Dishing Passover with
Kadish, Langer, and Mirvis
Compiled by Ken Gordon

RACHEL KADISH
Every year my sister and brother and I were given tasks for seder-preparation. My brother, five years younger than me and eight younger than my sister, needed a task to call his own while we older kids were set to fish-platterdecoration and haroset-making. So his job, circa age three, was to make the salt water.

My mother, ever the scientist, heated the water before adding the salt and taught him (and all of us) about supersaturation so more salt would stay in solution. It was my brother's job to get as much salt as possible into that water without it falling out of solution. It was a lengthy process, accomplished with great seriousness and delight. And each year at the seder we would compliment the salt water and go on about its miraculous, prodigious salinity.

I imagine there are time-honored one-liners at any family seder; certainly at my family's. They may be corny, they may surprise no one except guests, but it is illegal— absolutely illegal—to conduct a seder without them. My Polish grandfather used to open a bottle of slivovitz when the gefilte fish course was served; every year, he pronounced: "Because fish have to swim." Now that he is gone, we bring out the fish and say "As grandpa used to say, fish have to swim."

Our lines map our family history, even survive us when we're gone. This year I prepare once more to compliment the salt water. No matter that my three-year-old brother is now 31, with a child of his own. There is now another three-year-old in the family: my own daughter.

ADAM LANGER
Not long ago, a friend of mine was waxing eloquent about the unremarkable fare traditionally served up at his family’s Passover table. Recently, he had come to the conclusion that, like the boxes of bland Streit’s matzah, the bottles of wince-inducing horseradish, and sprigs of salty parsley, the festival meal was also designed to remind seder-goers of the harsh life they’d escaped in Egypt. The point, my friend philosophized, had been to make sure that the focus of the ritual was on the text of the Haggadah, not merely on the food.

Maybe so, but that wasn't exactly the way Passover worked in my parents' house in West Rogers Park, the Jewish ghetto on the north side of Chicago.

The typical elements of any seder were, of course, present—the light, fluffy matzah balls that my aunt would bring over on trays, the nuts and Joyva fruit jells that my cousins would provide, my sister's haroset, the gefilte fish composed of God-knows-what-part-of-which-fish purchased from Robert’s Fish Market on Devon Avenue, the jugs of easy-to-glug Kedem.

But somewhere after the blessing over the bitter herbs, the ceremony would diverge from tradition, and not just during the year when my mother eschewed Gold’s horseradish, instead opting for her own knee-weakening blend whirred up in the Cuisinart. Yes, somewhere along the line, Passover in my house transmogrified from Passover into something approaching Jewish Thanksgiving.

Brisket was, of course, on the menu in a thick stew of onions and carrots. And naturally, there was always a chicken soup filled with dill, parsnips, carrots, celery, and the pièce de résistance: a green pepper. But then there was the chicken served in a tangy, orange sauce, redolent of the fare in the best barbecue joints on Cottage Grove Avenue. There was also hot, crisp potato kugel, Hollandaise-smothered green asparagus (prepared in the actual copper asparagus pot my mother had received from her mom), even turkey with a matzah-meal stuffing.

Dessert was where my mother kicked her game up another notch, taking the opportunity to show exactly how overrated flour could be as a baking ingredient. Long before every pseudo-French restaurant on Lincoln Avenue or Halsted Street was featuring the de rigueur flourless chocolate cake with a warm, liquid center, my mother had moved beyond that trite, unadventurous delicacy and was fooling with a frozen chocolate pie that used toasted coconut as dough.

I always wondered why my father would race through the first half of the Haggadah and why everyone had already gone home by the time when we should have been reciting from the numerous pages that followed The Festival Meal. But, given the menu, it would have been hard for any oft-repeated story of Exodus to compete. And besides, one more ritual was left to remind us of the arduous labor we had escaped in Egypt—the washing of the dishes.

TOVA MIRVIS
I’ve never actually made the mayonnaise, but I have eaten it. My grandmother got the recipe from her mother, who made it year round, but my grandmother had the idea to use it for Passover. It was the first thing she made once she transformed her kitchen into the Kosher for Pesach (Passover) version. She said it was how she knew it was Pesach.

First she mixes, in the bowl of her mixer, the lemon juice, sugar, salt, and paprika, then she adds the egg yolk. The mixer should be on medium speed. Then she adds the oil a little at a time, until the mixture thickens. When all the oil is added and beaten well, she stirs in one teaspoon of boiling water.

Apparently the trick is to drizzle the first cup of oil in very slowly, a drip at a time. My grandmother says a prayer when she starts pouring and thinks of her own mother. My mother remembers standing in the kitchen, leaning together with her mother over the mixer, bristling at being told she was pouring the oil too quickly. One year my mother unknowingly left her jar in the car, and searched all Pesach for it, through the back traverses of the refrigerator, finding it only at the end of the holiday when it had separated and spoiled.

Now my grandmother goes to New York for the seders to her son and daughter-in-law (who makes it as my grandmother looks on). "We didn’t make it," my Memphis-based mother muses to me on the phone. "I didn’t pass it down. Should we make it this year?" she halfheartedly, wistfully, wishfully asks, as she contemplates ordering everything from a kosher caterer in Seattle who, because of family connections, ships prepared gourmet Passover food in a giant freezer truck to Memphis.

Later that week, my mother tells me of pushing her shopping cart through Kroger’s stocked Passover section, the organized shoppers buying early before there’s a run on tomato sauce or jelly. There’s Kosher for Pesach everything now, mayonnaise too. One of my grandmother’s friends rolls her cart past my mother. "It’s no fun anymore," she says. "Now you can get anything. What’s the challenge?"

Bubbie Katz’s Pesach Mayonnaise

1 lemon (juice and take out seeds)
½ tsp. sugar
¼ tsp. salt
¼ tsp. paprika
1 egg yolk
1/3 quart oil

This article appeared on JBooks.com, a web magazine for Jewish book reviews, news, excerpts, and more. Sign up for the free e-letter at www.jbooks.com.

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