kugel

A traditional savoury or sweet Jewish dish consisting of a baked pudding of pasta, potatoes, or rice, with vegetables, or raisins and spices.

Many cooks prepare one kugel in honor of the Sabbath. Some families serve extra kugels in honor of a Yom Tov or Rosh Chodesh that falls on a Sabbath. Their idea is to serve as many kugels as there are Torah scrolls read in the synagogue. Kugel recipes run the gamut from sweet to salty, soft to crisp, bland to sharp. They may be baked in the oven or pan-fried on the range.

In medieval Poland, kugel covered a range of preparations baked in shallow or deep (usually round) pans without reference to type of ingredients or elaborateness of preparation. The fancier deep-dish versions of kugel resembled bread puddings and were made almost exclusively for Chanukah. However, kugel also provided the practical advantage of being made in advance and then kept warm overnight for serving on Shabbos, when cooking was forbidden. Kugel made with shredded turnips is one of those old Sabbath dishes.

A wealthy young Jewish woman characterized as materialistic and selfish.

She was minding her own business, taking a visitor from struggle days in London around the sights of the New South Africa, when she was recognised by a clutch of ageing kugels, out doing what kugels of all ages do on a Saturday morning in Hyde Park, namely shopping.

Yet [Barbara] Ludman wants to take Michelle [in The Day of the Kugel (1989)] out of the "Kugel" category (a Kugel being a "disgusting, dull, boring noodle pudding"—the people in Johannesburg suburbs whose wealthy lives are one long party).

A traditional hanging ornament of German origin, made of thin glass with a metal coating, usually spherical but also produced in other shapes such as bunches of grapes and drops.

Along one wall of the Motts' home is an array of kugels, or glass balls, antique forerunners of today's classic $3.99-a-dozen-at-the-local-drugstore ornaments. However, unlike those made today, antique kugels are considerably sturdier and served as more than just decorations. Kugels decorated the house year-round and were known as "witches' balls." It was believed that if a witch were to visit it and see her face in one, the distorted image created by the rounded glass would scare her away.

Lauscha [in Thuringia, Germany] began, early in the nineteenth century, to produce reflective panorama balls or "witches' balls" for window and garden decorations. The first recorded order for smaller, Christmas-tree versions of these thick-walled "kugels," silvered on the inside with compounds of zinc or lead, dates from 1848. And, although kugel means "ball," relatively early examples of the type took on precisely the shapes noted by Harper's Bazaar, including mushrooms (a German good luck symbol), clusters of grapes, and acorns. Kugels were factory products, made in a glass kiln. But the thin-walled balls and mold-blown ornaments imported to the United States in large quantities in the 1880s were made in peasants' cottages, with whole families engaged in the year-round enterprise.