Next: 2 to 3 Oct 2027
Rosh Hashanah
The Jewish new year, with apples and honey, honey cake spiced with cinnamon and clove, and Sephardic seven-symbol seder.
Spices for Rosh Hashanah
Rosh Hashanah is a time for sweetness: apple dipped in honey, round challah with raisins, and lekach, honey cake, spiced with cinnamon, ginger, cloves and allspice. Sephardic families hold a seder of symbolic foods, such as leeks, beets, dates, pomegranate and gourd, each with a short blessing. In Moroccan and Iraqi homes, rice and meat dishes are cooked with cumin, cinnamon and turmeric, and in Persian homes, saffron and barberry rice. Because the year is hoped to be sweet, spice is used generously in the dessert and subtly elsewhere.
The spices
Written by the EveryMasala desk with AI assistance. Background: "Rosh Hashanah" on Wikipedia. Customs differ from place to place and family to family. If this is your tradition and we have it wrong, tell us.
Photo credits on this page
The small pictures above come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences. Some are cropped to fit.
- Clove: Bayu Nugroho, CC BY-SA 4.0, source
- Allspice: Unknown author, CC BY 2.5, source
- Cinnamon: Luc Viatour, CC BY-SA 3.0, source
- Saffron: Hubertl, CC BY-SA 4.0, source