Taste the Flavor of Survival One Square Cincinnati-Invented Matzoh At a Time

This past Saturday – January 28 –  was Holocaust Remembrance Day.    And the biggest way you can taste Jewish survival is to eat an American matzoh cracker.   The taste of American matzoh is THE taste of survival of a people who were attempted to be categorically eliminated from Earth by a fascist European dictatorship.     American Matzoh is a story and symbol of that survival.

A bit more than half a century ago there were the big four families who had built the American matzoh empire – Manischewitz, Streit, Horowitz-Margareten , and Goodman.   And by then, they were all in the New York/New Jersey area.    But if it wasn’t for a poor Lithuanian Jewish immigrant rabbi – Dov Behr Manischewitz – who settled in Cincinnati and founded the company in 1888, there wouldn’t be a matzoh empire.    It is said that Manischewitz did for matzoh what Ford did for the automobile.    They are the OG of machine-made, rectangular American matzoh.   Dov took it from a circular hand made ritual unleavened bread to a producible semi-automated rectangular commodity.      And unfortunately today, only one of the four families – Streit – is still running the company of their name.     They are going into the fourth generation.   There’s a great documentary about them on Netflix worth watching called “Streit’s:  Matzo and the American Dream.”

Even more interesting is that in the second generation, one family, the Gross family, married into three of the four big matzoh families.   Aaron Gross married Muriel Streit, daughter of Streit founder Aron Streit.   Aaron Gross’ brother Herman married Natalie Manischewitz, and a third Gross brother married into the Horowitz-Magareten family.   Imagine the competition as to whose matzoh would be the headliner at a family bar mitzvah or seder meal.    

Manischewitz moved their operations from Cincinnati to Jersey City in 1932, starting a kosher food empire bigger than just matzoh and building an international market for matzoh.    It included cheap sweet ritual wine that would morph outside the Kosher market and be led by Mad Dog 20/20, originally a Jewish Kosher Passover wine.   Manischewitz sold out to a venture capital company in 1999 which later bought the Goodman and Horowitz-Margareten brands, making Streit the last family holdout.

Above image: Aaron Gross, grandson of founder of Streit.

Streits was founded in 1915 by Aron Streit, an Austrian-Jewish immigrant who settled in Manhatten’s Lower East Side.

Above Image: Regina Margareten

Regina Margareten, the maven of the Margaretan-Horowitz brand was born in Balbona (Miskolcz), Hungary, in1863.   She came to America as a young bride in 1883, with her husband, Ignatz Margareten, and her parents, Jacob and Mirel Chayah (Mary) (Brunner) Horowitz.  They baked matza for themselves the first Passover they were in the United States, and within a few years the matzah business became their sole occupation. The small family business grew to a company that grossed a million dollars in 1931 and used forty-five thousand barrels of flour in 1932.

Above image: August Goodman

Goodman’s was founded in 1865 in Philadelphia, by Augustus Gutkind, a round matzoh maker from small Prussian Polish town Filehne, Germany., now Wielen, Poland.    There Gutkind’s grandmother was known as Chanah, the Matzoh Maker.  Before starting the business, Gutkind worked for a cracker bakery in Washington that travelled with Union Soldiers to make their hard tack rations. His first Philadelpha business was a combination ice cream and pastry shop, and during Passover, they baked round Berliner tea matzoh in addition to Passover matzoh.  In 1883 lured by the large New York City Jewish market, they moved to New York City and took up the machine oven made rectangular matzoh Dov Manischewitz had pioneered.  But they kept their traditional round product in their Round Tea Matzohs. They were famous for their pasta business, which specialized in egg barley, called in Yiddish farfel, and transforming the Ashkenazi Jewish dish kasha varnischkes (buckwheat groats and egg noodles) into kasha with bowtie pasta.

The funny thing was that when Dov Manischewitz opened his Cincinnati matzoh factory, it wasn’t yet Kosher-for-Passover.   Rabbis argued if machine made matzoh could be considered Kosher.  So he had a lot of non-Jewish crossover customers.    Cincinnati was one of the predominant transportation hubs heading West. Pioneer homesteaders in covered wagons would load up on matzo because bread would spoil but the matzoh would last a long time.   They would later set up the operation with a Mashgiach, or rabbinical supervisor, to make sure equipment was clean and the end product  Kosher.

The new slogan for matzoh could be :  Matzoh – It’s Not Just for Passover anymore.   In 2013 $90 million of matzo was sold in the United States, according to Menachem Lubinsky, editor of KosherToday.com. Lubinsky said that sales had been steadily increasing, thanks to a growing number of non -Jews who attend Seders. President Obama participated in the first White House Seder.    And Instagram food influencers have been showcasing matzoh for things outside of ritual, like s’mores and other non Kosher applications.

During the early 20th century, Streit, Horowitz-Margareten and Goodman’s Matzo served the booming Jewish population on the Lower East Side, while Manischewitz served the growing reform Jewish population of Cincinnati and the surrounding Midwest.  Although the brands still exist, their parent company is Manischewitz and the products are now made in Newark.  

Streit’s was until 2015,  the lone New York City holdout. The matzo was cooked in Manhattan and trucked to Moonachie three times a day.    Streit’s co-owner, Aaron Gross said that company’s vintage convection ovens and New York City tap water added magic to the matzo.    They made the difficult decision to close the last Manhattan matzoh factory and build a new robot-automated facility in New Jersey.   

Today there is a lot of competition from overseas importers of cheaper matzoh makers, but they don’t have that American matzoh flavor, say the Streit family owners.   And, it all started in Cincinnati.   You’re welcome America!

