We know that time of the year approaches because we just about trip over the big matzoh and chocolate macaroons display near the front door of our local supermarket. Matzoh is to bread as wallpaper paste is to pate’.
It’s a Yiddish word meaning “I forgot to use the yeast”. Matzo are thin, bread like crackers and the odds of buttering one without it falling to pieces are the same as a yodeler getting a good review from Simon Cowell.
Eating a sandwich made with matzo is like peanut butter and jelly without the bread.
The Passover meal is rich in both tradition and calories. It begins with matzo ball soup. The matzo ball recipe is passed down through the generations and in some families, guarded like the President’s nuclear codes briefcase.
There are three consistencies; sponge ball, volley ball and cannonball, or ‘sinkers’.
This year, the seven-day holiday began at sundown March 25th. We need 7 days because that’s how long it takes a sinker to go through the digestive process.
This is part of the religious symbolism of our faith because around the 4th day we raise our hands to the heavens, and cry out, “My God, when will I pass this matzoh ball?” This is one of the ways we reach out to other faiths.
Everything in the Passover meal like the Gefilte fish, the lamb, bitter herbs and the chocolate is symbolic. The bitter herbs symbolize our trek through the dessert without sunblock.
Some may feel that the chocolate macaroons and chocolate covered matzoh is a reward for having to partake of the bitter herbs.
And then there’s the Haroset. (The ‘H’ is pronounced ‘CH’ which sounds like we’re clearing our throat) Haroset is the blend of fruit and nuts symbolizing the mortar which our forefathers used to build pyramids in Egypt.
When we make the ‘ch’ sound, it symbolizes the amount of dairy we store in our throats.
We mix the bitter and the sweet between a sandwich of matzoh to symbolize the feeling of the sweetness of leaving Egypt and the bitterness of paying retail for class ‘A’ accommodations when all we got was a tent in the dessert.
When I want tears of happiness and an emotional feeling of pure joy, I’ll watch ‘Extreme Makeover, Home Edition’. I’ll cry along with them as the bus pulls away and for the remainder of the show I’m as wet eyed as a professional onion peeler.
You can buy the matzoh, which are shrink-wrapped 5 one pound boxes to the package. This makes it virtually impossible to buy only the one box we will use.
On a graph, the matzoh buying season looks like a snake with a vertical 10 foot pole stuck in it a third of the way through the year.
When the cable company makes you take channels you don’t want like the Knitting Channel along with Comedy Central this is called bundling. When Manischewitz does it, its simply called trying to sell a years supply in one week. That’s marketing.
