Around the Passover Table: 75 Holiday Recipes for the Food Lover

252 Pages·2012·1.04 MB·English

by  Jayne Cohen

Around the Passover Table
More than 75 Holiday Recipes for the Food Lover
Jayne Cohen
Wiley Selects
Copyright © 2012 Jayne Cohen. All rights reserved.
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.
Published simultaneously in Canada.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or
otherwise, except as permitted under Sections 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through
payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, 978/750-8400, fax [phone]. Requests to the Publisher for
permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, 201/748-6011, fax [phone], or online at
http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions.
Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the
accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or
extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where
appropriate. Neither the publisher nor author shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other
damages.
For general information on our other products and services, or technical support, please contact our Customer Care Department within the United States at 800–762–2974, outside the United
States at 317–572–3993 or fax [phone].
Wiley publishes in a variety of print and electronic formats and by print-on-demand. Some material included with standard print versions of this book may not be included in e-books or in
print-on-demand. If this book refers to media such as a CD or DVD that is not included in the version you purchased, you may download this material at http://booksupport.wiley.com. For
more information about Wiley products, visit www.wiley.com.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-1-118-35236-6 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-35237-3 (ebk)
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Around the Passover Table
Table of Contents
Passover
Kosher For Passover?
Passover Ingredients
Preparing For Passover
Tips For Planning a Seder Menu
Setting the Seder Table
Passover Recipes
Basics