Beer & Church Bingo: What Happens When Your Eyes are Bigger Than Your Wallet

Above image: Gambling Grannies in 1977 at St. William’s Thursday Night Bingo in Price Hill.

Bingo is everywhere in Cincinnati- from beer bingo at our local breweries to Drag Queen hosted bingo brunches.      And although we know it was Cincinnati wine during our Catawba Craze that first fueled the early foundation of Catholic churches in Cincinnati – see my blog on this:

It’s Catawba Wine, Not Beer and Bingo, That Founded The Early Cincinnati German Catholic Parishes

It was beer and bingo that took over during the Depression to pay off Church debts.   And like many good Cincinnati cultural icons – like schmeerkase and hanky panky – it was the West Side that first brought Catholic Church Bingo to Cincinnati gambling grannies.   I remember bingo at my childhood parish, Corpus Christi, in Springfield, Township, being a huge enterprise.   Walking to the basement undercroft, one had to wade through an almost blinding cloud of cigarette smoke to get your bingo cards.   But good food and cold local (swill) beer was plentiful.

We can thank Fr. Francis Reordan, Pastor of St. Williams Parish. “Fr. Bingo,” for introducing Cincinnati to Catholic Church bingo in 1937.     

In March of 1929, Father Roth, pastor of St. Williams engaged the prolific architects Bernard and Joseph Steinkamp. to design a spectacular new church to replace the old St. William Church.  The cost of this Romanesque Revival style beaut was $400,000 (about $6 million in 2020 currency).  The church was part of a half-million-dollar parish development program that included the rectory and sisters’ house. 

In August of that year, the church held a three-day festival and carnival to raise money for the building fund. Unfortunately, just a few weeks later, the stock market crashed, and some aspects of the project were scaled back. It would be almost ten years before the proposed stained-glass windows would replace the plain glass ones. St. William Church was named after St. William the Abbot and in memory of Archbishop William Elder.   Archbishop John T. McNicholas presided over the dedication on October 4, 1931.     Fr. Roth died in 1937, possibly due to stress of the mounting debts, and Fr. Francis Reordan was the lucky inheritor of this debt and the pastoral office.

Above image: Artistic sketch of original intended church decoration of St. William by church painter and German immigrant Gerhard Lamers. This was cut back due to expense and the Market Crash of 1929.

Oddly enough, before the church was decorated, Fr. Francis Reordan had the priest’s dressing room behind the altar elaborately painted by noted Northwest German immigrant church painter, Gerhard Lamers, also a Price Hill resident, with crests of all the former and current archbishops, and several religious symbols, including an elaborate one of two stags drinking from the fountain of life.   Gerhard proposed an elaborate decoration of the altar, rotunda and church, that was significantly scaled down by Fr. Reordan, because of the remaining debts.

In order to pay off the massive debt incurred in the church’s construction, Fr. Francis Reordan started Thursday night bingo at St. Williams.  It was said that the games were so popular that people came from as far away as Indianapolis to play and that up to 25 streetcars would be lined up on W. Eighth Street to take people home after the games. 

The popularity of Church sponsored bingo spread throughout the West Side and all over Greater Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky, and 30 years later Price Hill was still the epicenter of Catholic Church Bingo.   Each of the major churches had their own day – Saturday was the only day off in the week.    St. Lawrence bingo was Sunday night, Holy Family Monday, St. Therese Tuesday, the Knights of Columbus garnered two days – Wednesday and Friday, while the OG – St. William’s – reserved Thursday.     And for the next 60 years, St. Williams blazed on with their Thursday Bingo, shuttered for only a few weeks during the Blizzard of 1977.

St. Williams discontinued their Thursday bingo in 1997 because, as the pastor said, they were uneasy with the amount of money they were seeing people spend.   They saw Grandmas-on-a-budget take their rent money or social security check and drop nearly all of it in hopes of winning.  He said originally St. William’s bingo was more of a social event, but it had become a huge gambling enterprise.   And as most official statements of the Catholic church, that was not really true.   St. Williams’ bingo was started to fund an overzealously designed church in 1937, and they were losing money on Thursday bingo because of the newly arrived casino riverboats in nearby Lawrenceburg, Indiana.    What was once at its height about an $87,000 revenue maker, was more than halved by 1997.   And St. Williams had also enacted a no smoking policy which miffed off a lot of chain smoking Nannas.

St Lawrence took over the mantel of West Side church bingo and still does to this day, with scratch-offs and a variety of games.   The same year St Williams closed theirs, St. Lawrence bingo grossed, according to Ohio Attorney General’s office, an enormous $722K in 1996.  Figures from other parishes’ bingo were reported in the 1990s by the Enquirer.   In 1992 St. Clement Church in St. Bernard made $100k as did St Martin of Tours in Cheviot.   These were no small enterprises, and all were tax-free.

Although there wasn’t much description of the food available at the church bingos, undoubtedly there were lots of bags of Grippos and Husman’s chips and pretzels eaten, along with Hudy and later Little King’s beers.    A homemade cake or baked goods were mentioned here and there too, but unfortunately, no iconic dishes invented for bingo night.   Now the big yearly fundraiser for St. Williams is not bingo, but its awesomely named “Cod for God” fish fry, billed as the best in town.   This food etymologist will have to see about that.   Germania Park in Springfield Township still contends as the best fish fry in town in my opinion.

The Whoodeyist Candy in Cincinnati

As we roll into the playoffs it’s starting to get interesting here in the Queen City.   Busken has released their King of the Jungle King Cake, with baby Joey hidden inside.    And other restaurants and bakeries are releasing Bengals branded foods.    Not to be outdone, our oldest local candy company, Doscher in Newtown, has just rebranded their Bengals themed French Chew flavor.   They are now calling their orange crème flavored French Chew the Chew Dey, and it’s selling like hot cakes online.  

