Mighty matzo

A Passover primer

By Zena Chew

April 14, 2008

Roasted eggs. Lamb bones. Fresh herbs. Brittle crackers. Chopped fruit and nuts. If you’ve ever celebrated Passover, you’ll recognize this unusual assembly as the components of the Seder platter, the dish of symbolic foods present on every Passover dinner table. If you’re more of an Easter person, you’ll still recognize these foods as undeniably springlike; you just might be more used to seeing the eggs in baskets and the lamb with meat on its bones.

The celebration of the ancient Jews’ liberation from slavery in Egypt, Passover is the second most important holiday in the Jewish calendar, after the High Holy Days in the fall. It’s also the Jewish equivalent of a spring festival, and an annual family-dinner ritual. Here are the Passover basics: history, rites, and even recipes.

Spring cleaning

In Hebrew, Passover is called Pesach, which means “to pass over.” That’s a short way of saying, “The Angel of Death passed over the homes of the enslaved Jews, and killed only the first-born children of the Egyptians.” This bit of selective destruction was the last of the 10 plagues visited by God on the Egyptians. Afterward, the Jews were told to get out of the country so fast that their bread dough didn’t have time to rise. The unleavened, crackerlike bread they baked on their journey back to Israel lives on today in the form of matzo, eaten during Passover instead of bread.

Like Christians abstaining from meat (or chocolate, or whatever) during Lent, the season before Easter, observant Jews get ready for Passover by giving their homes a thorough spring-cleaning and getting rid of any leavened foodstuffs. During Passover, you can’t eat any chametz. That’s anything containing wheat, barley, spelt, rye, or oats. Before Passover, you have to get all the chametz out of your house, or at least symbolically out of your house.

In Seattle, 22-year-old Ben Dershowitz works for Hillel, a national Jewish student organization with a branch at the University of Washington. He’s their mashgiach, which is basically like being the kosher police.

In the Dershowitz family, he says, they gather up all their chametz and put it in the basement. Then they sell it to someone who’s not Jewish. “You set it up through the rabbi,” Dershowitz says. “It’s kind of a cop-out, but it works really well. You sell it for a fraction of the value of the food. Then, after Passover, you buy it back for the same amount.”

He says he’s never heard of a chametz’s temporary owner showing up to claim the goods. “But if someone wants to come eat my half-eaten box of Cheerios, gay gazindrah hait (go right ahead),” he shrugs.

After you clean your house and sell your chametz, you get some new chametz! The day before Passover, one person in the family hides 10 pieces of bread around the house. The family does a ceremonial search using a feather and a candle. You find the pieces, and on Passover morning, you burn them. Then, says Dershowitz, just to be safe, while you’re burning the chametz, you tell God that you’ve done your best: “Any other chametz in my possession, it’s garbage and not mine.”

Kosher kitchens

In your own home, you only have to be as kosher as you want to be, but if you want to cater Passover-week lunches for hundreds of people, you have to follow all the rules of your local va’ad, the group of rabbis who keep your community informed about kosher law.

That’s Leah Jaffee’s job during Passover. She’s a kosher caterer in Seattle, and during Passover she transforms the dining room at the University of Washington’s Hillel into the only kosher-for-Passover restaurant in town. “It takes a whole week to clean up, three weeks to cook, a week to eat, and another three weeks to forget about it!” says Jaffee.

The kitchen at Hillel has two identical food preparation areas, one for milk and one for meat. (See “Going kosher” sidebar.) Each area can be closed off by a steel garage door. Passover at Hillel is strictly fleischig (meat-based), so the milchig (milk) area remains padlocked. They have two storage areas downstairs: milchig dishes and serving utensils in one, fleischig dishes in the other. The Passover dishes — an entire third set of dishes used only during Passover — are kept in the fleischig closet, wrapped in black plastic bags.

Passover Seder platters vary, but they usually feature an egg, a lamb bone, greens, bitter herbs or horseradish, salted water, and a mixture of chopped fruit and nuts called charoset. Matzo crackers and wine are generally served as well.

Don’t worry if you don’t have three sets of dishes. You can still kasher your own kitchen for Passover. (Quick dictionary: Kosher is an adjective, kasher is a verb, and everything falls under the oversight of kashrut, or kosher law.) Anything made of stainless steel can be made pareve (neutral) with a splash of boiling water, removing the essence of the milk or meat. Dershowitz says you can also kasher a wooden utensil by shaving off the outer layer of wood. Not surprisingly, most people stick with the stainless.

If you’re getting really serious in your kashering, you probably should remove all the food from your kitchen, because it may be tainted with chametz. Jaffee completely re-stocks the Hillel pantry: “Salt and pepper is kosher, but I need new salt and pepper, new spices, everything.”

Menu planning

Now that you’ve kashered your kitchen, you can stock it with Passover groceries: eggs and matzo. “Eggs are the binder for everything,” says Jaffee. She and her staff crack more than 6,000 eggs during Passover week, cracking them one at a time into a separate bowl, to check for un-kosher blood spots. (Bloody eggs are discarded.)

Matzo is a shape-shifting ingredient during Passover. You can soak squares of matzo and use them like lasagna noodles. You can break the matzo into little pieces, called farfel, and put those in a sweet or savory kugel. You can buy ground matzo and make matzo balls — dumplings cooked in chicken or vegetable soup. If you’re really missing bread rolls, you can make some buttery egg bread using matzo meal. And, for dessert, you can whip up a chocolate or lemon sponge cake with eggs and matzo flour.