More Matza, Less Affliction

We’ve survived another Pesach. Getting through a whole week with no bread, no breaded schnitzel and no Pepperidge Farm is a struggle. The only thing that can get a carb-lover through is matza, also known as the bread of affliction.

Affliction was never so delicious, especially when spread with the beet-colored horseradish that is supposed to represent the bitterness of slavery. I look forward to this stuff all year. So I was unprepared when my Pesach indulgence hit a snag: the kibbutz store has a new manager, an earnest young woman, who apparently has not got the ordering thing down pat.

I bought some matzot the weekend before the holiday. It was rather early, I thought, but they had it, so why not? Little did I know that this would be all I would see for the entire holiday. From then on there was not a crumb to be found. When the rumor would spread that there was again matzot in the store, mobs of kibbutzniks would descend on the hapless clerks. Since matza is brittle stuff, it doesn’t really lend itself to a tug of war, but a few would emerge with the prized packages while most would leave disappointed.

One young clerk tried in true Stalinist fashion to tell me, as she pried my fingers from her throat, that the problem was not the ordering, it was that people were buying too much. I was nonplussed. There is only so much matza a person, even I, can eat. So if by some miracle the clerk had been right, what were people doing with the stuff? Tiling their roofs? Playing square Frisbee? Breaking it into poker chips? My mind went back to our forefathers wandering in the desert. If we have this much trouble with the bread of affliction, what do you suppose happened to them when they ran short of manna from heaven?

The Bread of Affliction

As of this writing, we are well into the king of the Jewish marathon holidays. After the Seder, the gefilte fish and the Had Gadya, the week of Pesach is all about not eating bread. Some people find this difficult. Some even keep a secret stash of buns in the freezer.

I can be sympathetic to this. I also love bread. Have you ever noticed that bread is the one thing you can eat three times a day – breakfast, lunch and dinner – every day and not get sick of it? Still, I have no problem with Pesach because I just adore matzot. Not plain, of course, because that way it tastes like a piece of bread that someone stomped on with a dirty boot. But with the right topping it is really quite tasty.

Chopped liver, chicken, tuna or egg salad all do well as does a thin smear of butter. Of course the traditional spread is schmaltz which is something I have never tried. In fact, I find just the idea of it – rendered chicken fat – a little off-putting. But my very favorite topping is … drum roll, please … spaghetti sauce.

I love spaghetti sauce and have been know to eat it out of the jar on a spoon. Pasta for me is just an excuse to eat more sauce. Imagine my delight some years ago when I dared to put some on a piece of matza and found the result to be entirely palatable. At one time I might have been more circumspect in recommending this. But here in the Middle East they put a variety of sauces and spreads in little bowls in front of you and call them salads.