“Yo Quiero” Sephardic Matzah Cookies!
by J.D. Arden, M.L.I.S. candidate, Reference Services Research Intern, Center for Jewish History

This Passover season, I invite you to try your hand at some sweet recipes from the Sephardic community of Turkey. For over 500 years since the expulsion from Spain, the Sephardic Jewish community in Turkey has maintained a cultural heritage of Ladino language, music—and tasty cookies and cakes! These two easy recipes are a great way to sweeten your holiday or make creative and practical use of all your left-over stock of matzah. (For use after the holiday: If you don’t have matzah flour specifically, it’s good to know that because it is unleavened, matzah can be ground up, food-processed or crushed back down into flour.)

Whether or not you want to serve the cookies and cake for breakfast (“dezayuno” in Ladino), as suggested in the above picture—with a bottle of Turkish Raki liqueur and fruit and eggs—at any time of day, they are sure to be delicious. 

Cooking substitutions and conversion:
You can substitute any other cooking oil for sunflower oil.
One glass is approximately 8oz. 

The source material for this blog-post is available in the Lillian Goldman Reading Room of the Center for Jewish History:

Sefarad Yemekleri: Sepharadic Cooking Book, recipes of Turkish Sephardim with photos and illustrations in Turkish and English (page 91: Passover cake & Passover biscuit).

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