The original Bengals Who Dey Chew was released around 2006 and was vanilla flavored. Doscher owner Greg Clark was given official right to use the tagline by Bengals Executive VP at the time, Katie Blackburn.   Doscher sold 300,000 bars that first year.   In 2008 the power of the Who Dey Chew was used for good, when it was paired with orange, black and white Doscher-made Bengals candy canes for a Crohns colitis foundation fundraiser at Paul Brown stadium.

The French Chew is one of those invented right here foods.   It’s not a taffy, but known as a chewy nougat.   The company released it in the 1890s at the height of the Turkish Taffy candy craze, started in France.    That Turkish Taffy name was supposed to connect the candy’s chewiness to Turkish Delight – a chewy candy made in the Turkish empire for centuries of fruit juice and gelatin.    Doscher smartly named their version the French Chew.  Originally it sold in large blocks that were broken off at the counter and sold in smaller pieces.   Then around about the 1960s it was packaged into candy bar sized sleeves and the cute lip-smacking boy logo was added.     It traditionally comes in vanilla, strawberry, chocolate and banana flavors.  

About ten years ago, my brother-in-law’s mother, Martha, who was the salesperson for the candy and toy distributor her grandfather Becksmith started in the early 1900s, suggested they make a smaller version for kids.   They took her advice and  Doschers started making French Chew Minis – small, tootsie roll sized versions of the French Chew that were chewier than the large bars and came in more interesting tropical flavors.   Unfortunately,  there is not a Chew Dey mini available.

The newly rebranded Chew Dey bar will be available online, at Kroger and other retailers, as well as at the flagship store in historic downtown Newtown.

The Doscher Candy Company was originally founded in 1871 by German immigrant Claus Doscher, who started making candy canes.   Before the Depression Doscher operated a large four story candy factory on the canal and made everything from candy canes to a variety of chocolate confections.   They downsized to a smaller shop on Court Street and moved into an historic Victorian farmhouse in Newtown. Today they are the oldest manufacturer of candy canes in America, and the only manufacturer of a chewy nougat.     

A Yummy German Christmas Tree Tradition Borrowed by Czarist Russia – Collected But Not Eaten Today

One year my mom made sugar cookies from the Better Crocker Cookie book that we iced and hung on our Christmas tree.   It was festive and we got to sneak in a cookie here and there before Christmas and then eat them all during the 12 days of Christmas.  But it was such work that it was the last year we did it.  This tradition comes from a long held Germanic tradition of hanging Lebkucken or gingerbread cookies on the tree.   Today Christmas markets in Germany today still sell these lebkuchen ornaments.  After abandoning making our own cookie ornaments, my family resorted to playdoh ornaments to get that real cookie ornament vibe on our tree.    We had the three kings and a girl in a snowsuit in playdoh and probably more, but none of them survived that passing of time.    I even made an entire playdoh nativity scene.

There are however, cookie ornaments made in St. Louis in the 1940s and 1950s by a Russian immigrant, that 70 plus years later have survived and are still being collected by vintage Christmas devotees.   The man’s name was Eugene Frohse and he made these beautiful cookie ornaments till he was 96 in St. Louis.  He lived to be 102.

Eugene was born in the small Russian town of Ostrov.   His father was a pharmacist there.  But Eugene had a stutter and dealing with customers as a pharmacist was not in his cards.  So instead of sending him to Germany for pharmacy school, his father sent him to apprentice with a Russian confectioner in St Petersburg, later renamed Leningrad during Soviet Communist period.    There Frohse learned the art of confectionery, particularly making Christmas cookie ornaments.   

Now we don’t think of Russia as the center of Christmas celebrations, but at the time Eugene was apprenticing, it was.   In the 19th century, Tsar Nicholas I’s Prussian wife, Princess Charlotte, who became Alexandra Feodorovna, when she converted to Orthodox Christianity, brought a pine tree into their home at Christmas and gifts were given to both royal and poor children. Alexandra imported many traditions from her native Darmstadt, Germany, including the Christmas tree, which marked the beginning of Christmas celebrations in the home. By the late 1800s, lavishly decorated yolki (Russian for pine) were central to the holiday celebrations and gift-giving to children became commonplace in Czarist Russia.   St. Petersburg, housed the palaces of the czars  and was the epicenter of Christmas in the Russian Empire.

The last Czar’s family who were murdered by the Bolsheviks chronicled their Christmases and one daughter, Princess Olga even drew wonderful colored sketches of their Christmas trees.

The tree became popular but all the Russians couldn’t afford the elaborate baubles with which the Russian royals adorned their trees, so they resorted to decorating the tree with homemade cookies.  

Eugene left before the Bolshevik Revolution, which ruined Russian Christmas until the fall of the Berlin wall and communist Russia.   The Russian Christmas tree became a secular yalki New Year’s Tree and St. Nick became Ded Moroz, or Father Frost, based on Slavic fairytales, who was helped by his beautiful granddaughter Snegoricha, or Snow Maiden.   Even though religious celebrations have returned, Russian Christmas is still celebrated on New Year’s Eve. 

