Pesach

For those enjoying the season of Pesach, maybe you shouldn't read this.
As a child with a jewish father and italian mother who cooked jewish food with her nose in the air, my father did the Pesach cooking. We made Pesach via food.
He ordered 10 lbs of ground whitefish and pike with ground onions included from Harold's Fish store.
Then a grocery list for me...Streits matzah, not the egg kind, eggs noodles, matzah meal, chrain, eggs, chicken for soup. Macaroons until you never wanted to look at a cocaonut again.
No one knew from gebroks.
My father taught me a trick I never heard anywhere in making gefilte fish, so he must have learned it at home. His family was from Radomsk.
He ordered his fish ground with the onions already added and stuck the huge plastic bag in the freezer just until the fish become the texture of crushed ice; frozen but still pliable, more than slushy but not frozen completely. Then in went 5-6 eggs, salt and alot of pepper. In the pot went onions, onions skins, carrots, sugar and salt, brought to a boil. NO matzah meal EVER went into his fish, no meal, no crumbs, no seltzer-fish, onions and eggs. And each year he solemnly reminded me carp is the garbage fish.
The water had to be sweet and peppery. The first balls were wrapped in the remaining fish skin and lowered into the pot. When the skins were finished he quickly made handfuls of gefilte fish balls and placed those on top.
By that time the stove top had splashed fish water all around, onion juice and skins were here and there. 2 huge pots that cooked for about 3 hours and then sat to cool at room temperature to be stored in the fridge.

Chicken soup was an uninspired simmer of carrots and onions with a stick of celery. But it provided a base for matzah balls and that's all that mattered for him. What he did, to produce baseball size feathery floaters, I dont know but selzter was rarely in our house. My mother tried once and we chewed on them, but it was an intersting change...

I learned to love boiled chicken from him. Any excuse to cook it, is good enough. My Polish mother in law couldnt conceive of chicken soup without dill and got me hooked. In CH during the summer the summer camp hired a young man as the cook. Husband was 'handy man' who fixed whatever needed fixing and this young guy started soup for about 200 Thursday in restaurant cauldrons with the usual but added whole cloves of garlic and small quartered tomatoes. The first time he served soup to the adminstrators table, no one realized there was a half inch of shmaltz floating on the top. After people took a spoonful into their mouths they were scorched by blazing hot shmaltz so thick the soup couldnt even cool off. A soup fit for royalty.

I cant find a chicken with this kind of body fat anymore, so in more melancholy moments of trying to recreate the right soup I throw in a package of wings.

By the time Ida and Max showed up with a fruit salad and Manchewitz, Passover was almost ready...he had to be sure the eggs had been boiled. I swear I dont know who taught my father anything about yiddishkeit, I think he just remembered some small things from his childhood and tried passing them on. Like on shabbos he put kippahs on me and sister and we had to make the blessing on the wine and then he uncovered the presliced challah and passed us a slice. All done with my mother huffing and puffing just annoyingly enough to make us wonder what strange sorcery my father was incanting in broken hebrew over the bread and wine.

First came a fish ball covered with skin, horseradish, matzah.
Then he stuffed a piece of matzah somewhere.
He ate a small bowl of soup with a whole egg that he chopped up in the broth himself.
Then a bowl with knaidlach.
Then a piece of chicken.
Then coffee
No Haggadah ever appeared. I did not know you needed a Haggadah until I got to CH and found out Pesach was a cleansing and departure to enter a new place and space, spiritual and physical...bye to Mitzraim.

In CH balsetschvahs gathered annually for a couple of kashering classes offered by one of our rabbonim who I will not mention because he's the sweetest neshoma and I dont know if he's still alive.
He patiently listened as we asked if the floors had to scrubbed with a toothbrush and if we can use the same toothbrush to wash the walls? If the porcelain sinks were scalded did they still have to becovered with alumninum foil? Did we need to buy new carpets? new wigs? new makeup? Can we wear makeup if we eat our lipstick? and on and on as he tried to explain the difference between minhag and required pesach kashrus.
None of us did gebroks because most considered themselves ashkenaz.
HUsband brought the food inside that Shabbos V TomTov delivered since it was more than wife could drag into the kitchen. He splurged on buying oranges to make fresh squeezed juice, allowed potato starch and sugar, but nothing else in cans, bottles or prepared.
I learned how to make egg noodles from potato starch rolled and cut into slivers, charoses he made, juice he squeezed for hours into bottles and crain got grated.
Every year when people were at the bakery either watching or making their own matzahs, somehow he never made it, we got round shmurer, I think they were Bobover because they were thinner and some years lubavitch because they were cheaper but usually leaden.

We would sit down with the kids and occasionally a bochur or two, but it was usually just us. I had this strange concept in my wifely brain that since a husband sat at the head of the table he might lead me and the kids thru the haggadah...kinda help out. But husband said that each person was responsbile for getting thru the entire seder himself, drinking 4 cups himself and get to it and good luck because it had to all happen before 12 when Elijah came knockin.
The kids had no idea what to do and the wife was in not much better shape phonetically trying to say the the words the right way so crippled angels werent created and get stuck in Mitzraim. By the time I finished drinking the second cup of wine, he was opening the door for Elijah, the kids were tired and cranky in tight yontif clothes and had been told not to eat before the seder so were under the table from hunger.
Laugh you may, cry I did in total frustration...it was like being abandoned at the gates of heaven, it was every man for himself.

I have never in my life been to a seder where I knew and understood everything, completed every step and felt a sense of accomplishment in reading the entire haggadah before food was being demanded and could hope that, next year in Yerushalim.

But this year I had an early pesach in leaving my personal mitzraim...so I can still hope next week im'ertzHaShem that Yerushalim remains undivided for yidden and one day I can return.