Winter Joy Retreat-Day 3: Food and Freedom

I'm participating in an online writer's retreat, thanks to Nina Badzin's blog. The topic is "Edible Memories," so all the posts will be about food. I will try to post every day to keep up, but there are some I might come back to later, depending on my schedule and when inspiration strikes.

Today's topic:
Tell us about a time when you felt food was about freedom -- or the lack of it. Who was involved? How has that experience influenced you as a person?


I personally don't have stories about feeling oppressed and thinking of food as freedom. However, this topic brought Passover (Pesach) to mind. (Funny that I'm talking about this now, with Hanukkah right around the corner.) Every spring, we sit around our dining room table, leaning back on our big pillows from the couch, and read from the Haggadah (the seder and story of Pesach). There are certain items that need to be on the table during the seder: matzah, parsley and a bowl of salt water, a hard-boiled egg, a roasted lamb bone, charoset (apple and wine mixture), lettuce, and horseradish root. These symbolize different things in the seder. I can explain a few of them.

The parsley is for dipping in the salt water, to represent the tears of our ancestors when they were enslaved in Egypt. When we had our first Pesach in New Jersey, we learned that you could use other items aside from the parsley for dipping in salt water. As long as you can say "....boray pree ha'adamah" (prayer over foods that grow from the ground), it's eligible for the (double) dip. This brought up an argument between my husband and some of the other men who were learning with him, as he knew that pineapples grew from the ground. Since he was right, the Rabbi put a pineapple on his seder table when we were there for the second night.

Yes, you can dip this in salt water!

The charoset represents the bricks and mortar that our ancestors used during their enslavement. We put it between two pieces of matzah and include a bit of horseradish for the korech, or Hillel sandwich. The charoset balances the bitterness of the maror, symbolizing the optimism of the seder. My husband has this amazing charoset recipe. I can't even explain what he does, but it comes out great every year. He makes a batch without walnuts due to our sons' nut allergies. It's delicious either way.

The matzah represents the bread that our ancestors didn't get enough time to bake before fleeing from Egypt. It's also the reason we can't eat anything leavened on Pesach. Over the past few years, we've been using Shmurah matzah at our seders. It's even thinner than the boxed kind made by Manischewitz or Streit's. It's really crispy, aside from it's plainness. It's great for making matzah pizza. The melted cheese weighs down the matzah, but it retains its crispiness. My kids like to eat it with cream cheese spread on top, even when it's not during Pesach. 

Shmurah matzah

At our seder table, we sometimes compare our enslavement in Egypt to the Holocaust. There was also no freedom for our ancestors during this horrific time, and food was hard to come by. My mother-in-law told us about her relatives who perished and how they would cherish a morsel of food whenever they could get it. At this time of strife in Israel and all the blatant Anti-Semitism going on, we compare what is happening to the Holocaust. The idea of being in such a perilous situation is jarring and unsettling to my family, my friends, and myself. We think about a time long, long ago and it's similar to a time in the not-so-distant past that we should never forget, as many survivors have now passed away. We are thankful to Hashem for bringing us to this time and place and providing a bounty of food that we can eat while celebrating our freedom and reminding ourselves "Never again!"

Pesach food used to be associated with bland taste. There weren't a whole lot of options for the seders or even during that whole week. I tended to eat a lot of matzo ball soup when I was growing up. In college, I had to improvise a bit, as the Passover "airplane food" provided by the dining center was disgusting. I'd get a plain burger or a plain piece of chicken, no bun. I wasn't keeping Kosher at the time, but I was pretty good about sticking to most of the Passover rules, even on a campus where the only synagogue was in the middle of nowhere. I'd bring matzah and the fruit slice candy (the good stuff with the sugar on top) to all my meals. My friends were interested in trying some of it, so I didn't feel too weird about that. My mom would also send me back to school with these chocolate chip cakes, which were the only dessert worth eating on Pesach at the time. The mix has been discontinued and I still miss it. I used to warm it up in the microwave so the chocolate chips melted and the cake was even softer and more delightful. A perfect breakfast treat! Side note: the Kosher for Pesach cereal is horrible and the bag inside the box is so small that it doesn't equate to the five dollars charged for it.

The first time I started liking Pesach food was when we went to my sister-in-law's family's house for the holiday. Her mom is an amazing cook and the food didn't even taste like it was intended for Pesach. Everything was just so incredible from the soup to the main dishes to the side dishes to dessert. At lunch, she had matzah macaroni and cheese and matzah lasagna. I now make those dishes for the holiday and they are in high demand from my whole family. I think the experience at my sister-in-law's parents' house inspired my husband to go outside of the box when it comes to cooking for Pesach. He's made some amazing dishes over the past years, including Pesach crepes. My sister-in-law baked these delicious blondies this past year and then gave me the recipe. It was so hard to stop eating them! And I managed to work with a Kosher for Pesach pancake mix that my kids and I both enjoyed. We used strawberry jam on top, as K for P syrup is ridiculously expensive. After all, if we're celebrating our freedom, we shouldn't be eating something bland!

My husband's Pesach crepes