Life in Black and White
These nostalgic pinwheel cookies are simply delicious. Perhaps you’ll bake them and create special memories for a child in your life.
With the recent loss of my beloved Papi, my brothers and I are in the heartbreaking process of clearing out our parents’ home.
It is emotional work, made up of long days sorting through a lifetime of my parents possessions. Then there are those breathless moments when an ordinary object stops us in our tracks and pulls us straight back to another time.
After my mother passed away in 2022, my father wanted her belongings left where they were, saying that made it feel like she was still there. So now I am packing, grieving them both at the same time.
So much of what we are finding came with my parents from Morocco in 1973. A gift from my grandfather, a Hanukkah menorah which they faithfully lit for more than sixty years. Delicate turquoise glass Moroccan teacups. Elegant tall colored glasses. A couple of old ashtrays. A retro metal ice bucket. A sugar bowl that sat on the table for decades.
None of it is especially valuable dollars-wise, but every object is priceless. Every one of them testifies to Shabbat dinners, holidays, celebrations and everyday family life.
Then, I dived deep into their closet. Tucked away were two iconic needlepoint pieces that my mother had hung in our home in Casablanca and later, our first apartment on Doheny Drive in Beverly Hills. I hadn’t seen them in over thirty years. It felt like opening a door into my childhood.
But the greatest surprise was still in store. Hidden beneath layers of her scarves and handkerchiefs, my mother had saved a trove of letters from her mother who lived in Israel. Breathlessly, I gathered them and brought them home. On Friday night, I pulled a letter from the stack and began to read it aloud. Written in Spanish, my grandmother wrote “I was so happy to receive Raquel’s letter and drawings.”
Chills shivered down my spine. How was it that of all the letters that was the one that I had pulled out of the stack? It felt magical and otherworldly.
Raquel– that was me. (I only became Rachel when we moved to America.)
She wrote that she was overjoyed to receive my letter, that she was so happy to know that I was always in the kitchen with my mother, helping her. (I must have been about ten years old.) Reading that was confirmation of my mother’s claim that I had been by her side in the kitchen, since I was a baby in my high chair.
My mother would tell me that she would boil potatoes, allow them to cool, and then hand one to me to peel with my small hands. Long before I understood how deeply food would shape my life, that was my first kitchen task.
My grandparents made Aliyah from Larache, Morocco in the late 1950s. My grandfather owned a candy store. To this day, people in Ein Karem, Jerusalem still remember him as a kind man with a generous heart. I only knew my grandparents from our short visits to Israel, a few precious weeks at a time.
A few years ago, my younger cousin Raymonde gave me a huge treasure—a collection of my grandmother’s recipes that her mother, my aunt, had saved. Reading through them, I recognized the dishes. The same foods my mother had made over and over again, the flavors of our home.
The recipes include Pastel, a potato and meat dish similar to a shepherd’s pie. Rosquitas, cake-like donuts soaked in honey syrup. Spanish red rice. Tortitas, fennel-scented Moroccan biscuits. And the biscochos, pinwheel cookies of chocolate and vanilla, as well as date and walnut cookies.
My heart feels broken. Clearing out my parents’ home has been one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. I feel like a lost little girl. Grief has a way of collapsing time and returning you to the time and place where you were once most protected.
I will hold on to my parents’ dishes and silverware and use them for special occasions and celebrations. Serving their purpose of bringing people together, as well as helping us remember our loving, devoted parents.
My grandmother Simcha Bensabat was a very special woman. Her name Simcha, Joy, tells you everything. She was tiny and God-fearing and had the biggest heart. She passed love and blessing to all six of her children. Somehow, across generations and oceans, that love reached me.
Her letters and these recipes are everything to me, bringing me comfort in a time of deep loss. A reminder that love can be written down, cooked, saved and passed on, sometimes folded carefully into an envelope, and sometimes baked into a cookie, shared at a family table.
—Rachel
When I was a child, my grandmother baked black and white pinwheel cookies. I remember thinking how different they were alongside all the traditional Iraqi desserts—baba t’amar (crispy date-filled crackers), cheese sambusak, almond and cardamom sambusak and baklava.
Later, I found out that she had learned to bake them in Israel from a Moroccan neighbor, who had become a good friend.
My grandmother loved to innovate recipes and sometimes she would add flakes of dried coconut to the plain dough. These nostalgic pinwheel cookies are simply delicious. Perhaps you’ll bake them and create special memories for a child in your life.
—Sharon
Pinwheel Cookies
2 cups white sugar
1 large lemon
3 eggs
1 1/2 cups avocado or vegetable oil
3 tsp baking powder
4 cups all purpose flour
1/4 cup dark cocoa powder
Place the sugars in a medium bowl. Zest the lemon directly into the sugar and massage with hands to ensure that the lemon oils flavor the sugar.
Place the eggs in the bowl of a stand mixer and beat the eggs, then slowly add the sugar until the mixture is fluffy and pale yellow.
Add the oil and continue beating on low until well incorporated. Add the baking powder.
Turn off the mixer and add 1 cup of flour, then beat on low speed. Repeat process until all the flour is incorporated into the dough.
Halve the dough and place one ball into another bowl, then set aside.
Add the cocoa powder to the bowl of the mixer and beat for a few seconds until the cocoa is well combined.
Wrap both balls of dough in plastic wrap and refrigerate for 30 minutes.
Place parchment paper on the counter and roll each dough ball into a rectangle shape, then layer one on top of the other.
Slowly roll the dough outwards to form a log. Wrap the log and refrigerate for two hours.
Preheat the oven to 350°F.
Slice the logs into 1/4-inch rounds and place 2 inches apart on a lightly greased baking sheet.
Bake for 10 to 12 minutes, just long enough for dough to set. Cool on wire racks.
Sharon Gomperts and Rachel Emquies Sheff have been friends since high school. The Sephardic Spice Girls project has grown from their collaboration on events for the Sephardic Educational Center in Jerusalem. Follow them
on Instagram @sephardicspicegirls and on Facebook at Sephardic Spice SEC Food.