Armed with this very special technique and the molds to make them, Frohse came to the U.S. in 1890, settling  in Germanic St. Louis.   He landed a job at the Blanke Wenneker Candy Company, known for their delicious Nadja caramels.     The company closed in 1918 and Eugene turned to farming and raising bees for honey.    Twenty years later, after friends and family urged him to make them again, he decided to resume making these wonderful sugar ornaments. It was 1940 and he was 67.  He sold thousands of them at $1.00 per dozen.  He said they could last for 7 years if taken care of properly.      At 97 he felt his hands weren’t nimble enough and turned production over to his relative – his daughter-in-law’s niece – Mrs. Richard E. Rasch and her assistant Mr.s Frank Bardot, who continued to make them in Frohse’s basement.   At the time of his last season, they produced 20,000 ornaments in 36 different styles, and an additional 15 of his helper’s design.

The cookies weren’t designed to be eaten, but for a time he flavored them with anise.   The problem was cats and dogs ate the ones hanging from the low hanging branches of the trees, so the flavoring was removed.   Kids were also attracted to their beauty and believed that something so beautiful would also be tasty.  They were disappointed and Eugene said he got many calls from hysterical parents whose kids had taken bites asking if there was anything hazardous in the cookies.   There wasn’t.  Packages stated the cookies were made of  sugar, albumen, gelatin, & food color.

He would only sell the ornaments for local pick up because they crumbled when sent in the mail due to the jostling in the USPS system.     So, many that collect them have a connection to St. Louis.   Despite them being difficult to store – if they aren’t stored dry they get gooey and can develop brown spots, and if stored too dry, they get brittle and fragile – many still exist in treasured Christmas collections.

There were horses, tigers, angels, butterflies, geese, parrots, doves, a variety of birds, squirrels, swans, goats, pigs, rabbits, two types of Santas, cats, and dogs.   Frohse even made made peakaboo Easter eggs with inside scenes and sometimes even small wedding photos.

It’s wonderful that these artifacts connected to czarist Russia and pre-Soviet Christmas are still around today.

The Local French Pastry With A Great New Flavor And An Awesome Back Story

Sebastian’s just ccntnues to up their pastry game and wow us all.   I’ve been a fan since they had a small popup last winter at my neighborhood ‘pony keg’ – Dutch’s.     This time they’ve come at us with what’s called the Isaphan St. Honore.

Isaphan is a flavor fusion created by award winning French pastry chef Pierre Herme.    He’s called the Elvis Presley of French Pastry.  His flavor combinations have the affect that Elvis’s hip thrusting dance moves had on high school girls.  The flavor is a combination of rose water, raspberry, and leechee, which he named after the ancient capital of Persia.    The flavor profile is highly sought after in France and Japan, and Chef Herme’s patisserie and others sell isaphan jam.    Hopefully Sebastians will do the same – I’d like to incorporate it into a strudel.

This amazing creation Sebastians makes with Chef Herme’s popular flavor belongs to the French patisserie family called petite gateux, a puff pastry.  The original St. Honore was invented in 1847 at the Chiboust bakery on Rue Saint-Honoré in Paris – named after the patron saint of bakers – and was a puff pastry surrounded by small cream filled pate a choux (what cream puffs are made of)   

Sebastian’s uses a pate a choux base topped with a cornflake-almond parline croustilliant – say that ten times fast.   That’s like a crunchy but not so crumbly struessel  and sticks to the pastry.      Inside is an isaphan jam, an isaphan cremeaux, and it’s topped with a white chocolate namelaka icing and with a freeze-dried raspberry.

When he was working on the West Coast, Chef Randy of Sebastian’s was invited amongst a select few of the nation’s best pastry chefs to take a trip to France to witness the Coupe de Monde de la Pâtisserie competition. It was during this trip that he was introduced to Chef Hermé. It was also during this time that Chef Hermé opened his first Boutique Patisserie in Paris and introduced the pairing of Lychee, Rose, and Raspberry in a macaron gateaux.

I await more amazing creations like this one by Chef Randy.

Chef Herme, the Elvis Presley of French Pastry.

Two New Cincinnati Chili Hot Sauces

As a student of hot sauces, I was excited to learn that Gourmet Chili in Newport, Kentucky, has come out with two limited time hot sauces.    Last Fall I visited Ground Zero for Louisiana-style hot sauces in New Iberia, Louisiana, about 2 hours west of New Orleans.     Hot sauces like Tobasco, Crystal, Louisiana, Trappeys, and even our own Frank’s Red Hot were grown, fermented and bottled there starting in the early 1920s.   I visited the historic Frank’s Red Hot pepper fermentation plant now being restored as the new Sugar Cane Museum.   And, this February I teach a class at UC’s Communiversity about Louisiana Style Hot Sauces.

Frank’s Red Hot and the History of Other Louisiana-Style Hot Sauces – Office of Professional and Continuing Education | University Of Cincinnati

Gourmet Chili is only a block south of the OG of Northern Kentucky Cincinnati-style chili parlors, Dixie Chili, founded in 1929 by Macedonian immigrant, Nicholas Sarakatsannis.

This historic chili parlor is the second oldest continually operating chili parlor location in northern Kentucky.   It’s second only to the Dixie Chili location on Monmouth Street.    It was founded in 1986 by Steve Stavropoulos when he bought the parlor from its former owners –  the Thomas Sarakatsannis family, cousins to the Dixie Chili family –  who ran it from 1946 to the time of sale as Crystal Chili Parlor.     The Sarakatsannis family bought it from Petro Manoff, another Macedonian immigrant who had opened the Strand Chili parlor in 1931 after dissolving his partnership in Dixie Chili with Nick Sarakatsannis.  Petro’s son, Tom Manoff, started Hamburger Heaven, which was sold to the four Daoud brothers from Jordan who renamed it Gold Star Chili.   I know, it’s a tangled web.

