As Mia Zimman prepares to celebrate Purim this year with her husband Alejandro and their two-year-old Luna, she will fold delicate hamantaschen dough into a triangle around dulce de leche. The caramel-like spread has been a part of Alejandro’s family table for over 100 years. 

In the early 1900s, around the time of the Russo-Japanese War, his great-grandparents left Ukraine. There were two boats departing, one for New York and the other for Buenos Aires, explains Mia. By chance, they boarded the boat for Argentina where they joined a fast-growing Jewish community.

Two generations later, with growing political unrest in Argentina and a coup in 1976, half of Alejandro’s family moved to Madrid. He was little when they arrived in Spain, but still remembers relatives coming to visit with a tin of dulce de leche in their suitcases. “They would always have family meetings together and talk for hours,” Mia explains, and snack on pastries like alfajores, a sandwich cookie from South America made with dulce de leche. 

The cookies have remained an important part of Alejandro’s family life. In California where he and Mia now live, the cookies are served at every family gathering and birthday celebration. Last Purim, Mia, who grew up in an Ashkenazi American home, decided to create a new tradition for family, tucking dulce de leche into hamantaschen and adding cornstarch to the dough to give it the crumbly texture of alfajores.

The recipe brings together Luna’s identities, Mia says. “She’s Latina, Jewish, American — she’s got so many cultural identities. It just feels really good to put together a few different pieces into one.”