A Passover Recipe For Non-Jewish Women Who Need Some Help In The Kitchen

Yes, this is a recipe…but it offers so much more.

Photo by Jonathan Pielmayer on Unsplash

This week many Jewish, and in my case Jew-ish, families are getting ready for their Seder dinners. This tradition is embraced equally by un-religious families, even basically non-practicing families, along with the most devout families.

Religion can play any level of importance in this meal, but it’s tradition and storytelling that lead the way. It’s a Biblical story that can be taken as literally as you wish, with the underlying event being a meal that can be as interactive and lively as your imagination can take you.

Hosting a Seder dinner is no small task.

For starters, there are lots of rules: no leavened bread, we must listen to a long story before eating, there are very specific foods to have prior to dinner, there’s a book to follow along with, you sing at the dinner table… the text is literally written into the story: “Tonight is not at all like all other nights…”

One reason I love Jewish traditions is that they revolve around food, family gathering, and story….three of my favourite things.

All the rules follow age-old traditions handed down in the story of the Passover for thousands of years. And although it’s a lot of work, it’s also a wonderful night and a very special (and practical!) way to pass on traditions to the younger generation.

I was not born Jewish nor raised Jewish.

In a certain way, I was raised in the Anglican Church, although aside from a basic knowledge of the Bible and its traditions, along with a brief stint in the church choir. It is not a tradition that has endured with me.

All this to say that when I met the man that I would later marry, I knew I was in for a whole new ride. He is Jewish but was raised in a Jew-ish family in a mostly secular and deeply hippy way. This was fortunate for me because it meant that they were very welcoming of me as a non-Jew. Secretly, I was more interested in Judaism than in any religious experience I had been raised with.

The Seder dinner is my favourite way to share and pass on the story of the Jewish people. So whether you’re Jewish, Jew-ish, or just want to try a new recipe, I’m going to share one here, along with some helpful annotations, to get you started.

As I usually do at this time of year

I emailed my Jewish mother-in-law to ask for help with a Passover recipe. She swiftly responded. The subject line of the email left no room for confusion:

carrot tzimmes

And then the body of the email got right to the point, with none of the cursory warm-ups or salutations:

Chop onions (1 medium per small bunch of carrots) into small chunks.

I quickly skimmed the email to see where this recipe might lead me and immediately realized that this was much more than just a recipe.

Yes, thankfully, my mother-in-law had shared a recipe with me for a time-honoured classic Seder item.

But she had also taken it one step further: Her recipe related everything to a new unit of measurement:

A Small Bunch of Carrots

Meaning I was to measure each of the ingredients needed in the recipe; the onions, the chicken fat, the matzah meal, the honey… in relation to how many small bunches of carrots I began with.

This left me scratching my head for a moment.

How big of a bunch? What size should the carrots in this bunch be? What about a handful? Is that the same thing?

But there were no rules and nothing to further explain her novel concept. It was vague yet genius at the same time. I was left to figure out what to do next to take this to the next level by myself.

Let’s first consider what a small bunch of carrots could bring to the table as a unit of measurement.

• Carrots are somewhat roundish, both long and lean, often dirty, and usually wrinkled.
• They’re generally wide around the middle, lean on the bottoms and tops.
• No two carrots are ever the same: they come in all different sizes, many different colours.
• Carrots show their provenance and their age, that is, their time-from-ground, by whether or not they arrive in your kitchen with their green tops still intact.

If we were going to consider anything as an entirely new unit of measurement, I would say that carrots pass the test: they are terribly honest, entirely gracious, and lovingly inclusive, all at the same time.

A Small Bunch of Carrots just says so much more than other Imperial measurement units — thou, furlong, fathom, chain, yard, acre, and fluid scruple… the colour, for starters, is impeccable.

Only this woman could figure out how to posit a whole new way of thinking in a hastily-written email recipe off the top of her head.

If you’re getting ready for Passover this week, or you’re up for learning a new recipe (and are willing to consider new ways of measurement), below is a great new one for you. The commentary is just for free.

Carrot Tzimmes

Chop onions (1 medium per small bunch of carrots) into small chunks.

When she says small, she just means not big. It will take a bit of latitudinal thinking to imagine how many onions you need, as they must relate to the exact size of your small bunch of carrots, so just take your time here.

It’s a whole new way of looking at carrots. And measuring.

Add chicken fat (I have some) or butter but not oil - 
maybe one tablespoon per small bunch of carrots.

