Line a well-buttered baking-dish with a rich pie-paste. Then mix 1 cup of fine poppy-seeds with the yolks of 5 eggs and ½ cup of sugar, some chopped raisins and nuts and the juice of ½ lemon. Add the whites beaten stiff; then fill with the mixture and let bake until done.
A poppy-seed (mohn) filling baked in a pastry shell, written in the telegraphic one-paragraph style this book uses throughout. Two things are left unsaid: the seeds want grinding, and the oven wants a number.
- Grind the seeds"Fine poppy-seeds" here most likely means finely ground rather than simply small. Whole seeds stay gritty and taste flat; run them through a spice grinder or nut mill, or scald them in hot milk and drain before grinding. This is the single step that decides whether the filling reads as a custard or as birdseed.
- Oven and timeNo temperature is given. Bake at 350F until the filling is set and no longer wobbles in the centre, roughly 40 to 50 minutes for a 9-inch shell. If the pastry rim colours too fast, shield it with foil.
- "A rich pie-paste"Period shorthand for a short, high-fat pastry; some period versions also work in an egg yolk and a little sugar, which would put it closer to a sweet tart dough than to a flaky American pie crust. A pate sucree is a reasonable modern stand-in. Blind-baking the shell 10 minutes helps, since the filling is wet.
- Pan"A well-buttered baking-dish" for this quantity of filling means about a 9-inch pie plate or tart tin, or an 8-inch square dish. Serves 8.
- Folding the whitesFive stiff whites into a heavy seed-and-yolk paste will collapse if stirred in. Slacken the base with a spoonful of the whites first, then fold the rest in two additions. The torte rises modestly and settles as it cools; that is expected.
- SweetnessHalf a cup of sugar for five yolks and a cup of ground poppy is restrained by modern standards, and the raisins carry much of the sweetness. Taste the filling before the whites go in and adjust rather than after.
- Quantities left open"Some chopped raisins and nuts" is genuinely unspecified. About 1/2 cup of each works; much more and the filling will not set cleanly.
- ServingBest the day it is baked or the next, at room temperature. Poppy filling stiffens in the refrigerator.
Poppy seed is the emblematic Purim ingredient in Ashkenazi baking, and mohn fillings appear in the same households in hamantaschen, mohn kichel and tortes like this one. The association is traditional rather than documented: it is often traced to the story that Esther ate only seeds and pulses at the Persian court so as to keep kosher, and poppy seeds are also cheap, keep well through winter, and were long ground at home in a purpose-made mill. The recipe itself is labelled only "Jewish" and never mentions Purim, so the holiday connection is an inference; but tortes of this kind — a pastry shell filled with ground poppy bound by eggs and lightened with beaten whites — sit somewhere between a pie and a sponge. Its inclusion here, filed simply as "Jewish" beside a French fritter and an English pudding, shows how these 365-day compilations treated an entire cuisine as one entry in a calendar of novelties for the American housekeeper.