Conversations across time

Every year when I get ready for Pesach, as I scrub and schlep boxes and shop and chop and cook and bake and wash endless dishes it always feels sacramental. It isn't just housework but something prayerful and holy, not all that different from the work done by the priests in the Temple as they prepared the sacrifices.

I know that lots of people complain about the work involved to create Passover. It is an incredible amount of work but it is also a wonderful thing to be able to create for your circle of family and friends. It is work with meaning.

As I work away cutting vegetables, making this cake or that or mixing up yet another batch of matza balls or matza muffins, or slicing up a brisket,

I recall the sedarim celebrated with my parents.

I believe that these photos were taken the year of the famous disaster Seder. That was the year when one nephew threw up on one of my parents rugs.

Another nephew was in charge of my youngest who was then a baby and while in his charge, my youngest fell down a flight of stairs. He was fine...my nephew, though, felt terrible.

Later in the evening my nut allergic nephew ate a dessert contaminated with nuts and had to be rushed to the ER, and while he and his mother were in the hospital the young woman who was hired to help with the meal and the dishes passed out.

Each of these things on their own were kind of bad but all together on one Seder it was just so funny. The retelling of that disaster Seder is as much a part of our Sedarim as the retelling of the story of the Exodus.

This year though, the loss of my friend Miriam my childhood friend and through Facebook my virtual cooking buddy has weighted heavily. Tomorrow is her second Yahrzeit.

I have also been missing my friend Shawna so deeply. She and her husband joined us so often for the second Seder. We would talk during the weeks and days before Passover about what I would be cooking. Shawna would offer wise suggestions.

My connection to Shawna is though Halifax. The community there is filled with long and complex kinship connections.

The recipe as it appears in my mother's holy Passover recipe notebook

As I type this, Mrs. Pascal's sponge cake is baking in my oven.

This is Mrs. Ida Pascal with my mother in June of 1953 at Peggy's Cove when my parents went to visit Halifax to see if the job was a good fit both for my parents and for the community. It was an excellent fit for both.

One of Mrs. Pascal's daughters is Shawna's sister's mother in law. I make Mrs. Pascal's mother's nut cake. Today I have been emailing back and forth with Ida's daughter Millie who I have never met but has been a virtual baking partner for the past couple of years.

This is that nut cake that I made last year --with my own spins on the original. I shared those spins with Millie. This year's cake is in the fridge setting so I can trim and decorate it tomorrow.

I wrote to another Halifax friend, Nancy, today. She was making my mother's excellent Passover chocolate cake. That recipe comes from Mildred Jacobs's sister in law Mrs. Mael. Mildred was one of the great bakers in Quincy.

I am emulating the priests in the temple as I cook and bake my way through Passover. But I am also having a conversation with the women of my past, my mother and Shawna and Miriam and also women that I never met--- the women who were the mothers and grandmothers of the women who taught my mother how to cook and bake.

So I am feeling sentimental this Passover. I am thinking about the conversations that I am having across time and across generations through the food that I am making, through all of the Passover prep work that I am doing.

I hope that someday long into the future my own kids will be having these same phantom conversations with me as they prepare Sedarim for their families.

Mrs Pascal's sponge cake. It is the tallest cake I have ever made, hands down.

I wish I could show it to Shawna and hear her say "Not bad!"

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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