[Sca-cooks] Jewish Chop Suey

[Robin Carroll-Mann]

On Fri, Oct 30, 2009 at 11:01 AM, Susan Lin <susanrlin at gmail.com> wrote:
> I was fine with the recipe until I got to the "break the pot" part.  Do they
> really mean break the pot or just take the lid off?

According to Charles Perry's footnote, this is a version of adafina
(called cholent among Ashkenazi Jews), which is left to cooked slowly
overnight so that a hot meal can be served on the Sabbath.

There are two other chicken recipes in that section of the cookbook
that call for sealing the lid in place with dough.  (A chicken recipe
in de Nola also uses a dough seal.)  After many hours of baking, the
dough seal would turn into something hard that had to be broken open.
And if the pot was made of clay, it might be easiest to break that.
As Johnnae observed, clay is cheap.

Since this recipe doesn't specify sealing the lid with dough, this is
speculative, but it fits with what we know about cooking methods of
the time.

Brighid ni Chiarain