A Recipe Prompts Memories of Passovers Past

Before writing this column, I went searching for the recipe for a Passover cake that I carried to innumerable Seders over the years.

Finding it, I tumbled down the rabbit hole of memory.

There it was, yellowed with age, tucked inside my paperback copy of “The Joy of Cooking.”

That was the single cookbook I chose to take with me when I moved to Jerusalem in 1982.

It was the best packing decision I ever made. In Israel, I had an elegant apartment with a view of the mountains of Moab, but a frightening stove that used bottled gas. “The Joy of Cooking” never let me down, as the gauge-less bottle of gas sometimes did by running out mid-meal.

“Joy” included tables that translated American baking temperatures into European and Israeli equivalents. As a result, I was able to make a respectable cake every time friends came over.

In Israel, you never had to offer a guest any beverage stronger than coffee, but you were always expected to have baked goods on hand.

It was in Jerusalem, where we lived for almost a year, that I experienced the thrill of being in that most extraordinary city during Passover and reading from the Haggada the wish, so resonant for every Jew, especially in diaspora or bondage: “Next year in Jerusalem!”

It was also in Jerusalem that I experienced my personal best as a Hebrew speaker. I managed to call a plumber, who turned out to be from Morocco and spoke little English.

“The waters are not emigrating from the kitchen,” I explained in my very best, very bad Hebrew. Miraculously, he fixed my sink.

I was shocked to discover my recipe for “A Passover cake . . . wine-flavored,” as the headline described it, was from the March 1972 issue of Sunset magazine.

Our now adult son was only 2 at the time, and we were spending the year at Stanford, where my ex-husband was on sabbatical. It was my first time in California, and Sunset was my preferred guide to this wondrous new place where your garden never dies.

That year, I brought my wine-flavored Passover cake to a decidedly counterculture, mostly graduate-student Seder at which one participant actually said, “Far out,” in praise of the matzo-ball soup (it must have been the dill).

Passover is, of course, the Jewish holiday that marks the liberation of the Jews from slavery in Pharaoh’s Egypt. It starts at sundown on Wednesday. But beyond its religious significance, Passover carries layer upon layer of personal meaning. It is one of those touchstone holidays that tells you how your life is going, as you inevitably compare it with the Passovers of your past. Fortunately, it happens in the spring, when it is hard not to have a modicum of hope.

Ellen Solomon’s Pesach, which is Hebrew for Passover, got off to a fine early start. For fun, the West Hills woman entered last weekend’s Passover dessert contest at the Skirball Cultural Center, and her “Chocomatzo Cookies” took second in a field of 19 entries.

With a laugh, Solomon describes hers as “my almost prizewinning recipe” and says, “I got nosed out by a peach cobbler.”

Like thousands of other women in the Valley, Solomon will be having a Seder on Wednesday night. Beforehand, religious Jews will be meticulously purging their homes of any trace of leaven as required by Jewish law and preparing their special kosher-for-Passover pots, plates and utensils for the eight-day holiday.

But Solomon is not strictly observant, and her Seder will be a simple family affair. Daughter Leslie, a dentist, can’t make it this year--she’ll be in Denver. But son Eric, an accountant, will be there, complimenting his mother on her brisket and asking for more of her special matzo-spinach kugel.

Solomon’s husband, Joel, is a pharmacist, and he’s good about bringing extra chairs to the table, but he leaves the cooking to her.

Putting a Seder together is no easy task, even if you do buy the gefilte fish, as Solomon does. Seder guests have certain expectations.

“It’s like Thanksgiving,” Solomon says. “You can’t make a salami sandwich and say, ‘Everybody come over.’ It’s very labor-intensive. You use every dish in your house. But I think it’s very important to do.”

Inevitably, as Solomon cooks for Passover, she thinks of the women in her family who did this before her. Her mother was a fine cook, she says, and so was her grandmother, Gizzie Goldblatt.

Grandma was Hungarian, and, Solomon says, “she lived in the kitchen. She made her own noodles for her soup, and she made her own strudel. She had a golf-ball-sized ball of dough, and she stretched it out over the whole dining-room table and never got a hole in it.”

Solomon’s kugel is an elaborate affair that requires large amounts of fussing, or potschke, as it’s called in Yiddish. At the other, non-fussing end of the culinary spectrum is Solomon’s never previously revealed recipe for matzo-ball soup.

“My secret,” she confides, “is I use the Manischewitz mix and add carrots, celery and parsley on my own.”