Jewish food fest serves deli staples, baked goods & more
Temple B’nai Israel in Laconia is taking orders now for its 2024 Jewish Food Festival.
For 27 years the Reformed Jewish Congregation has held a food festival, and for 23 of those years it was very much like many food festivals held by religious communities. Until the Covid-19 lockdown in 2020.
“It used to be a very different format,” said spokesperson Barbara Katz. “We used to have an on-site food festival at the Temple. One day a year, people came by the droves. They lined up down the street. They bought food to eat there. They bought food to take home. And then Covid hit.”
When the lockdown was announced in the spring of 2020, it put the Temple in a bit of a bind. A lot of the food for the summer Festival had already been prepared and frozen.
“It was like, ‘OK, what are we going to do with this? Are we giving it away?’” Katz remembered. Fortunately, there was already an online ordering system, so fans of Jewish food could ensure they were able to get what they wanted. “It was a simple way for people to pre-order foods,” Katz said. “They would complain that they couldn’t get what they wanted because it was sold out. So we had started this pre-order system, which went really well.”
The members of the congregation were able to adapt that ordering system to take all the orders for food online, then arrange for people to contactlessly pick up their food on a particular date. “We put that into play that summer and we had a fabulous response,” Katz said. “And so now we find that it’s been a lot easier for us to host an online event than an in-person event.”
The Jewish Food Festival has a pretty consistent menu of items available for order.
“Every now and again, we throw something different in,” said Katz, “but not that often.”
The food on offer is traditional Jewish and American-Jewish dishes that customers look forward to each year. Baked goods like challah, blintzes and kugel are made by members of the Temple, as well as homemade Jewish dishes like matzah balls, knishes and slow-cooked brisket. Deli staples such as sliced pastrami, corned beef, and tongue meats, rye bread, and pickles, are ordered from Evan’s Deli in Marblehead, Mass., then brought back to Laconia just before the pick-up date.
“We buy big chunks of meat. We slice it, we package it,” Katz said. “It is fresh to go because we get it a day ahead. Anybody who orders fresh deli meats gets really fresh deli meat. We get great deli pickles that everyone just absolutely loves. We can never buy enough pickles to meet all the requests.”
“The other things we do fresh,” Katz added, “are chopped liver and the chopped herring. That is done right then and there.”
Katz stressed that although all the food at the Festival is authentically Jewish, it is not kosher. “We are a Reformed congregation,” she emphasized. “It is kosher-style in the sense that everything we do is in line with meats and dairy being separate, but we don’t want to lead anybody down a path. The other thing that is really very interesting is the majority of our customers from year to year to year are not Jewish. They love what we have to offer and keep coming back.”
The most high-demand items, Katz said, are the blintzes and the rugelach.
“Ours [the rugelach] is a very different recipe. They are coated with a turbinado sugar and the filling we use is not overly sweet. But that turbinado sugar on the top gives this unbelievable, lovely, little crusty thing going on with the sugary [crunch]. They are so good!”
Katz emphasized the importance of customers’ placing their orders in time.
“We give people four weeks to order,” she said, “but we don’t cook to order; we cook what we think will sell and that’s what’s on the inventory on the menu. Once it’s gone, it’s gone.”
New Hampshire Jewish Food Festival
Will accept orders until Sunday, July 7.
Order online at tbinh.org. Orders will be available for curbside drive-thru pickup, by appointment, on July 19 or July 20. Select your appointment time at checkout when you place your order.
Featured photo: Courtesy photo.
