Beer on Pesach?

Post date: Mar 21, 2016 12:13:02 PM

19th Century Marginalia in the Chicago Haggadah

The Bible forbids the use of all leavened bread and fermented grains on Pesach. Religious Jews keep this rule stringently and even replace all their cutlery and cooking utensils, used throughout the year for preparing food, with special Pesach plates, pots and pans in order not to transgress the commandment that "chometz/ chametz" may not be eaten. Bread is obviously forbidden and Matza is eaten instead but also fermented drinks such as beer and whiskey are not consumed and may not even be kept in the home during the eight days of Pesach.

Beer-loving religious Jews would therefore need to find a "kosher for Pesach beer" with some kind of grain replacement. At least one late 19^th century American housewife seemed to have found a solution based on the recipe for wine and "mead" she scribbled in her Haggadah. Mead is an alcoholic beverage created from fermented honey and water with hops added to produce a bitter beer-like flavor.

I found this recipe written on the bottom-half of the last page, page 93, of a Haggadah scanned by "HebrewBooks", a wonderful non-profit project by the Society for the Preservation of Hebrew Books which, among its amazing collection, has an impressive list of scanned Haggadot. I stumbled upon it while digitizing Haggadot for my research. It can be found in a Haggadah edited by Chicago Rev. H. Liberman (at the time rabbis were called reverends) and published by the New York-based Hebrew bookseller Kantrowitz in 1879 (Yudlov #1530).

The earliest date of the recipe is therefore 1879 but this marginalia could have been added any time after that. What we do know is that marginalia (scribbling in the margins of a book) was a very common custom in the 18^th and 19^th century and has actually a rich literary tradition as can be seen in this blogpost. The assumption that the housewife was American is based on the obvious fact that the book was published there but also on her spelling using the American "color" as opposed to the British "colour". The late 19^th century is, by the way, the time when this American spelling became more popular than the British spelling as can be seen from the following Google n-gram: