Food History

When people talk about Jewish food it all sounds so easy. For Passover in two weeks we might have matzah brie and chicken soup and choc-nut cake and all kinds of wondrous stuff. Charoseth and chopped liver and pickles and edelbitter chocolate.

I don’t often hear people talk about the food before Passover. Finishing up food for Passover is never glamorous.

I grew up in an Orthodox household (which means we kept a kosher kitchen) in Melbourne in the 1960s and 1970s. Because we were a biggish family and each of us kids had numerous friends, getting the place ready for Passover entailed biscuits. Lots of biscuits.

The biscuit recipe was adapted to meet the ingredients that needed to be used up. The tins of biscuits we took to school started off as full of fruits and nuts and chocolate chips and ended up butter or coconut. By a week before Passover there was no more flour in the house and we finished up the last sugar and vinegar with a tin or so of toffees. We might have a dish of sago or something else a bit more unusual to finish up other odds and ends, but really, the only food we had to get rid of (in the caravan, technically sold to my father’s dental nurse for the duration) were mostly food colourings and essences.

I did my cupboard just now, ready for furious finishing-up over the next 2 weeks and the results couldn’t be more different.

I have enough flour for precisely one batch of biscuits. I had enough polenta for two batches of pancakes and enough honey for two, so I made one for lunch today and have diminished the polenta, the honey and the eggs all at once. Yay me. Not all the food is finishable, so I have a shelf of the cupboard that I shall simply seal off and pretend it doesn’t exist. There is only one of me, after all. And I’m not nearly as religious other members of my family.

I threw out all the out-of-date food. There wasn’t too much of that, though how I managed to get 3 boxes of pudina chutney mix and let them all get three years beyond their use-by date is a mystery.

I will be eating quite a bit of nori maki this next fortnight - rice and seaweed and wasabi and soy sauce were most plentiful. Also heat-and-serve spinach curry. I have enough for two meals of that. I have Vietnamese spring roll wrappers and some sheets of lasagne. Great Northern beans, chickpeas, one meal worth of pasta shells, three of spaghetti and one small roll of buckwheat noodles. Enough red lentils for one dish of dhal (to go with both the spinach curries, I think, since my dishes of dhal are large) and some ground almonds. Ground almonds and flour = almond biscuits, of course. The sweetest things there are a tin of unsweetened peaches and some almond-flavoured agar-agar jelly mix from Singapore, which will go very nicely together if someone drops in. And I really can’t face those lasagna sheets: I’ll give them to a very fortunate friend.

My mother, on the other hand, is making biscuits as usual.

Mum’s Biscuits

Ingredients:

150 g butter or equivalent amount of oil
1 large egg
1 small cup sugar
1 cup SR flour
1 drop vanilla (optional)
any flavouring/additional ingredient you feel like (eg mixed dried fruit, coconut, chocolate chips)

Method:

Melt butter. Add everything else. Mix well. Drop a teaspoon at a time on well-greased trays. Bake in a moderate oven for 10-15 minutes.

PS The picture is of bread because for eight days in April I won’t be able to eat it. That’s another thing about pre-Passover preparations. Bread becomes the dream food that will soon become the stuff of painful denial. I’ve already started wandering longingly through the bakery part of the supermarket eyeing off shelves of ciabtta and pitta with wisful gluttony. I can’t buy any though. Too much to finish up. Too little time.

It will all be over in three weeks. If I say it often enough I might believe it.