Passover—The Feast of Unleavened Bread, part 2

Passover is a long holiday—eight days, to be exact—and so I have returned to complete my task. When last we met, I discussed the traditional table items for a passover meal; in this, the second part of my little discussion of Jewish passover tradition, I shall take on the passover meal itself, and elaborate on some of the varieties of food found in the Steampunk era. It will begin, with my apologies, in a somewhat scholarly manner, examining the sources I have used to create this pair of articles; I shall quickly proceed to a lesson on the origins of the dietary restrictions surrounding Passover, and finish with a discussion of dishes typical to a seder in the age of steam. As of this time, I have not prepared many of the dishes in my usual manner, and as such will present recipes from the primary sources without editing; it is a goal, however, to prepare some of them for my more typical posting style shortly. (Kosher for Passover food goes on sale after passover is over...)

Passover—The Feast of Unleavened Bread, part 1

Jews making a Passover sacrifice; represented
in a 15th-century art piece.
(Wikimedia Commons)

Holidays sneak up on you, if you're not careful. In Christian tradition, they're mostly predictable; after all, our modern calendar is a Christian one, and therefore Easter is somewhat more predictable (or at least marked on more calendars.) Being (culturally) a Jew, I am not much on Easter celebrations, but I do celebrate passover with my family every year. Passover has a varying date, much more variable than Easter (though the dates are somewhat linked,) as the Jewish calendar is a lunar cycle-based calendar and doesn't always match up quite so nicely with the Gregorian calendar that most countries use to mark their time.

Passover is  holiday with great cultural significance for Jews. Simply, it is a commemoration of the flight of the Jews from slavery in Egypt sometime between 1550 and 1203 BCE. (These dates are cited on Wikipedia, and represent such a vast time period that most estimates are encompassed.) As a festival celebrating freedom, however, Passover contains much more than just a simple remembrance. Primary amongst these traditions is a meal rich with symbolism, possibly the most symbolic feast of any in Jewish canon; many holidays in Judaism have associated foods—I have previously discussed the use of oil during Hanukkah—but Passover is somewhat unique in that it has foods that are inherently part of the celebration of the holiday. (Think of it thus: Most holidays in Judaism have foods associated with them in the way that a nice big ham is associated with Easter dinner: It's mostly to do with tradition, and less to do with the actual religious aspect of the holiday—though there are notable exceptions—; Passover's foods are more like the wafers and wine involved in communion: they are actively part of the holiday's basic meaning.)

A 19th-century illustration of Ukranian Jews at a seder.
(Wikimedia Commons)

The Torah (the Jewish bible) says in Exodus 12:14-17:

And this day shall become a memorial for you, and you shall observe it as a festival for the lord, for your generations, as an eternal decree shall you observe it. For seven days you shall eat unleavened bread, but on the first day you shall remove the leaven from your homes ... you shall guard the unleavened bread, because on this very day I will take you out of the land of Egypt; you shall observe this day for your generations as an eternal decree.

Biblically, we are commanded about our food choices for the holiday—but the food traditions do not stop with unleavened bread, and the meanings are manifold.

So what are these foods? What are the meanings? Read on.

Colcannon, Champ, and the Potato

Sometimes, the best things in life are the simplest. A delightful meal with friends, a beautiful snowstorm, the sunset at the end of a summer's day, or the potato.

Seriously—the potato is simply wonderful, useful in a variety of manners, able to be prepared into any number of dishes—from appetizer to dessert—in any number of ways. Think of the pervasiveness of the potato: we eat them in myriad manners, from potato breads and biscuits to chips (crisps) and fries (chips.) We bake them, roast them, boil them, cook them sous vide, sauté them, simmer them, and make them into confit; we smash them, eat them whole, peel them, save the skins and serve with bacon and sour cream, and cover them in mayonnaise or hot bacon dressing. I use potatoes to thicken the occasional item, like my garlic sauce, and can put them in soups for a similar effect—not to mention the ever-popular loaded potato soup, and their presence in chowders.

A Culinary Commentary: Utilization

The Buffalo Hunt
From Native Americans

There's an old story—perhaps you learned it in grade school—saying that the Native Americans used every part of the buffalo when they killed it. This story is meant to highlight the decadence and wastefulness of Western culture, in contrast to the noble, in-touch-with-nature Natives. Besides its obviously orientalist trappings and its exclusion of non-plains tribes (I don't think the Mi'qmak, Ojibwe, or Potawatomi were hunting buffalo in the woods and northern lakes,) it is also a patently disingenuous statement: Classical Western Cuisine contains hundreds of uses for many parts of pretty much every edible animal.

Service Amounts

One of the main challenges of non-plated service (i.e. family-style or carved items) is determining just how much of a given dish to make and present. When you're serving individual steaks, it's obviously simple—10 people get 10 steaks—for our purposes nobody is vegetarian in the group—, but when you have a soup served in a tureen to a table, how much to make—and how to offer a variety of items—becomes more difficult.

So, I present to you today, from the Hand-Book of Practical Cookery (1868), "the following table [which] shows how many dishes of each kind are to be served at dinner to a certain number of persons:"