Matzo Ball Memories

[Sunday Scribblings this week asked us to write about our own personal Time Machine.]


It is the first of March and even though Passover isn't until April this year, I'm already starting my plans. We'll figure out who can come, and start counting dishes and chairs to make sure we have enough. I'll start making lists of the various tasks that need to be done (and by when). And I'll start the menu.

Some menu items are optional; the vegetable and potato change, and although I always make chicken, I use different recipes from year to year. But there are some things that don't change a bit. One thing that doesn't change is the chicken soup with matzo balls.

The chicken soup is my own recipe, based on a couple of recipes from books, memories of my dad making soup, and years of my own experience. It is a labor of love and it is all me. But the matzo balls are made from the recipe on the side of the Manischewitz Matzo Meal box. That's how my dad made them, and I've clipped the side of the box to keep because they keep coming up with "healthier" versions and I'm afraid one day the old recipe won't be there any more.

As I eat one of the resulting dumplings, I eat history. I eat my own history. I eat the same matzo balls I have made since Chelle and I hosted our first Passover in the 1980's. The first year was just the two of us plus her sister; the next year we had a total of 6 people. I think the biggest year (so far) was about 15 people. There is almost always a conversation (or a friendly argument) over the perfect consistency of matzo balls. "Do you prefer floaters or sinkers?"

I eat the matzo balls I had as a girl whenever my dad made them. He showed me how to keep them fluffy, by handling them as little as possible as they go into the boiling water. Those were my standard. Fluffy, light ones some people have nicknamed floaters.

My parents didn’t often make Passover dinner at home. We usually drove into St. Louis to Sammy and Rena's. Sammy had been my dad's roommate back when they were doing their medical residencies. Sammy presided over the Seder. Rena presided over the kitchen. Rena's matzo balls were sinkers. They were more substantial, more solid. We couldn't eat as many of them. But every year when I eat matzo balls at my own Seder, I also taste Rena's.

I never met my dad's mother; she died before I was born. But somehow I know I taste her matzo balls too, when I eat mine. And her mother's too.

The entire Passover experience is filled with symbolism, the things we eat representing our history. The matzo represents the unleavened bread that Moses and Aaron and Miriam ate in the desert. Jews all over the world eat matzo to remember history and take a place in that history.

I do the same. I eat the matzo and remember my own history, the history of my family, and the history of a people. And it doesn't hurt a bit that chicken soup and matzo balls are mighty tasty!