Judy Bart Kancigor - The Perfect Passover Cookbook

My father with the Barry Sisters, regulars on the American-Jewish Caravan of Stars radio show, 1950s.

For my dad, Jan Bartsinger, raconteur, cantorwhose magnificent Catskill hotel seders (complete with a choir that included my mom Lillians glorious contralto) set the bar for Passovers to come. No wonder its my favorite holiday. J.B.K.

Family-Tested Recipes for Matzoh Ball Soup, Kugel, Haroset, and More, Plus 25 Desserts

BY JUDY BART KANCIGOR

Copyright 2011 by Judy Bart Kancigor

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproducedmechanically, electronically, or by any other means, including photocopyingwithout written permission of the publisher. Published simultaneously in Canada by Thomas Allen & Son Limited.

The Perfect Passover Cookbook is a condensation of material previously published in Cooking Jewish: 532 Great Recipes from the Rabinowitz Family by Judy Bart Kancigor

ISBN 978-0-7611-6564-4

Cover design by Jean-Marc Troadec
Cover photograph by Jon Edwards

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Ask most Jewish children, Whats your favorite holiday? and youd think Hanukkah would be the quick response. For me all the blue and gold beribboned gift boxes in the world cant hold a shammos to Passover. To my mind, you just cant beat the cuisine.

The festival of Passover commemorates the exodus of the Hebrew slaves from Egypt. In their haste to depart they could not wait for their bread to rise, so the dough was baked in flat cakes. As a reminder of our passage to freedom, Jews throughout the world eat matzoh for the eight-day holiday (seven in Israel).

This poor bread that sustained our ancestors in the desert we call the bread of affliction, to remember that once we were slaves in Egypt. But through the miracles of God, we were led into freedom, enabling us to use our ingenuity, skill, traditions, and collective memory to create a glorious celebration around it. To focus on what we do without for those eight days is to see the glass half empty.

During the Seder (the word means order in Hebrew), we eat matzoh with haroset, the fruit and nut mixture resembling the mortar the ancient Hebrews used when they were slaves in Egyptyoull find both Ashkenazic and Sephardic versions here. We combine it with bitter herbsusually horseradishto remember the bitterness of slavery and the sweetness of freedom.

Imaginative Jewish cooks through the ages, like a million Iron Chefs all working with the same surprise ingredient, have molded, crumbled, whipped, layered, fried, baked, infused, and combined matzoh with an astonishing variety of other ingredients to produce a tempting feast. The fact that we base a glorious celebration on the bread of affliction illustrates that we have the freedom to do so.

Passover is the most celebrated of all Jewish holidays, and even those who rarely step into a shul all year knock themselves out cooking for this one. We mix it up with dishes that honor our traditions and just enough new stuff to keep it interesting.

While the Seders get all the glory, this is an eight-day holiday, and our family has all the bases covered, from breakfast muffins, rolls, and bagels to latkes, matzoh brei, and fritters, even a Spinach Lasagna for a dairy meal.

And yes, you can have dessert! Sure, no flour is permitted during the holiday, but Jews love a challenge. Where leaven fears to tread, to the rescue comes the incredible, edible egg!

A note on keeping kosher: The label KLP, for Kosher LPesach (kosher for Passover), means that a particular product has been certified by a rabbinic agency for use during Passover. While some foods do not require Passover certification, many do. As guidelines may change from year to year, its best to consult your own rabbinic authority. Two websites have been especially helpful to me in this regard: www.kosherquest.org and www.kashrut.com .

All ingredients listed herechocolate, cocoa powder, brown sugar, whipping cream, maple syrup, wine, liqueurs, even sprinklesare available (at least as of this writing) and assumed to be KLP. For more information on cooking kosher, see the primer at the end of this e-book.

Because I love my family and because I love food, I decided to write the family cookbook that eventually became Cooking Jewish, the opus from which this e-book short is culled. It would be more than a cookbook, I envisioned. It would hold precious old photos of our family and the Russian town my grandparents had left almost a century before, some of the documents and maps I had collected fifteen years earlier when my hobby/obsession was genealogy, an updated family tree, and most important, as many stories as I could gather.

I would try to tell, with laughter and with love, the history of our family from the shtetl to the suburbs. And Id do it where Jewish families always gather, of coursein the kitchen!

So I sent letters to my Rabinowitz aunts, my first cousins, and their adult children, asking them for their signature recipes and for stories. The response was overwhelming! In-laws of in-laws begged to be in the cookbook, and my answer was a resounding yes! Anyone related to the Rabinowitzes by blood or marriage was eagerly welcomed, which meant I would include my dads family and my husband Barrys family as well. My little project was growing. By print time over 200 family members were included (not to mention some talented friends who slipped in through the back door).

I started Cooking Jewish as a tribute to my family, but as the recipes and remembrances poured in, it soon morphed into a tribute to others mamas, grandmas, imas, omas, and nonas as well. Like a well-worn snapshot, it captures a moment in time, a legacy to pass along as we each create our own traditions. Like our family, this cookbook is inclusive, reaching out to embrace in-laws of in-laws in an ever-widening circle of the extended Rabinowitz clan, and like our family, it is big and boisterous, filled with laughter and love. For more on , flip or click through to the back of this e-book.

Seder was always special because of the family hoopla, getting together, laughing, singing and of course the delicious food, coanchored by Mama Hinda and the aunts. We all stuffed ourselves into their tiny living room, candles lit, scents of holiday delicacies, the mountain of pots in the teeny kitchenand of course Mama had no dishwasherbabies crying and cooing, Papa chanting, the Rabinowitz women serving and never, ever complaining that they were tired or anything was too much.

PHYLLIS EPSTEIN (COUSIN)

Tradition! Tradition!