Liz Zaretsky last wrote for The Toast about Taylor Swift’s lesbian anthems.
The process will take two hours, but we’re gonna do it anyway, okay?
Start with a chicken. A capon is best, you won’t have a capon, but it’s important that you acknowledge out loud that you are, in fact, already starting at a deficiency. You have a chicken.
Boil water, add chicken. Boil water and chicken. After a while, skim the fat off the top. You will not get all of it because that is, frankly, impossible. Nonetheless, you have already committed two failings, and it’s important that you take a moment to feel bad about yourself.
The story goes that after the angel of death killed all the firstborn children in Egypt–his own included–the Pharaoh finally agreed to let the Jewish people go, and in our hurry to escape before his grief turned to anger, we didn’t even wait for the bread to rise before we escaped into the desert, where, if you’ll remember, we wandered lost for forty years.
The point is, no one has ever felt good about eating matzo.
Now chop the vegetables. Three carrots, three stalks of celery, half a large white onion, four cloves of garlic. If anyone has offered to help you, this is the only step in which they may participate. Later, when someone compliments the soup, you will graciously say, “well so-and-so helped,” to which they will be forced to reply, “oh, I just chopped the carrots,” and you will nod, glowing with the praise of both your talent and magnanimity.
Add the vegetables to the pot. Boil everything for another, longer while. Long enough to pick a fight with someone you swear to love. One of you should be shouting. One or both of you should use an old Yiddish word. That’s fakakta and you know it. You’re meshuggener. It does not matter what the fight is about, it’s all part of the same stream of arguing you’ve been going down since 1997. In fact, one of you should bring up something that happened in 1997. You will both turn to look at it, like a sapling you planted that’s become a tree. A physical representation of how goddamn long you’ve loved each other, you putz, you beautiful schmuck. I won’t let you forget it.
In the absence of your family, an episode of The Sopranos will suffice.
When the credits roll, add the soup mix. It’s not cheating to use a mix if you use the same brand that every woman in your family has used for the last century. This is what my great-aunt tells me when I call to ask. It’s just better with the mix. This is what my mother tells me when I call to ask. She makes that soup? I always thought she bought and heated it up. This is what my father tells me when I call to ask. Use the mix. Boil for a third while.
Use the soup mix, but make the matzo balls by hand. The wet matzo and egg batter will get caught beneath your fingernails and you will think we escaped from Egypt for this?
As a child, you heard enslaved in Egypt and thought pyramids, and even today, you have a hard time shaking that assumption.
Roll the batter into separate matzo balls, about one-inch in diameter. Drop them into a separate pot of boiling water, then cover tightly.
Although the Book of Genesis and Book of Exodus describe a period of Hebrew servitude in ancient Egypt, more than a century of archaeological research has discovered nothing which could support this claim— not the four centuries toiling in Egypt, nor the escape of well over a million Israelites from the Delta, or the three months journey through the wilderness to Sinai.
Add the matzo balls to the soup, let it all boil together for a while. At this point, someone should be shouting that they’re almost ready to take the brisket out if everyone would stop whining and set the table. Someone should already be setting the table. There should be silverware clanking and an old man with a bad toupee telling a bad joke and two women in gold jewelry should be sitting with your little brother on their laps, teaching him all the words to an Ella Fitzgerald song, and a teenaged boy should be complaining about having to use sparkling grape juice for the ceremony instead of the ritual glasses of wine, and no one should be paying him any attention because my god your kitchen smells good, my god.
In the absence of your family, tupperware will suffice.
Tags: family, food, liz zaretsky, passover, recipes, who doesn’t love the jews
Forty years of wandering, and no one has time to let the bread rise? What, no one could just wait to start the soup until they were out of Egypt? (Also, it is too true that it all happened like that — I’ve seen The Ten Commandments. This is not the kind of thing Chuck Heston would lie about.)
Soon we will get an updated version of things!
Exodus: Gods and Kings, featuring Christian Bale as White Moses and Aaron Paul as White Joshua!
If they’re doing it right, the Egyptians (sorry, “Egyptians”) will all have snooty BBC English accents, and the “Israelites” will all speak with down-home Midwestern accents. Bonus points if, when talking to Ramses, Moses uses modern expressions like “I feel like you’re just self-medicating, Ramses — I need your buy-in on letting my people go. Think outside the box, man.”
That sounds about right. Also Sigourney Weaver is involved somewhere. And John Tuturro! (“He looks tan, let’s cast him! What do you mean he’s Italian?”)
I’m just waiting for Aaron Paul to break into Jesse-isms.
“Yeah! Freedom, bitch!”
Oh. You were being serious.
This sounds delicious! So why have I never liked matzo ball soup? Is it my defective gentile half? Or am I just a monster?
You are clearly just a monster. Or else my own gentile half is not defective, somehow?
I know, right? I’ve also never liked (as much as I expected to) chicken-and-dumplings, the goyishe’s pale simulacrum of matzoh ball soup. It perplexes me always. It sounds so good: beautiful homemade chicken soup thick with vegetables and with little starch-bombs floating in it, soaking up all that gorgeous golden flavor.
[eta: But I bet if I made it at home, from this perfect guide, I would LOVE matzoh ball soup. Maybe this is the spring to try it.]