PASSOVER
14–21 Nissan (March or April)
All people, in every generation, should see themselves as having experienced the
Exodus in Egypt.
—PASSOVER HAGGADAH
A generous ransom paid for a much sought-after piece of broken matzoh.
Horrific plagues re-created out of wine drops, and bricks from a
scrumptious fruit and nut paste. So many raucous cousins, the dining table
must be stretched with bridge tables until it snakes around the front door.
At every Passover seder Jews revisit magical childhood memories.
A glorious ceremonial family dinner held on the first and second nights
(Israelis and Reform Jews observe one night only) of Passover, the seder
brings to life the ancient Hebrews’ liberation from slavery and their flight
from Egypt. Nearly 80 percent of North American Jews—and many non-
Jews as well—attend a seder every year, making Passover the most
celebrated—and best-loved—of all the Jewish holidays.
The story of the Exodus is a universal one, a struggle for political
liberation and spiritual freedom relevant to all peoples. Moses, as God’s
emissary, pleaded with Pharaoh to free his people—the enslaved Hebrews
who, smarting under the taskmasters’ whips, were forced to build Egyptian
cities. To convince the nefarious king to heed the request, God visited nine
monstrous plagues on the Egyptians, ranging from boils on their skin to
frogs in the water to total darkness. Still Pharaoh would not relent. Finally,
God sent the worst curse of all: the death of the firstborn males, and
Pharaoh at last conceded. That night the Hebrews ate a hurried meal of
roasted lamb and unleavened bread and fled in haste, lest he change his
mind.
And that he did. Now the Hebrews stood before the Red Sea, and behind
them, they could feel the hot breath of the Egyptian pursuers mingled with
the desert scorch. Moses lifted his arm and miraculously the waters parted
so that they could pass through to safety. When the last Hebrew reached the
shore, Moses returned the waters to their natural state, drowning the
Egyptians and their chargers.
It is a stirring tale, meant to be felt, not merely told, and the injunction
above, to relive the Exodus personally, is taken seriously. The symbolic
seder foods are used to make the narrating vivid, and because most of these
foods are consumed, we actually taste the experience and ensure it will
become a part of us.
The matzoh recalls not only the flat, unleavened bread quickly prepared
for the flight from Egypt, it also suggests the humility of the Hebrews first
as slaves, and later as grateful worshipers before God. They had become
acquainted with yeasted bread in Egypt, so leavened bread (and by
extension, any form of leavening), puffed and swollen as with vanity and
pride, symbolized their Egyptian oppressors. Jews are prohibited not just
from eating leavening (hametz in Hebrew) during the eight days of
Passover, they must fastidiously remove every crumb of it from their
homes. This is a holiday of freedom and every trace of the tyrants must be
cleared away.
After the meal, a piece of matzoh stealthily hidden by the leader of the
seder becomes the object of a treasure hunt for all the children. Whoever
finds this afikomen (the word means “dessert” in Greek) will demand a
ransom (contemporary requests run from cash to charitable contributions to
video games), for the meal cannot be concluded until it is eaten.
The focus of the table is the special seder plate filled with other ritual
foods from the Passover saga. The highly symbolic egg, eaten extensively
throughout the holiday, appears on the plate either roasted or haminado,
Sephardi-style. It speaks of many things. Primarily, it recalls the festival
offerings brought to the Temple in Jerusalem, and, as a symbol of
mourning, reinforces our sense of loss at the Temple’s destruction. But
paradoxically, it also stands for the eternal and for new life, the hope and
optimism that are evoked with every spring. A roasted lamb shank bone
(sometimes replaced by a chicken wing or neck or even, for vegetarians, a
roasted beet) brings to mind other sacrifices at the Temple.
Salt water or vinegar gives us a taste of the tears and hard sweat of
slavery, but it is tempered by the sweet vegetable we dip into it: parsley,
celery, or soft lettuce, representing the renewal and growth of spring.
Horseradish, arugula, romaine, or other bitter herbs sting our tongues with
the harshness of slavery and oppression. And everybody’s favorite is
haroset, which mimics the brick and mortar the Hebrews used to build
Pharaoh’s cities. Variations on this fruit-and-nut theme reflect all the myriad
foodstuffs available in the Diaspora. Classic Ashkenazi haroset calls for
simple ingredients easy to obtain in Central and Eastern Europe: chopped
apples and walnuts or almonds flavored with cinnamon and wine. Sephardis
could choose from the exotic pantries of the Mediterranean. Their luscious
“mortar” might blend pureed dates and wine with chopped walnuts.
Coconut, pomegranate, lemon juice, pine nuts, and chestnuts are just a few
possible additions.
The joy symbolized by the four cups of wine (or grape juice) each
celebrant drinks during the seder is not complete: recognizing that our
enemies, too, suffered during the Exodus diminishes our gladness. So, with
one finger we flick out a drop of wine for each plague visited on the
Egyptians. The door is opened during the service so that the Prophet Elijah,
harbinger of peace and the Messianic Age, may come in to drink the cup of
wine poured for him. Everyone watches this goblet closely to see if he has
sipped, a sure sign of God’s blessing.
Today some seders feature a special goblet, the Kos Miryam (Miriam’s
Cup), created by a group of women in the 1980s. The cup is filled with
water and honors Moses’ sister, who provided the Israelites with water from
a well that followed her throughout the wandering and dried up when she
died. (For more specific details on preparing these ritual items, please see
Setting the Seder Table.)
The ceremonies are spelled out in a special book called the Haggadah. To
date, more than 4,000 printed (and countless hand-lettered) versions have
been created; as Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi wrote in Haggadah and History,
“it has been reprinted more often and in more places than any other Jewish
classic.” New editions attempt to connect the ancient struggles of our
ancestors to our modern lives in passionate and meaningful ways.
This too is part of the tradition. For while “seder” means order in
Hebrew, the rituals have never been set in stone. Ever since Passover
became a home-centered holiday with the destruction of the Second
Temple, the service has been evolving, new customs and ceremonies added
over time and throughout the Diaspora.
During Talmudic times, the ancient Hebrews adopted many elements of
the Greek symposium and Roman banquet. The four cups of wine owe as
much to the Roman practice of drinking before, during, and after the meal
as to the traditional Kiddush ceremony. Food scholar John Cooper even
suggests the Greek game kottabos, flicking wine from a cup at a target, may
have been the model for flicking wine when reciting the plagues. Greeks
and Romans, reclining on couches, dined on sauces similar to haroset; the
Romans often began their feasts with egg hors d’oeuvre, still the seder
custom among both Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews.
Not until the Middle Ages would the European seder plate resemble the
current Ashkenazi one: rabbis then finalized the roasted shankbone and egg
as appropriate substitutes for the ancient Temple sacrifices and approved
the use of horseradish for bitter herbs, though as a root, it lacked the
requisite bitter leaves called for in the Mishnah. And after the Crusades,
expulsions, and a continuing litany of other horrors, the Middle Ages
introduced the rituals associated with Elijah, because Jews desperately