Pastel (Savory Pie Filled With Ground Meat, Rice, and Onions)
Ingredients
For the dough
- 1 ¾ cups plus 1 tablespoon all purpose flour
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 1 cup water
- 3 tablespoons vegetable oil
For the filling
- 3 tablespoons vegetable oil
- 1 large onion, finely chopped
- 1 lb ground beef
- ½ cup long grain rice, rinsed
- 1 teaspoon salt
- ½ teaspoon pepper
- 1 - 1 ½ cups water
For frying
- 3 tablespoons vegetable oil, divided
Pastel (Savory Pie Filled With Ground Meat, Rice, and Onions)
Ingredients
For the dough
- 1 ¾ cups plus 1 tablespoon all purpose flour
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 1 cup water
- 3 tablespoons vegetable oil
For the filling
- 3 tablespoons vegetable oil
- 1 large onion, finely chopped
- 1 lb ground beef
- ½ cup long grain rice, rinsed
- 1 teaspoon salt
- ½ teaspoon pepper
- 1 - 1 ½ cups water
For frying
- 3 tablespoons vegetable oil, divided
As we cook over the course of a lifetime, the recipes we reach for can morph, some are forgotten, others become staples of our table, and still others are tucked away in the cupboard only to be dusted off when a family member or dear friend asks for them. That is how it is with Shoshana Elimelech’s pastel, a free form savory pie of sorts, made with a thin layer of dough that’s wrapped around a filling of ground meat, rice, and onions. It’s a recipe that Shoshana’s daughter Rachel recalls from her childhood, but not one that her own daughter Noa had tried in years. That changed earlier this year when we gathered for a cooking session in Shoshana’s home in Holon, just south of Tel Aviv.
In the family, the recipe can be traced back to Shoshana’s grandmother, who was also named Shoshanah, but its roots tell a longer and deeper story. The family’s believed to have migrated from Spain during the Inquisition to Turkey, having brought the recipe (like many Sephardic Jews did) with them.
In Ankara, the family lived with several others around a courtyard where all the cooking was done and recipes were shared. Money in their family was tight and they subsisted mostly on beans and rice during the week, reserving pastel for Shabbat meals, pairing it with green beans, zucchini or cauliflower and salads of cabbage or tomatoes. If guests joined, Shoshana’s mother and grandmother would stretch the meal with rice.
While Shoshana didn’t help in the kitchen when she was little, she saw how her mother and grandmother worked the dough and made the pastel. She brought the recipe with her further east when she moved to Israel in 1949. Here, she married a man named Menashe, who had been her neighbor in Turkey, and started to cook.
When Shoshana’s daughter Rachel was little, she would poke around the kitchen asking her if she could join in or run an errand to pick up ingredients. She remembers helping Shoshana to stretch the dough for the pastel across a round table in their home, and making the dish in a pan that came from Turkey. Still, it is a recipe that lives with Shoshana, now the next generation.
At 88, she doesn’t make it often. But like so many of those recipes that sit in the back of the cupboard, this one is beloved.
