Passover is a weird holiday to me. In theory, it's great - Jews getting together and commemorating our freedom from bondage in Egypt. We drink at least four glasses of wine, watch The Ten Commandments"" on NBC, sing - sometimes poorly - and celebrate with our closest friends and family.
However, in practice, it's also kind of tough. After enjoying two fantastic food-filled Seders - ceremonial meals - you're still left with over a week of forgoing all leavened bread, wheat, rice, corn, corn syrup and legumes. It's difficult to define a legume precisely, but the category basically consists of most beans, peas, peanuts, soy, lentils and the like. In addition, you have to rid your house physically and monetarily of the prohibited foodstuffs.
Yes, it's a lot of work and dedication - a sort of forced Atkins diet, if you will - without Pokey Stix, but we enjoy matzah pizza for late-night cravings.
Luckily, Manischewitz is our savior. This company, and other similar brands, has conjured up an expansive array of substitute ingredients to observe a kosher Passover without questioning your continued existence. Salvation comes in the form of matzah baking flour, ketchup without corn syrup and even different mixes for sub-par cakes that you eat only when you get really desperate for something sweet. Maybe the cakes aren't that bad.
So one day, my friend Amy and I decided to throw a little Pesach party and cook for all our friends. A quick note: aside from being alimentary hell, Passover is also a time when everyone decides to flex their culinary skills, get really creative and throw eating parties for no reason.
Most of our intended dinner guests were busy with other plans, i.e. earlier and more efficiently planned eating parties, but we found a few to come over and eat whatever we could muster up given our limitations.
I brought a two-pound bag of Yukon Gold potatoes and a vat of olive oil, since I had this genius idea to make obscenely large amounts of French fries. Amy's mom went shopping for the rest. We were stocked.
Our friend Steven arrived first. It was about 3 p.m. - not exactly dinnertime - and we had some time to kill until the others arrived. We shot the breeze for a while, talked about the holiday and then decided we were famished. I could've started frying the potatoes, but hand-cut fries take time, and we needed a quicker fix.
Rummaging through the pantry, we found an odd item purchased by Amy's mom. It was labeled as a box of coffee cake mix, including all the ingredients except water and a cake pan.
It looked kind of sketchy, I'll admit, but Amy proceeded to prepare it according to the directions. We sat on the couch, popped in a DVD and waited.
So there we were - Amy, Steven and I - hungry, lazy and watching ""The Big Lebowski,"" such a traditional Jewish pastime. We heard the ding of the oven and Amy jumped up, put her apron back on and went to extract the concoction from the oven like a picturesque '50s housewife.
She brought it in to the living room. We ""oohed"" and ""ahhed,"" but then we noticed something strange - is a cake supposed to drip out of the pan?
A more thorough investigation revealed that the cake was, in fact, undercooked - way, way undercooked. Like, not cooked at all.
""Ew! Amy, throw it out!"" I screamed.
""Looks fine to me,"" Steven said.
""No! You can't eat that!"" I shouted.
""I'm going to eat it, too,"" laughed Amy.
We continued to watch our movie while they consumed this literally raw cake, caused by improperly cooked matzah flour, but we didn't really have any other options. I was not about to eat raw eggs, because even though Passover is a time for restriction, it is not a time for salmonella.
Disgusted, I began to heat the oil for my civilized (and fully cooked) fries.
The raw coffee cake indulgence happened almost four years ago. But whenever Passover rolls around and I'm travelling down the kosher aisle, I smile to myself and instantly recall the cake batter oozing out of that tiny pan from all angles. The image of the batter still sends shivers down my spine. But Amy and Steven still ate it and lived to laugh about it. Good times.
Ariel is celebrating Passover in London this year, if you'd like to send her some encouragement to keep on fighting the good fight, send her an e-mail at akraut@wisc.edu.
