Heading towards the zero hour

This morning I shredding and sliced out horseradish for the maror. The giant root got reduced to just three sandwich bags of maror. I don’t think it’s that hot a root. I wasn’t screaming while the food processor was doing it’s stuff. I was yelling while I was transferring the processed root from the processor into the bags.

My kids and my husband think that I’m slightly daft to make radish roses, but there is something irrationally important about making the table as nice as my mother did for so many years. During all of the hours I have been spending getting ready for Passover I have thought often about the many hours I spent as a kid working with my parents getting their home and table ready for this holiday over the years. The work feels like a long conversation with both my mother and my father that started when I was teeny.

This is how to make a soup taste rich. This is how to get a higher yield from your egg whites. This is how to slice meat thin. This is how to set a table. What are ways to make this meal feel special? This is how Ida Pascal baked a cake. This is Mildred Jacobs’s frum sister in law’s cake. These are Milton’s mother’s matza balls. My mother’s mother used to whip dish pans full of egg whites for her mother to add to Passover cakes. My father’s mother know only how to bake one cake, a Passover sponge cake. This is the melody my grand father used to chant the haggadah. This is the melody(?) my father’s grand father used to sing Va yihi b’ chatzi ha layla. Parsley and a few radish roses look nice on the meat platter. Be generous in how much you serve. Use nice serving utensils.

The lemon cake is just the best. It makes me look like a great baker. The batter is the consistency of shaving cream before you bake it. It’s so light and bakes up really tall.The top was ugly so I made camouflage.

Lemon custard and sliced strawberries work well to hide an ugly cake top.

Here are tonight’s desserts.

The house is clean.Tonight’s meal is cooked. Most of tomorrow’s meal is cooked as well. My sister is on her way. Tonight we re experience both slavery and liberation. I love how the labors of the past weeks help me to understand that liberation in a visceral way.

A zissen Paysakh to all – a sweet Passover.

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Connecting with the past

A few months ago I had a craving for my father’s chicken fricassee. If my father were still alive I would have called him up and he would have talked me through the process of making it. My father is no longer alive so I turned to my cookbooks and the recipes I found for chicken fricassee were nothing at all like the stew of chicken necks, gizzards and wings in a watery sweet and sour tomato sauce that I enjoyed as a kid. I assumed that the dish was an invention of my father’s. I then attempted to replicate the dish from my memory of it and failed. A couple of weeks ago I saw an article on the internet, and I can’t remember where, that talked about Jewish fricassee and it sounded an awful lot like the dish I was hankering after. This afternoon I went to the butcher and picked up all of the chicken elements of the dish, a couple of packages each of wings, necks and gizzards. My father never cooked directly from a cook book. He used to re...

The light themed tallit has been shipped!!!

I had begun speaking to Sarah about making her a tallit in the middle of August. It took a few weeks to nail down the design. For Sarah it would have been ideal if the tallit were completed in time for her to wear it on Rosh HaShanah., the beginning of her year as senior rabbi of her congregation. For me, in an ideal world, given the realities of preparing for the High Holidays I would have finished this tallit in the weeks after Sukkot. So we compromised and I shipped off the tallit last night. I would have prefered to have more time but I got the job done in time. This tallit was made to mark Sarah's rise to the position of senior rabbi but it was also a reaction to this year of darkness. She chose a selection of verses about light to be part of her tallit. 1) אֵל נוֹרָא עֲלִילָה God of awesome deeds ( from a yom kippur Liturgical poem) 2) אוֹר חָדָשׁ עַל־צִיּוֹן תָּאִיר May You shine a new light on Zion ( from the liturgy) 3) יָאֵר יְהֹ...

A Passover loss

My parents bought this tablecloth during their 1955 visit to Israel. It is made out of linen from the first post 1948 flax harvest. The linen is heavy and almost crude. The embroidery is very fine. We used this cloth every Passover until the center wore thin. You can see the cloth on the table in the background of this photo of my parents and nephew My Aunt Sheva bought my mother a replacement cloth. The replacement cloth is made out of a cotton poly blend. The embroidery is crude and the colors not nearly as nice. The old cloth hung in our basement. We used the new cloth and remembered the much nicer original cloth. I loved that my aunt wanted to replace the cloth, I just hated the replacement because it was so much less than while evoking the beauty of the original. After my father died my mother sat me down and with great ceremony gave me all of her best tablecloths. She also gave me the worn Passover cloth and suggested that I could mend it. I did. Year after year ...

sarah in nyc

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