My friend Brian spearheaded the quest to discover a Los Angeles half-moon cookie.
“I haven’t been able to find real half-moon cookies outside of New York,” Brian told me, glancing at the directions toward Schwartz Bakery he scribbled down on the back of a receipt as we zoomed down Wilshire Boulevard, passing through Beverly Hills.
A half-moon cookie, or a “black-and-white” cookie, is a large piece of vanilla shortbread with one side dipped in vanilla fondant icing and the other in dark chocolate fondant.
Most black-and-white cookies I had encountered fit in my palm and tended to be crunchy and overwhelmingly sweet rather than rich or chocolaty. Nothing too special and not really my cookie of choice, but I obviously hadn’t tried the real thing if it was worth departing at 10 a.m. on a Friday to find one.
What I hadn’t realized was that finding New York-style food also meant finding a New York-style city block. Along North Fairfax, between Melrose and Beverly, is a small strip of Jewish-only businesses from Kosher delis to butchers to grocers to restaurants. Only the Hebrew lettering above tattered green awnings distinguishes this block from any other along the mostly unimpressive Fairfax. However, most of Los Angeles’s ethnic secrets remain intertwined with freeways, road signs and flat, identical buildings like the ones we encountered.
At the sight of Solomon’s Bookshop, I found myself giddy. In the window sat displays of stacked yamulkes (the flat, circular hats that Jewish men and sometimes women wear when they pray), dreidels, Hebrew-English dictionaries, paintings of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv! The familiar and comfortable sight of these objects connected me to this little part of Los Angeles.
Growing up in Northern California with a relatively small Jewish community, I could not help but take pride in the fact that the people running these shops and owning these businesses were all part of my distant, extended, cultural and religious family. Sure, I didn’t really understand Hebrew as my Hebrew school education was limited to learning prayers for my Bat Mitzvah, and ““ sorry, mom ““ I’ve only attended one religious service since studying at UCLA, but I at least understood the weight, the significance, and the meaning of all of the objects laid out like ancient artifacts in the window.
Inside the shop, a man with a long, dark beard, wearing a shirt that only slightly covered his tzitzis, or the long threads of his tallis (prayer shawl), swept around the doorway. Dark, rich paintings of Israeli landscapes and muted portraits of ancient religious figures completely covered the store’s high-ceilinged walls, framing the racks of Judaica in the store. An older man hunched over a glass display case with a couple examining intricately carved mezuzahs, or boxes that are placed on the doorframes of Jewish homes for protection and sanctity. I traced my fingers over the familiar four sides of a decorative dreidel, just one of a large collection on display in the center of the store.
Yet not everything inside Solomon’s was necessarily traditional and old-fashioned. A collection of Jewish-themed board games included “Apples to Apples: The Jewish Edition!” (with nouns such as “Israel,” “bubbe,” “mensch.” Oy gevalt!) and “What’s the Schtick?” For the younger set, “KosherLand” featured a winding game board with a villainous, goopy-looking monster illustrated on the box, threatening to bring together “meat” with one hand and “cheese” with the other. A bit of an inauspicious way to approach Kosher eating with Jewish children, perhaps, but still a way to create pride, right?
While I could have spent hours more flipping through books about the Hebrew language and debating which game board to bring home (“KosherLand” was a tempting party-game bet.), I managed to remind myself that the half-moon cookie mission remained unaccomplished.
Entering Schwartz Bakery, however, was no less heartwarming and connective for me than the bookstore. A long, wide display case at the side of the store featured an array of Jewish delights like rugelach (a rolled-up cream cheese cookie that can be filled with raisins, walnuts, cinnamon, chocolate, marzipan or jam), bagels and challah (a braided sweetbread). Croissants, danishes, donuts and cookies also beckoned beneath the lit glass. I paced the length of the display case, wondering whether buying six loaves of fresh-baked challah would be excessive.
Then, we saw them: the half-moon cookies stacked one on top of the other like discs. They were much bigger than I expected and they didn’t look crumbly or crunchy, but chewy, like mini-cakes.
Mission accomplished.
If you have found the perfect half-moon cookie, e-mail Cohn at jcohn@media.ucla.edu.