And to make the web even more tangled, Stavropoulos had cousins, Peter and George Georgeton, who owned the Ludlow Avenue Clifton Skyline franchise.     Steve is now gone and his son George runs the parlor.    Gourmet’s is one of my favorite versions of Cincinnati chili.   I think it tastes a lot like Skyline chili, but with a spicier kick. 

Skyline also has their own hot sauce, which is made and bottled for them and is probably just a house labelled version of a leading brand like Frank’s.   But Skyline is very mysterious about their hot sauce and haven’t revealed where, by whom and what’s in it, type of details.

Both are Louisiana style hot sauces – meaning the peppers are fermented in distilled vinegar which makes it through to the hot sauce for that tangy acid. They’re made in Louisiana by a manufacturer doing business as Fun Foods Family. Right now, George Stavropoulos tells me they’re having trouble getting replen shipments of both sauces because the supplier is having trouble getting bottles.

One of Gourmet’s new hot sauces is a Cayenne Garlic Hot Sauce, like Frank’s. It is good but I didn’t really taste much garlic.    The other is a hotter, golden amber colored Habanero hot sauce.    Gourmet have smartly developed a fun Greek man mascot for the label.   The curly black haired Greek mascot dons a chef’s hat and uses the universal chef’s OK hand signal.      Although Skyline carries Habanero cheese periodically, in my opinion it’s not noticeably spicier than the regular shredded cheddar.   Apparently when you shred habanero cheese the spicy seeds and bits that make it spicy don’t really come along in the shred.   So a spicier habanero hot sauce served with Cincinnati chili is really exciting.  

The Cajun Country King Cake Made With a Goetta Cousin

New Orleans has its booming King Cake Industry, but two hours west in Cajun Country, a restaurant bakery called Twins Burgers and Sweets, makes its own unique king cake filled with the popular local Boudin sausage.    For those not familiar with this Cajun classic, it’s a cousin of our goetta – a grain sausage make with pork parts (more liver than goetta) and uses rice as the grain instead of goetta’s pinhead oats.   It has a large following, usually eaten in gas station parking lots for breakfast, and it’s delicious.    Like goetta, everyone in and around Lafayette, Louisiana, has their own family recipe.

This king cake is  kinda like a pig-in-the-blanket concept.   It’s also a bit like the Goetta and apricot Danish that Findlay Market bakery Skirts & Johnston used to make many years ago.     It’s a savory grain sausage wrapped in enriched dough with a sweet adder.    What’s not to love?

Owners are twins Denny and Billy Guilbeau (what a great French Cajun last name!).    But it wasn’t they who came up with the boudin king cake that they now make in large numbers during carnival season.

Above image: Brothers Denny (left) and Billy Guilbeau and inventor of the boudin king cake, Dr. Bob Carriker, center.

It was actually the creation of Dr. Bob Carriker, a super-fan of boudin.   He’s a professor of history at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, the epicenter of boudin country.   Locally he’s  known as the Boudin King and Dr. Boudin and runs a fan website called BooudinLink.com.   He also gives local boudin tours and started the Boudin Cookoff, listed as one of top food festivals in America by Gourmet Magazine.    Sounds like my type of guy.

His king cake consists of a hamburger bun dough filled with boudin, topped with bacon (although the original called for fried pork cracklins) and a drizzle of local Steen’s cane syrup.     The twins have a custom recipe of boudin they have made for them at a local USDA meat processing facility.

In 2015 Dr. Bob posted images of his creation online and it quickly became viral.   He was even  interviewed by the local news station.  People quickly contacted him for orders, one from Los Angeles who ordered six at $150 a piece.     With 100 orders and feeling overwhelmed, he approached the twins about helping him fulfill the orders, which they agreed to and the rest as they say is history.   In three weeks that first year, they sold 6000 boudin king cakes!     Today they can be shipped to anywhere in the US if you’re willing to pay the appropriate shipping.

While they are the original boudin king cake, their version inspired a dozen or more copycat versions across Louisiana.

Twins also makes a variety of other sweets including a southern version of the woopie pie they call dinky doozies – in snickerdoodle, Chocolate chip, red velvet, and oatmeal, to name a few.

In 2015 Dr. Bob posted images of his creation online and it quickly became viral.   He was even  interviewed by the local news station.  People quickly contacted him for orders, one from Los Angeles who ordered six at $150 a piece.     With 100 orders and feeling overwhelmed, he approached the twins about helping him fulfill the orders, which they agreed to and the rest as they say is history.   In three weeks that first year, they sold 6000 boudin king cakes!     Today they can be shipped to anywhere in the US if you’re willing to pay the appropriate shipping.

While they are the original boudin king cake, their version inspired a dozen or more copycat versions across Louisiana.

Twins also makes a variety of other sweets including a southern version of the woopie pie they call dinky doozies – in snickerdoodle, Chocolate chip, red velvet, and oatmeal, to name a few.

Maybe this calls for a goetta king cake vs boudin king cake taste off!.

Are Potato Chip Stuffed Sandwiches Better?

I would like to present with full disclosure that I was not raised in a potato chip-sandwich-stuffing family.   I always thought the kids who brought PB & J sandwiches stuffed with potato chips to school in their lunch were odd.      Even odder were those who put Doritos in their PB& J.   But there’s nothing wrong with it, we all crave a little crunch in our bite.   The problem is that when you let a potato chip stuffed sandwich marinate in a lunch bag for four hours, the crunch can become a soggy lump.

There were enterprising mothers who tried to jazz up a boring slice of bologna and sent their kids to school with a sandwich Bolgna and may sandwich stuffed with Doritos.   That one really grosed me out as a kid.

