Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
News

Yid.Dish: Halva, Two Ways (Raw and Pumpkin)

Raw Halva:

Recipe from Arrowhead Mills

1/2 cup Sesame Seeds (ground)

2 tablespoons Sesame Seeds (whole)

3 tablespoons Raw honey

1/4 cup Sesame Tahini (use the driest part of the jar)

1/8 teaspoon Almond extract

Grind 1/2 cup seeds in a blender. Mix ground seeds, whole seeds, tahini, honey and extract in a bowl all together until thoroughly blended. Roll into small balls or into a long roll and refrigerate.

Pumpkin Halva:

Recipe from Claudia Roden’s The book of Jewish Food

1 1/2 cups sugar

1/2 tsp ground cardamom (or 3 seeds)

2/3 cup clotted or heavy cream

1/2 cup coarsely chopped almonds and/or pistachios

This is a Bene Israel sweet from India. Roden calls for a fresh, good-flavored pumpkin, but canned pumpkin would do. Since she calls for 1 lb of fresh pumpkin, with some of the liquid boiled away, about 3/4 lb would probably be right.

Heat pumpkin to boiling, stirring often, and add sugar and cardamom. Continue cooking until thick and slightly jammy. Let it cool before folding in cream and nuts. Serve chilled or at room temperature.

The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.

This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

2X match on all Passover gifts!

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines.
You must comply with the following:

  • Credit the Forward
  • Retain our pixel
  • Preserve our canonical link in Google search
  • Add a noindex tag in Google search

See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.