![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Mortar on bread of affliction
Apr. 6th, 2010 01:21 pmBoth Christianity and Judaism specialize in making you a bit miserable over this time of year, but I think Judaism takes the gold medal for it.
During Lent, you're supposed to give something up as a test of your resolve for 40 days after engorging yourself the day before it - chocolate and other niceties are common. I can't recall any time that I've actually done this, but giving up pancakes would seem quite wise and indeed attractive, if you overdo it the previous Tuesday. If you're observing Passover, though, your choices are far more limited - during this time you're meant to avoid things with any sort of leavening in them, or anything that could reportedly be mistaken for bread, such as rice and beans (whoever made these rules up obviously failed his bread identification exams quite badly). Whitney managed this for a week, and I'm very impressed that anyone can go that long without so many things that I'd consider fairly basic parts of what you're meant to eat as a human being.
Matzos, which doesn't/don't has/have a very satisfactory transliteration, are the staple at this time, but simply being the blandest thing in the world next to plasterboard isn't enough - they have to be prepared in a special way to qualify as kosher as well. When we lived in the flat owned by my parents in Scotland, we ordered these from somewhere in Manchester and left the remains behind when we moved - my dad then ate them, thinking that they were just really bad crackers. Naturally there have been desperate attempts to make this stuff slightly less depressing, one of which is a delightful compound called charoset, depicted in this photo I stole from a friend's Facebook. It's meant to look awful but taste great, and having experienced it myself I can tell you that it fulfils exactly half of these criteria. Perhaps it's just because I didn't grow up getting accustomed to foods intended to symbolically resemble grouting compound.
There are more successful ways to get this stuff palatable, though - matzoh ball soup as prepared by Whitney is something that I'd honestly choose to have at any time, and soaking them in soup saturates them with enough moisture to be nice and disguised. And in the middle of the week she managed a lasagne with it instead of pasta (a further casualty of the vaguely-white-things ban) and having been baked among cheese and tomato it had taken on a pliable enough texture to be unrecognizable. If Italy had just been a little closer to Egypt, then I think that they would have had a much better time.
During Lent, you're supposed to give something up as a test of your resolve for 40 days after engorging yourself the day before it - chocolate and other niceties are common. I can't recall any time that I've actually done this, but giving up pancakes would seem quite wise and indeed attractive, if you overdo it the previous Tuesday. If you're observing Passover, though, your choices are far more limited - during this time you're meant to avoid things with any sort of leavening in them, or anything that could reportedly be mistaken for bread, such as rice and beans (whoever made these rules up obviously failed his bread identification exams quite badly). Whitney managed this for a week, and I'm very impressed that anyone can go that long without so many things that I'd consider fairly basic parts of what you're meant to eat as a human being.
Matzos, which doesn't/don't has/have a very satisfactory transliteration, are the staple at this time, but simply being the blandest thing in the world next to plasterboard isn't enough - they have to be prepared in a special way to qualify as kosher as well. When we lived in the flat owned by my parents in Scotland, we ordered these from somewhere in Manchester and left the remains behind when we moved - my dad then ate them, thinking that they were just really bad crackers. Naturally there have been desperate attempts to make this stuff slightly less depressing, one of which is a delightful compound called charoset, depicted in this photo I stole from a friend's Facebook. It's meant to look awful but taste great, and having experienced it myself I can tell you that it fulfils exactly half of these criteria. Perhaps it's just because I didn't grow up getting accustomed to foods intended to symbolically resemble grouting compound.
There are more successful ways to get this stuff palatable, though - matzoh ball soup as prepared by Whitney is something that I'd honestly choose to have at any time, and soaking them in soup saturates them with enough moisture to be nice and disguised. And in the middle of the week she managed a lasagne with it instead of pasta (a further casualty of the vaguely-white-things ban) and having been baked among cheese and tomato it had taken on a pliable enough texture to be unrecognizable. If Italy had just been a little closer to Egypt, then I think that they would have had a much better time.
