Some Ideas for an Italian
Passover.
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BEYOND
BRISKET: A SEPHARDIC PASSOVER
A
chef with a passion for travel brings Mediterranean flavors to her holiday
table.
Los
Angeles Times
By
Evan Kleiman
Special
to The Times
March
31, 2004
Growing up in Los Angeles as an only child of a single parent — my mom — I experienced holidays as a fusion of our tiny family and the huge extended family my mom constantly gathered around us. When spring rolled around, Passover was celebrated at our house or my aunt's with a crowd of nearly 30, an eclectic mix of secular and observant Jews, nearly all of Ashkenazic background.
The table was covered with plates of gefilte fish, bowls of chicken soup with matzo balls, brisket — the usual suspects. As I grew older and what would become a lifelong fascination with cookbooks began to take hold of me, I wanted to participate.
In Gourmet magazine I found a recipe for matzo balls graced with pretty flecks of parsley and a hint of freshly grated nutmeg. I was about 15, they were as light as air and I never lived it down. Oy — the girl who thinks she can learn to cook Jewish from Gourmet!
But my personalization of the holiday began in earnest after I traveled to Italy the first few times in the early 1970s. When I was 18, I happened to be there during the holiday and was nearly snatched off the street by a kind, very cosmopolitan Florentine woman, who took me home to a slightly run-down urban palazzo straight out of "The Garden of the Finzi-Continis." She kicked off her stylish heels, stepped into her cooking slippers, tied an apron around my waist and then her own. I became her assistant in the preparation of the Seder.
I was fascinated with the food: Italian, but with the twists necessary to adhere to the prohibition against using flour during Passover (or even having it in the kitchen), a real challenge in a country whose culinary mainstays are pasta and bread.
This elegant woman forever changed the way I thought about the holiday. Rather than matzo balls, there were broken matzos floating in broth with lots of spring herbs; a beaten egg enriched with a tablespoon of matzo meal was stirred into hot broth, as if for stracciatella, the famous soup of "little rags," normally made with eggs and Parmesan cheese. Succulent spring artichokes were braised with a little vinegar and sugar and abundant olive oil for that familiar Jewish sweet-and-sour taste.
The revelation of the meal was the fish course. In place of the small plate of gefilte fish with the obligatory carrot coin placed atop each serving was pesce in carpione, a bit of fried fish lifted out of a piquant marinade in which it had been soaking for a day or two and topped with caramelized onions, a dish even a teenager could love.
'Passover pasta'
The realization that other cultures celebrated this central holiday with different dishes than the ones familiar to me opened up my world. I began to buy cookbooks in a bookstore in the Jewish ghetto in Rome; my purchases quickly became a collection that I'd refer to every holiday. One year I even tried "Passover pasta," (sfoglietti per Pesach). Sheets of fresh pasta went right from the rollers to a baking sheet in the oven (before they had time to rise), where they bubbled and turned crisp and golden. They were used in pasta dishes or soups. Although the pasta certainly had flour, it was "kosher" flour. A rationalization? Perhaps. But it afforded some Italians who weren't very observant a way to enjoy pasta in some form during the holiday.
Then Edda Servi Machlin's "The Classic Cuisine of the Italian Jews" was published, and I was in heaven. More fodder to play with and introduce to the table, accompanied by wry comments from the crowd. "When do I get my brisket back?" my mom still says every year.
[...Klienman goes on to describe dishes from Turkey, Iran, Middle East, North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean ...]
Beyond
brisket: a Sephardic Passover
http://www.latimes.com/features/food
/la-fo-passover31mar31,1,5228335,print.story?coll=la-headlines-food