That said, sandwich shops and fast food restaurants have increasingly been stuffing sandies with chips – especially since we have a 100+ year old local chip brand in Grippos, and a cult following behind their BBQ flavor.      We usually eat a sandwich with a bag of chips, so why not skip a step and put the chips inside the bun.    It’s kind of like putting oyster crackers on a threeway.

There’s something that says Carnival food about insertion of crunchy snack chips between two buns.

The questions then are – what type of chip do you use and what sandwich is each type of chip appropriate on?  There are choices between salt and vineger, sour cream and onion, barbecue, plain, pringles, ruffles cheddar?

There are a few types of sandwiches that are deemed better stuffed with potato chips.    BBQ, sloppy joe, or even the Ohio shredded chicken sandwich are at the top, but make sure they’re inserted right before serving or they might get mushy.     Fried fish, grilled cheese, the lobster roll, ham and cheese, and Reubens are also at the top of the list.

Really the combinations are endless –   Harvest Cheddar Chips on a Subway tuna salad ; Salt & Vinegar chips on a ham and cheese with pickle sub ; Egg Salad with Grippos Barbecue Chips.

Epic Deli has a Deebo a polish ham and american cheese sandwich on white bread battered in tempura and then completely coated in crushed Doritos and deep fried – served with ghost pepper ranch dipping sauce.

Local Tom and Chee have a Grippos BBQ chip stuffed grilled cheese, as does Frisch’s.

Senate has the Trailer Park Dog with bacon, slaw and American cheese with Crushed Grippo’s on top.

When it comes to fast food, Jennifer Harris, director of marketing initiatives at the Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity at the University of Connecticut in the US, says that fast food companies combine social media and wacky dishes to hone in on young people, one of the biggest groups of fast food consumers in the US and the UK. She likens the snack-food-fast-food fads to vaping and energy drinks, which also target similar demographics, especially males between the ages of 13 and 24.

Health is not their primary concern. Their concern is being cool, having their peers think they’re daring and exciting, All their friends can see [on social media] they’ve bought and eaten this really cool new thing. And then once something goes viral, it can be some of the most effective, cheapest marketing a company can use

The Gold Star Gorito – a chili burrito with fritos is a chip stuffed sando.   But I can say from experience don’t get this at a drive thru and think the crunch will last more than five minutes after wrapping.

If you think about it the Taco Bell crunchwrap  is a version of the chip stuffed sando.     And, they even doubled down on the collab with Cheez-Its and offered for a limited time the Big Cheez-It Crunchwrap, inserting a giant Cheez-It into the normal crunchwrap.

In Spring of 2022, Friendly’s released their  Doritos Cool Ranch Chopped Cheese Burger – A beef burger patty chopped with pepper jack cheese, onions, jalapenos, and salsa, then drizzled with ranch dressing and topped with Doritos Cool Ranch tortilla chips, served on a grilled ciabatta roll.

And let’s not limit our selves to snack chips – what about puffed flavored snacks?   Well, thanks for asking.   The August before the pandemic KFC released a fried-chicken sandwich stuffed with Cheetos. That sounds kind of redundant to me.

Where does this take us next?   Well chips-on-food has made it to pizza, mac and cheese, chip encrusted chicken, crispy chicken wrapped tacos, and who knows where else.

So what are my chip stuffed sandwich fantasies?  I think one might be broiled cod with kimchee, tartar sauce and Grippos BBQ chips on a rye bun.  Another close second would be mustard egg salad with dill pickle chips on a croissant.   And my third would be Benedictine spread with Cheddar ruffles on wheat.     Who’s the odd kid at the lunch table now?!

12 New Orleans King Cakes That Are “Off The Parade Route”

I sampled my first piece of New Orleans King Cake in 1993 and it quickly became one of my many love languages.   Matteo, my college friend who was a Chem E coop at BP in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, made sure we got to taste McKenzie’s, the grandfather of all New Orleans king cakes.   It’s the OG, and unlike the others considered standard now, was a simple, round, unbraided brioche dough, no hint of cinnamon, and no white icing, only three colors of sanding sugar (the mardi gras colors of yellow, green and purple), which they instituted.     The majority of king cake bakers today had McKenzie’s as their earliest influence.    McKenzie’s closed in May 2000, after Henry McKenzie opened in 1929 on Pyritania Street.  So as a food historian, I was lucky to have experienced their legacy.   In addition to their king cakes, they were famous for their buttermilk drops and their turtle cookies (YUMMO!), neither of which I unfortunately was able to experience.    I have even made my own King Cake at home and it turned out fairly well.   Grandpa would be proud!

Above image: My homemade King Cake, circa 2000.

Today the standards come from Haydel’s and Rouse’s among a handful of others.     The standard today has evolved into a cinnamon swirl, round yeasted dough, sometimes braided, with white icing dusted in the tri-colored sanding sugars, and stuffed with a plastic baby, known in Creole French as the feve.   Haydels offers small porcelain figurine feves, much like the antique French versions served in the gallette des rois, the French great grandfather of the New Orleans king cake.   I collect these Haydel feves, because they represent a fascinating food legacy that I blogged about:

Frozen Charlotte: The Creepy Doll that Became the King Cake Baby | dannwoellertthefoodetymologist (wordpress.com)

Now that we have celebrated Three Kings Day or the Epiphany on January 6, its full on King Cake Season in NOLA and the Nati.     People in New Orleans will bring them to work, and the one who finds the plastic baby in their piece will be expected to buy the next one.    Locally, Servatti, Graeters and Busken will start making them in a few weeks.    Last year Busken made a King of the Jungle cake with black and orange sugar which received a lot of hater comments on social media by expat New Orleanians in Cincinnati.

