In Carmel, the sign that summer is really underway is the tempting aroma of rugelach drifting out of a synagogue kitchen.
Prep work for the annual Jewish Food Festival begins in May, months before a single latke hits a griddle for the public. The festival itself dates back to 1954, but the countdown to it runs on a very specific weekly clock: Sundays are cooking days.
Show up at Congregation Beth Israel on the right Sunday and you’ll find a group of volunteers – a mix of longtime congregation members and newer folks still finding their footing – elbow-deep in dough. The room quickly fills with the smell of apricots, walnuts, cinnamon and chocolate.
The rugelach goes first – baked, cooled and marched straight into a freezer to wait out the weeks until the festival, which is both the congregation’s biggest fundraiser and one of the few days a year that manages to snarl traffic on Carmel Valley Road.
By post office standards, Congregation Beth Israel sits in Carmel. But on this stretch of road it borrows all the charm of neighboring Carmel Valley. The sun is bright, the coastal fog is a memory.
It is a Sunday right after the Fourth of July. The parking lot is maybe a third full and utterly peaceful, so it is almost funny to imagine what’s coming. On festival day, this same lot turns into a chaotic zone of corned beef and pastrami sandwich lines, but a few weeks beforehand, it’s orderly.
The door to the main building is propped open, and it takes no time to find the kitchen. Lisa Averbuch, the festival’s chair for four years running and who seems to be everywhere at once, keeping every cooking session on schedule.
The challah operation, though, belongs to Peter and Diana Rosenthal. Their recipe is the product of years of trial and error, and Diana will be the first to tell you it’s not the challah her family eats at home. Home is better, she says without hesitation, because the home version gets something different.
“We use butter in our home recipe,” she says. The festival version swaps in oil instead, keeping it kosher and pareve, so a slice can sit comfortably next to a corned beef sandwich without breaking any kosher rules.
The Rosenthals’ work is surrounded by a rotating cast of volunteers, each parked at a station, each grinning like this is the best part of their week – which it might be. Challah is not a quick job. The dough rises once, gets shaped and then braided by hand, loaf by loaf, until the count hits 150 for the year. Every one of those loaves goes into the freezer to wait, patiently, for its turn in the oven right before the festival opens.
Ask people why they buy challah and most will say French toast. Fair enough. But Averbuch has better ideas: egg sandwiches, bread pudding, or – her favorite – just tearing off a piece and eating it plain.
That’s exactly how the Beth Israel community treats it every Friday night at Shabbat, and it’s hard to argue with a method that simple.
The festival keeps growing. Averbuch says sales climb 15 to 20 percent nearly every year, even as the menu quietly reinvents itself. This year she’s chasing a different mood for the whole event – less Fiddler on the Roof, fewer creaky wooden booths, more contemporary Jewish life.
“It will be like a farmers market,” she says, which tells you everything about where this is headed.
Some aspects are untouchable, of course, such as the challah and the hamantaschen. But the kitchen likes to experiment. This year brings a cold citrus-ginger borscht (perfect timing for a July heat wave), a regional bagel sampler, stuffed cabbage rolls, eggplant blintzes and limonana, a frozen mint lemonade straight from the machine.
The egg cream, sadly, did not survive the cut.
One quirk worth knowing before you go: Cash is useless here. Everyone pays in festival “gelt,” purchased in advance. It’s not nostalgia, Averbuch insists: “We just don’t want our food volunteers to deal with money.”
Come festival day, the longest lines will form, as always, for latkes and sandwiches. And every dollar spent waiting in them goes straight back into Beth Israel’s educational programs. It might be the tastiest kind of fundraiser.
JEWISH FOOD FESTIVAL takes place 10am-3pm Sunday, July 26. Congregation Beth Israel, 5716 Carmel Valley Road, Carmel. (831) 624-2015, carmelbethisrael.org.