A Witch Remembers Passover – 2021

If you glance through the list of tags on my blog (the tag cloud is on the right if you’re reading this on a desktop computer; it’s after the post if you’re reading this on a phone) you’ll see I have a series of posts on Passover seders. Though my earliest post on the subject was written in 2008, I was regularly hosting seders since 1995.

2019 was the first year I hadn’t hosted a Passover in about two decades. A friend of mine had to make the meal instead. My medical issues at the time precluded me from doing the usual shopping and cooking.

Of course, last year and this year, I could not host a seder. We have to deal with an actual plague instead of reading about one.

Last year, I purchased a couple of boxes of matzoh for that seder. I purchased them in February of that year. Pro tip: If you want individual boxes of Kosher-for-Passover matzoh, get them a couple of months in advance. If you wait until the week before Passover, all you’ll find are the huge five- or ten- box packages. If you don’t keep a Kosher household (and Goddess knows that I don’t), that’s a lot of matzoh to dispose of.

I ate some of that matzoh last year, but I saved one mostly-full box in the refrigerator. Pro tip: After you’ve opened the cellophane wrapper inside a box of matzoh, keep it in the fridge if you don’t want any hungry insectoids to start munching on it.

I meant to nibble on some matzoh last Saturday (what would have been the night of the seder if I had had one), but it slipped my mind. I only got around to tasting a bit of matzoh today.

It tasted just as good as if it had been brand-new.

A joke has just leapt into your mind. It’s not a joke in Judaism. The matzoh baked by the Hebrews as they escaped the tyranny of the Pharaoh is also just as good as it was 3200 years ago. The Dead Sea scrolls are falling apart, but the matzoh survives.

Here’s hoping that next year there’ll be hot chicken soup with matzoh balls, horseradish so intense that your nostrils burn, a roast that sparks the usual debate about how well-done it should be, and millennia-old matzoh (or at least made to a millennia-old recipe) for me to share with my friends.

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