Oddly enough, the best and most popular king cake status in New Orleans is given to a Vietnamese bakery and restaurant called Dong Phong, (owned by immigrants Huong and De Tran) about 20 minutes east of the French Quarter, in the immigrant neighborhood of Little Vietnam .   They were also awarded in 2018 the James Beard American Classic Award.  I’ve been there for lunch and sampled their also famous moon cakes and other pastries but not their king cake.     So, in true fusion fashion, you can have some of the best pho and bahn mi in New Orleans and also a sample of its best king cake during Carnevale season.

Above image: Vietnamese immigrant Huang Tran and her popular King Cake.

Well, today there are at least 83 bakeries making king cakes in New Orleans, which have been expertly chronicled by New Orleans food writer Matt Haines and photographer Randy Krause Schmidt in their pandemic book The Big Book of King Cake.  I bought the book this past September when I was making my yearly visit.      The amazing thing about King Cake, is that like Goetta and Cincinnati Chili, it is constantly evolving into newer versions of itself.   Here are 12 New Orleans King cakes that are not the standards, and are a bit “off the parade route,” as you might say.

The first is the cricket king cake made by world renowned entymologist (not food etymologist!)  Zack Lehmann, the “Bug Chef,” at the Audubon Nature Institute.   It’s Zack’s mission to get Americans to eat bugs as he says 80% of the rest of the world does.   His sales pitch is that we eat crustacians like crawfish, which are related to bugs, and we eat honey, which is regurgitated pollen from bees.

Speaking of crawfish, Sharena Smith of SS Sweets makes a crawfish  filled King Cake.   She prepares her crawfish with sauteed pepper,s onions and crawfish mixed with cream cheese and shredded cheddar cheese, topped with crawfish Monica sauce (a creamy, buttery wine sauce invented by chef Pierre Hilzim head of Kajun Kettle Foods, named after his wife Monica Davidson), grated parmesan cheese and sliced green onions.   I’m totally down with that!

Noel Barras of Café Reconcile makes a Muffelatta King Cake, filled with local Chisesi ham, Genoa salami, mortadella and provolone cheeses, and traditional olive tapenade.  The muffaleta was also invented in New Orleans in 1906 in the city’s wave of hundreds of thousands of Italian and Sicilian immigrants.    Barras says, people buy their king cakes like they do their mayo.  The kind you had as a  kid is the kind you like best.”

Casa Borrega owner Hugo Monterra makes the unique taco King Cake.  Ok, it’s really more of a charcuterie board of tacos in the round with salsas and dipping sauces in the middle.

Then Dirk Dantin, former hall of fame baseball player at Loyola University makes his sushi king cake at Rock N Sushi’s three locations in Metarie (across the Mississippi from the French Quarter), Lafayette, or Baton Rouge.

Sven Vorkauf, a native of Berlin makes a Pretzel King Cake (or maybe he should call it the Brezelkonigkuchen) at his Bratz Y’All restaurant.  I Love that name!   While Sven says there are no king cakes or Dreikonigkucken eaten in Berlin, they do eat the jelly filled Berliner donut that JFK made famous, on Fat Tuesday.  Look out Tuba Baking!

Montreal immigrant Catalina Colby-Pariseau makes a churro king cake at her Bearcat Café.   It’s drizzed in dark caramel sauce and sprinkled with tri color round confetti sprinkles.

Nicole Johnson of Cakez and Cocktailz makes what I think is an amazing flavor of King Cake.   She has invented the boozy  Hennesy and pecan king cake.

Co-owners of the Bakery Bar, Charlotte McGehee and Charles Mary IV (the numbered name is so Southern!) have two unique king cakes.   The first is a take on another New Orleans iconic pastry, the beignet king cake.   I wonder what Cafe du Monde thinks of these! Their second is called the Doberge King Cake.   The doberge cake is also a New Orleans invention, a lighter take on the Hungarian dobos cake, a stacked cake of thin layers filled with cream.    Before moving into brick and mortar, Charlotte McGehee served her popular doberge cakes out of a popup called – and I love this – Debbie Does Doberge.

Ok and this has to be my favorite off the parade route king cake.    Cochon Butcher has for the last decade or more offered the Elvis King Cake, filled with peanut butter and roasted bananas, topped with roasted marshmallows, tricolored sprinkles, and house cured bacon, made from Mississippi and Louisiana raised pork.     It was invented by Rhonda Ruckmann a former employee in homage to Elvis’ favorite sandwich, the peanut butter nanner sandwich, when he realized Elvis’ birthday was on January 8, only 2 days after Ephiphany and the opening of New Orleans King Cake Season.   Instead of the plastic baby, the Elvis is stuffed with a plastic squealing pig – classy!

Jack Rose Restaurant makes a creative twist on their signature dessert, the King Cake Mile High Pie. It’s a multi-colored layer concoction of ube, mango, and pistachio ice creams with coconut merengue and a coconut-cornflake crumble.    The Mile High Pie is the grandfather to the Mecklenburg Pie, which Mecklenburg Gardens has just started making again.     Maybe they should make a King Cake version for Mardi Gras.

 The Mile High Pie and Its Journey from NYC to NOLA to Cincinnati | dannwoellertthefoodetymologist (wordpress.com)

Thankfully, no baker in New Orleans has come out with a pumpkin spice king cake, which I’d have to boycott.   Since New Orleans claims they invented the Nectar Soda (Mullane Candy in Cincy did in the 1870s), maybe a Cincy bakery should make a Nectar Flavored King Cake in protest.  So, don’t hate on the regional food fusion journey – try an off the parade route king cake this season.

