Kugel

Many cooks prepare one kugel in honor of the Sabbath. Some families serve extra kugels in honor of a Yom Tov or Rosh Chodesh that falls on a Sabbath. Their idea is to serve as many kugels as there are Torah scrolls read in the synagogue. Kugel recipes run the gamut from sweet to salty, soft to crisp, bland to sharp. They may be baked in the oven or pan-fried on the range.

In medieval Poland, kugel covered a range of preparations baked in shallow or deep (usually round) pans without reference to type of ingredients or elaborateness of preparation. The fancier deep-dish versions of kugel resembled bread puddings and were made almost exclusively for Chanukah. However, kugel also provided the practical advantage of being made in advance and then kept warm overnight for serving on Shabbos, when cooking was forbidden. Kugel made with shredded turnips is one of those old Sabbath dishes.

With the dipsy-doodle, the kit and caboodle / The truth is brutal, your grandma's kugel

Our mother wanted us and loved us dearly. Her chicken and fish, her stews, her meatloaves, her lasagna and kugels and everything else were flavorful in their own, unadulterated way.

She was minding her own business, taking a visitor from struggle days in London around the sights of the New South Africa, when she was recognised by a clutch of ageing kugels, out doing what kugels of all ages do on a Saturday morning in Hyde Park, namely shopping.

Yet [Barbara] Ludman wants to take Michelle [in The Day of the Kugel (1989)] out of the "Kugel" category (a Kugel being a "disgusting, dull, boring noodle pudding"—the people in Johannesburg suburbs whose wealthy lives are one long party).

The trouble is that now, in this new century, the kugel is a rare and unprotected species in South Africa. […] The kugels have all left, and the few who stayed behind, protected by their high walls and heavy security, don't venture out at night to come and see themselves in a local revue. Kugels have now re-emerged in the form of black divas – beautiful, glamorous, loud and opinionated women who set store by hair and nails, sunglasses and cars.

Along one wall of the Motts' home is an array of kugels, or glass balls, antique forerunners of today's classic $3.99-a-dozen-at-the-local-drugstore ornaments. However, unlike those made today, antique kugels are considerably sturdier and served as more than just decorations. Kugels decorated the house year-round and were known as "witches' balls." It was believed that if a witch were to visit it and see her face in one, the distorted image created by the rounded glass would scare her away.

Lauscha [in Thuringia, Germany] began, early in the nineteenth century, to produce reflective panorama balls or "witches' balls" for window and garden decorations. The first recorded order for smaller, Christmas-tree versions of these thick-walled "kugels," silvered on the inside with compounds of zinc or lead, dates from 1848. And, although kugel means "ball," relatively early examples of the type took on precisely the shapes noted by Harper's Bazaar, including mushrooms (a German good luck symbol), clusters of grapes, and acorns. Kugels were factory products, made in a glass kiln. But the thin-walled balls and mold-blown ornaments imported to the United States in large quantities in the 1880s were made in peasants' cottages, with whole families engaged in the year-round enterprise.

Some of the glass ornaments you might find in a family's collection could date back to the 1870s, when the first glass ornaments, similar to the ones we know today, were imported into Britain from Lauscha, Germany. Silver glass orbs called kugels were manufactured there as well. Because of the cost of these exotic glass ornaments, owning them was often considered a symbol of status. However, by the 1880s, kugels were being imported en masse; in the United States, they were even sold through five-and-dime stores.