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!"