“We grew up in the waspiest place on earth. Everyone was blonde and no one celebrated the Sabbath,” Sarah Magid says through laughter. The stylish baker behind Knead Love Bakery who is a fixture of the Union Square Greenmarket spent her childhood in La Jolla, a neighborhood of San Diego. In the 1980s, there were no kosher businesses nearby — “there was no bakery, no butcher,” Sarah says. Kosher meat for the holidays required a special trip to Los Angeles, a two plus hour drive up the coast, and her family would bake their own flour-free cakes for Passover. 

Since both of her parents had grown up in the Midwest, there wasn’t much family nearby either. “Grandma Eva was really our family. She and my grandfather lived not even a mile away, and so we were really close to them,” Sarah says. Jewish holidays like Shabbat — which she spent reading Nancy Drew books from the library — could at times feel isolating. But Purim was different. “It was almost like the Jewish Halloween,” she says.  

Sarah remembers dressing up all in pink as Queen Esther and baking hamantaschen in her family’s sunny kitchen with her mother Ruby and grandma Eva. The cookie recipe they used likely came from a community cookbook. And when the cookies were ready, they were piled on a platter before they were completely cool. The chocolate and raspberry ones were always devoured first “leaving behind a sad mound of the ones made with prune jam,” Sarah recalls. (The prune ones were beloved by grandma Eva.)   

Sarah would bring hamantaschen to school for the holiday and her mother would pack up baskets of mishloach manot, edible gifts given out around the holiday. And since it was the 1980s, everything was tied with mint and peach ribbons or red satin bows. Popped into the car, Sarah’s family would deliver them by hand and receive baskets as well. 

“The excitement of making baskets and also comparing our hamantaschen to those we received in gift baskets became part of the celebration,” Sarah says. “Everyone was an expert hamantaschen food critic.” 

As a mom herself living in New York City, she kept the hamantaschen tradition going, baking the cookies for Purim with her kids — sometimes for their classrooms. Today, Sarah is gluten-free and shares her passion for gluten-free baking and local regional grains through her bakery Knead Love. “There’s a very emotional response at our stand around Purim because we make a gluten-free sourdough hamantaschen,” Sarah shares. Customers — even those who aren’t religiously observant — recall their grandmothers making the cookies. “It always strikes me. There’s something very generational and emotional — it’s really about hamantaschen, I don’t know why,” Sarah adds.