If you don’t have chicken fat (aka schmaltz), and you have a Jewish mother-in-law, it’s likely she does. Just pop over to her place, go to the fridge, look in the furthest back, right-hand-side of the fridge, second shelf from the top. It’s there. Trust me. Otherwise, often butchers sell it, or some delis sell it. It’s not crucial, but it adds a delicious layer of flavour.

Add matzah meal or bread type flower (not cake flour) - 
maybe two tablespoons per bunch of carrots.

The words here seem plain, but actually, when you dig down, they are lovingly inclusive to all those Gentile womenfolk like me who have married Jewish men.

Her note here is also to serve as a gentle (gentile?) reminder of the most important tenant of the Passover holiday — Do Not Use Leavened Flour — because, as the Passover story tells us, the Jews had to flee persecution so hastily that they didn’t have time to wait for their bread to rise, and so now, out of tradition, there is no leavened bread on Passover. It’s important to nail the basics.

But, with love, my Jewish mother-in-law allows some latitude to use some leavened flour if it’s absolutely necessary.

Like say, you discovered the only matzoh meal in your pantry has a best-before date of 2004. But then, with a hug, she drills this point home in parentheses (not cake flour) because that would out you as accidentally using an extra leavening agent. With just small bits of flour (not quite two tablespoons per bunch), you could just squeak by. Stick with the skinny end of the bunch, note.

Add tablespoon of honey, cinnamon, small amount of nutmeg and 
lots of ginger plus salt and pepper to taste. 
Sometimes I add celery salt, never garlic even before 
my current non-garlic state.

This list of ingredients is what makes the magic of this Passover come alive. The combination of honey, cinnamon, nutmeg, and ginger, along with salt and pepper, are the cornerstones of this holiday.

And then there it is, the reminder, this isn’t just a random recipe, but one that came from my Jewish mother-in-law, with her new dietary restriction announced, no garlic in any food. What?!

Note to the reader: the ratio of garlic to a small bunch of carrots is equivalent to the ratio of garlic over zero: Impossible.

And tablespoon-plus of liquid - preferably stock but 
don't fret it if it has to be water

Here, it’s interesting to note that the liquid measurement is not indexed to carrots, but rather to fretting. Here again, inside a Jewish or JewISH mother-in-law’s recipe, we find some traits that are inescapable. Even after garlic over zero. Fretting, for all Jewish mother’s-in-laws, is what dirt is to carrots….just part of the requirement for life.

Whip separated eggs - about one-plus eggs per small bunch of carrots. 
Yolks just a bit, Whites till they are stiff.

As to the index of measurement, there’s a sort of Fibonacci Sequence at work here, where a Small Bunch of Carrots is related to a more exact measurement, the egg, which is categorized and sized according to diameter and weight, and then over-generalized as Small, Medium, Large and X-Large.

Doesn’t it plainly show how narrow the concept of egg measurement is? And just how easily it could lead to misunderstandings.

Mix in yolks, fold in whites being careful not to stir too much.

There are some life lessons buried in this line of the recipe, I feel, but to really get the point, you need to picture my Jewish mother-in-law in the kitchen with you while you are whipping the egg Whites (her capitalization) into submission.

To illustrate this, please picture her standing beside you as you work. She will definitely yell “Watch!” a few times as you attempt this, and because we are indexed to a Small Bunch of Carrots, she might need to repeat this nervous squawk a few more times.

But then, when it comes time to fold in the whites (her capitalization), please just be careful not to stir that pot too much.

Moving along.

Grease pan very much.

You got this.

Pour into baking pan so that it is at most 1" high. Top with prunes or not.

It’s nice to have some choice here, bunch or no bunch.

Cook for a very long time, and broil for last five minutes 
till slightly crispy on top and browned on bottom. 
I always cook at 350F, but you could slow cook.

Now I would posit that she really missed her last best opportunity to spell out how the unit of a Small Bunch of Carrots relates to cooking temperature. “A very long time” is highly relative, whereas a Small Bunch of Carrots is much less so. But still, a quantifiable correlation could have been made.

Alas, we are saved by an actual unit of time measurement, five minutes, accompanied by an action that is relatively easy to achieve, though not relative to any small bunches, slightly crispy.

By the way, one can add parsnips to the mix, 
though not sweet potatoes (sweet potatoes cook too fast)

Just because sweet potatoes and carrots are both orange doesn’t mean you can substitute them. Further proof of the viability of a Unit of Measurement for a Small Bunch of Carrots.

Not your mother's type of recipe, but this is what I do.

Behold the classic last statement found in all recipe requests received from any mother-in-law: How she does it.

Samantha Hodder is an audio producer and writer. If you love narrative podcasts as much as I do, subscribe to my Substack Bingeworthy.

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