(Pesach) one of the most important religious holidays of the Jewish year, is the occasion for special foods. Its origin is explained in the Book of Exodus in the Bible. Bringing pressure to bear on the Pharaoh to let the Hebrews depart from Egypt, Moses cursed the Egyptians with ten plagues, of which the last and most horrific was that all the first-born males in Egyptian families were to die. To ensure that the deity invoked by Moses would not inadvertently cause the death of the first-born of Hebrew families on the night of carnage, Moses required all these families to place a sign of blood on their door posts. The blood was to come from a sacrificial lamb which had to be roasted and eaten with unleavened bread and bitter herbs. Schwartz (1992) points out that the origin of the paschal lamb tradition lay in the pagan habits of a nomadic past:
Past ceremonies are resuscitated every few generations and given a more contemporary meaning which answers the demands of a new understanding. Pesach was a spring thanksgiving festival when nomadic people settled down for a few months to enable the ewes to give birth and suckle their young. It was the only time of the year when they had the opportunity to gather in fertile green enclaves, to tend their flocks, to meet friends and relatives, arrange marriages and conduct business. These gatherings were celebrated with joy and involved mysterious ancient blood rituals to ensure a prosperous year ahead.
Indeed the original meaning of ‘pesach’ is to skip or gambol, as young lambs and kids will do, while its other meaning is ‘to pass over, to exclude’, which is what had to be done for their dwellings on the night of the slaughter of the first-born.
The requirement to eat unleavened bread came from a different source, as also explained by Schwartz:
The holiday of the unleavened bread has its origins in the fallahim (settled cropgrowers') celebration of the beginning of the barley harvest when it was the custom to destroy all old leaven stocks. We do not know if grain was also destroyed, but the symbolic sale before Pesach of all Jewish grain stores, still practised now, indicates that symbolic destruction was practised in the past. This kind of practice is related to a global folk tradition of symbolically sacrificing leftovers of the previous year to guarantee a prosperous new year; a tradition which in modern times is probably echoed in ‘spring cleaning’.
The requirement to make sure that there is no leaven or leavened goods or grains on the forbidden list (wheat, barley, rye, oats, and spelt—all considered to be potentially liable to fermentation) in the house and to do without leaven during Passover is essentially negative, but can be viewed as having positive results. The following two passages from Claudia Roden (1996) show how the search for stray or hidden leaven can be an occasion of fun for the family, and that the challenge of baking without leaven produces some fine results.
In Orthodox homes, only after total cleansing can the special Passover silverware, dishes, and utensils be taken out of storage and the ‘kosher for Pesah’ provisions, including matzos, be brought into the home. Part of my father's happy childhood memories was the ‘search for hametz’ the night before Pesah, when, armed with a candle, a feather, a wooden spoon, and a paper bag, he looked with his older sisters for pieces of bread hidden by his father, and the whole thing was burned.
As for the results of baking without leaven:
The demands of cooking without grain or leaven have produced a whole range of distinctive Jewish variants of dishes making use of ground almonds, potato flour, ground rice, matzo meal, and sheets of matzos to make all kinds of cakes, pancakes, pies, dumplings, and fritters. For instance, in the Arab world, kibbeh, usually made with cracked wheat and lamb, was prepared with ground rice. In Eastern Europe, matzo-ball or egg-drop soup replaced vermicelli. Stuffed neck was filled with mashed potato instead of the flour-based filling; sponge cake was made with ground almonds or potato starch. One of the gastronomic highlights was the splendid cakes made with ground almonds, hazelnuts, or walnuts. One of the most affectionately remembered is matzo-meal fritters.
The name Seder (meaning order) is given to the ritual Passover meal and the tray on which it is served. Claudia Roden kindly agrees to continue the story at this point:
The large Seder tray was one of the few things my parents brought with them to England. Every year we placed it in front of my father on a pile of telephone books and covered it with a small embroidered tablecloth. On it were placed six little dishes, containing three matzos under a napkin, to remind us of the Jews who had no time to let their dough rise when they fled, and five symbolic foods.
In Europe, a decorative ceramic Seder plate, which is divided into sections, carries the ritual foods: karpas, a green vegetable such as parsley or little Bibb lettuce, representing new growth, which is dipped in salt water, symbolising the tears of the slaves; maror, bitter herbs, which can be chicory, cress, or grated horseradish, to remind us of the bitter times of slavery; betza, a roasted egg, representing the sacrificial offering of a roasted animal to God in the Temple on each holiday (in my family we had one hamine egg for every member of the family); zeroah, a lamb-shank bone, representing the lamb sacrificed by the slaves on the eve of the Exodus and the sacrificial paschal offering in the Temple (in my family we had a boiled shoulder, which we ate); haroset, a fruit-and-nut paste recalling the color of the mortar made with Nile silt that the Jews used when they built the pyramids for the Pharaohs.
Alan Davidson was a distinguished author and publisher, and one of the world's best-known writers on fish and fish cookery. In 1975 he retired early from the diplomatic service—after serving in, among other places, Washington, Egypt, Tunisia, and Laos, where he was British Ambassador—to pursue a fruitful second career as a food historian and food writer extraordinaire. Among his popular books are Seafood of South-East Asia, North Atlantic Seafood, and Mediterranean Seafood. In 2003, shortly before his death, he was awarded the Erasmus Prize for his contribution to European culture.
Roden, Claudia (1996), The Book of Jewish Food, New York: Knopf.
Schwartz, Oded (1992), In Search of Plenty, London: Kyle Cathie.