The Nectar Soda Standoff: Cincinnati vs. New Orleans | dannwoellertthefoodetymologist (wordpress.com)

The Mob Bosses And Butcher Shops Behind The Best “Bawls” In Cincy

I’m lucky to be part of group that poses as a crime game solving group, but is really a foodie group.     My sister started this group now three years ago with her BFF and her sister-in-law,  including me.    We meet about every other month to solve a crime box and we start with a themed dinner.   We’ve done German, Greek, and  Italian themes.     Our team won the Spring Clued Up Crime event in Cincinnati, amongst 81 teams, so we’re some of Cincinnati’s best Crime Fighters!

On German night, Kim, the New-York-Italian-with-an-Irish-last name, was tasked with making sauerkraut balls, or “bawls” as she pronounces them.  For someone who had never made them or even tasted them, the baseball sized bawls that she brought to that crime night were the best I’ve ever had.    And for a New York-Italian-American to make a Cincinnati-German-American dish so superbly, it’s sort of crazy. They were crunchy on the outside with and creamy, sour on the inside.  She said when complimented on her skills, “What, they’re just another type of bawl.”  I told her we should do a popup food truck for Oktoberfest with her bawls.     She also makes a lifechanging eggplant parm that my brother-in-law jokingly says has to be Stouffer’s frozen that she disguises as her own.    When it comes to Christmas, she can also make some outstanding Tri-Color cookies and has a recipe for Sicilian Fig Cookies from her Sicilian Grandmother.

When I found out that those fig cookies (which are a fave of mine) were probably served to NYC mob bosses Carl Gambino and  Paul Castellano, the theme to the Godfather started playing in my head.   I was entranced – I had to hear this Sicilian family story.   For me the line should be “Take the gun, leave the Sicilian fig cookies.”

Above image: Mob boss Carl Gambino

Above image: Mob Boss Paul Castellano.

Kim’s Great grandfather Ignatio Bileci came over from Palermo, Sicily,  in 1902  on the ship Lombardia.   –   Ignatio was sponsored by his brother Giacomo, who was already living in Brooklyn, and had been hosted in 1900 by a cousin, Guiseppe Amoross.   In standard method of chain migration, Ignatio nine years later would go back to Palermo and accompany his mother Maria to America.   Giacomo also went back in 1911 to bring his wife Agatha and their brother Giovanni to America.   Ignatio was a butcher and opened a small shop in the Sheepshead Bay neighborhood of Brooklyn.   Guiseppe Castellano, father of mob boss Paul Castellano (1915-1985) was also a butcher and had immigrated from Sicily in 1907 and worked with Ignatio.

Above image: Ignatio Belici and his Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn butcher shop.

Ignatio’s daughter, Gloria Billeci Primavera (our friend Kim’s grandmother) had a young Paul Castellano, as her godfather at her baptism in 1926.    Her grandmother’s older sister had another mob boss, Carl Gambino as a godfather.     Castellano succeded the Napolitan Carl Gambino as head of the Gambino Crime Family in NYC, when Carl died of natural causes from a heart attack.    Paul, on the other hand would be gunned down in an unauthorized hit in 1985.

The character Don Corleone in the Godfather is supposedly based on Carlo Gambino’s quiet, non-flashy rise to power in the New York mob.

The baptisms were probably held at the old St. Mark’s Church in Sheepshead, Brooklyn.   But in 1936, a new parish catering to the Italians of Brooklyn, Our Lady of Grace Catholic Church was built.   The first mass was held by Fr. Salvatore Cafiero.   The parish lovingly named their church bell, Salvatore after him.   This parish became ground zero for the Gambino crime family’s spiritual activities.   And man would I love to have been at the post baptism feast for either one of those baptisms or any of the other Italian feasts these churches hosted.

In the style of a good Italian Catholic family, Ignatio and his wife Rosario Bufalo had 16 children, which they raised in a very small Brooklyn house attached to the butcher shop.  The children slept 3-5 per bed!    Even after losing almost everything in the Depression, Ignatio took in and fed starving families at his 28 foot table in the butcher shop on Sundays – serving them three roasts, antipasta salad, and homemade pasta doused in ‘gravy.’    That might be where Kim gets her obsession with charcuterie boards.

The butcher profession was passed down through to his sons and grandsons.   When Ignatio died in 1940 his four sons and one son-in-law started another shop, which quickly grew to six shops and a catering business.   In 1961 the brothers claim that they invented the Chicken Cutlet and started a very profitable wholesale chicken cutlet business serving New York City, run by Ignatio’s grandson Jackie, who supposedly had help from the Gambino’s from time to time.  This was at a time when chicken was still pretty expensive and not everywhere like it is today. They were commonly sold whole and had to be cut into pieces. The chicken cutlet revolutionized poultry in America, taking away countless hours of prep and making family dinners easier.

Kim’s Grandmother moved from Brooklyn to Long Island, and her son, Kim’s uncle Tom Primavera, still owns a butchery in Long Island today called Primavera’s Italian Specialties.     Our friend Kim worked at the store for her uncle many years and frequently waited on John Gotti, Jr. who was a regular customer. Her favorite from the family shop is an Italian ring sausage called ‘chivalad.’ It’s a sausage made out of lamb seasoned with Pecorino Romano cheese, black pepper, fresh parsley and garlic that you can’t find at any butcher shop or Italian restaurant in Cincinnati.

I’m honored to have tasted the recipes from this awesome Italian legacy, and it’s also kinda cool that I have shared recipes that two of the most infamous crime bosses also gnoshed!