Hamantaschen

The Book of Esther, read aloud in the synagogue at Purim, tells of Haman, chief minister to the Persian king Ahasuerus, who plots to have every Jew in the empire killed after Mordechai the Jew refuses to bow to him, and whose plot is undone when Esther, the king's Jewish queen, reveals her own identity and pleads for her people. Purim is kept as a day of reversal and celebration, with a festive meal, gifts of food to friends and to the poor, costumes, and a noisy retelling of the story in which listeners drown out Haman's name with noisemakers each time it is read, and hamantaschen belong to that same spirit of turning the villain into an object of harmless mockery rather than dread.

The pastry is made by folding a circle of dough up at three points to enclose a spoonful of filling, most traditionally poppy seed paste sweetened with honey, though prune, apricot, date and modern fruit or chocolate fillings are all common in different communities, and the dough is baked until the three corners hold their shape and the filling shows through the small triangular opening left at the center. Purim also obliges givers to send mishloach manot, gift baskets of food, to friends and neighbors, and hamantaschen are among the most common items packed into these baskets alongside other sweets and pastries, carrying the festival's spirit of celebration from one household to the next.

Hamantaschen carries two folk explanations that both read the same three cornered shape as a piece of the Purim story rather than as a plain pastry design. The Yiddish name, hamantaschen, literally Haman's pockets or Haman's pouches, points to the three cornered purses or pockets Haman is imagined to have carried, so eating the pastry becomes a small act of taking apart the villain's own belongings.

The separate Hebrew name, oznei haman, Haman's ears, reads the same three points instead as his ears, drawing on a folk tradition that Haman's ears were cut off before his execution, or simply that his large ears marked him out as a figure of mockery; either reading turns a piece of him into something eaten and enjoyed at the very festival that celebrates his downfall. Bakers in different communities favor one name over the other, and some serve both readings side by side without treating them as competing claims, since the point of both is the same: transform a villain into a treat, an old and widespread trick of festival food in which the thing feared is made small, sweet and consumable. The poppy seed filling most associated with the pastry is itself sometimes connected to Esther's own diet in the story, in which she is said to have eaten only seeds and legumes at the Persian court to keep to permitted food while concealing her identity.