Yeah, I’ve had some amazing chicken and dumplings. I am not super fond of matzo ball texture. It’s a little…brainy. But weak chicken soup in general is pretty much the worst. But boiling chicken all day? Yes please!
The key to delicious chicken and dumplings is it has to be stew made from fresh, homemade stock, not runny old soup, and it helps immensely if the dumplings are seasoned. I like cracked pepper and thyme in my dumplings.
Hey I just figured out what to make for dinner.
You could always try chicken mole with masa dumplings. Of the “soups with lumps of carbs” options, it’s pretty much the best one I’ve come across…(I’ve done yellow and green mole and both are excellent, red would probably also be awesome).
You’re allowed to make the matzo ball soup? How are you allowed to make the matzo ball soup? Aunt Gudrun makes the matzo ball soup.
Aunt Flo makes the brisket.
Aunt Glenda hosts – Aunt Glenda always hosts, do you have the chutzpah to think that would ever change?
(She has her husband make the chopped liver, ever since Grandmama died. Never before then, because even at 87 she wouldn’t dream of not tottering around in her heels chopping and mixing her own perfect chopped liver.)
(Did you ever in her life see Grandmama barefoot? She stepped out of her heels only to slide her feet into bed, then put them right back on in the morning.)
And since you’re the schmuck who didn’t reply to the invite email until after everyone else, you’re the one bringing the broccoli kugel, EVEN THOUGH you have to drive an hour in rush hour traffic to get there before Elijah, after driving half an hour through rush hour traffic to get home & pick up said kugel & your son (hopefully remembering whatever thing they made in religious school this year – personalized afikomen cover, perhaps, or construction paper seder plate.)
(Do not forget the personalized afikomen cover!)
So you’ll bring the broccoli kugel, and it’ll be cold and soggy by the time it’s served, and everyone will devour the matzo ball soup and the brisket and Aunt Dede’s salad, and barely pick at the polite portion of kugel, and you’ll know that you, of course, have failed.
Even if you bring the afikomen cover. You will always fail.
This was awesome-a million thumbs up!
Also 100% true (she sighed, mournfully.)
Just hit the Manishewitz a little harder. 4 glasses is a MINIMUM. Let me be clear: a MINIMUM.
This year my end of the table snagged the blackberry flavor! SCORE. *glug, glug*
FUCKIN HELL YEAH!
Post-Seder update:
Forgot the religious school whatever-it-was.
Aunt Gudrun was visiting a grandkid or something, so someone else made the soup. 🙁
The brisket was great.
The chopped liver was great.
My broccoli kugel? KILLED IT. People clamored. They went back for more. They ate the whole thing.
(And now I’ll be broccoli kugel person for the rest of my life. Like with Aunt Betty’s potatoes, people will try to recreate it after my death, too, and it won’t quite work out the same, and in this way – hopefully, not only in this way – will I obtain immortality.)
I don’t have a seder to go to so I’m just going to drink a bottle of wine by myself and attempt to teach my roomie the words to Chad Gadya. That’s almost as good, right?
“It’s not cheating to use a mix if you use the same brand that every woman in your family has used for the last century.” I need this cross-stitched onto a sampler.
Since my family was mixed-faith and I’ve been in school since the late Paleozoic, I am a veteran of mostly institutional Hillel seders with plastic plates and bowls. This year I made my own charoset for the first time and I am really happy with myself that I could make something so nice. I can’t find beet horseradish in this dumb town though.
Chag sameach, all! Matzo is terrible unless you’re drowning it in delicious things by making chocolate-toffee covered matzo crack. MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM.
Know what is even worse than regular matzo? Gluten-free matzo. SO BAD. Even waiting for the damn stuff to rise, back in the day, wouldn’t have helped.
IT IS SO BAD. I can’t emphasize this enough. (At least, I couldn’t emphasize it enough last year, when my sister made attempt upon attempt to foist some of her supply on us.)
(What I meant to say, before I got sidetracked, is that this sounds like a good reason to let Aunt Glenda foist leftover matzo on me this evening. But none of the GF stuff, just the normal.)
haha, look at this gmail conversation I just had with my dad:
Dad: you having a sedar?
me: wasn’t planning on it
I’ll probably make some of that toffee chocolate matzo though!
Dad: we’ve got plenty of matzo, if you want, we can ship it up
i bought a box.
then another box, because it was “handmade” or whatever
then safeway had one of those “buy 5 pounds for $5” deals
and you know what happens next!
For context, I live about 1000 miles away and in a different country. DADS. Especially JEWISH DADS.
Almond butter, banana, and honey sandwiches on matzo!! It’s the only thing that makes Pesach bearable for me!
This warmed my heart. Love to you fellow Toastie Jewesses and Jewess-lovers.
Hi, important question.
I have never in my life boiled the matzoh balls in a separate pot of water. I have always just put them directly into the soup pot, because one fewer pot. I don’t like doing dishes.
is this bad? am I missing out on something by doing it this way??
(I always always make it from the mix. whichever mix is on sale at the supermarket. I feel this is truest to my roots.)
No, man! I was actually going to post about that—I mean, what kind of heathen boils the balls in a separate pot? The matzo balls need to soak up all the delicious flavor of the broth, and in turn release their celery-salt goodness and olive-oil-delight into the broth to make it that much more rich. Separate pot indeed! *hmph*