How is this night different from all others?

April 8, 2020

I love Passover. I love it more than Channukah and Rosh Hashanah and Christmas and Diwali and my birthday and the various anniversaries of lovely things that have happened to me. I hate Zoom, though I am getting used to it. Which is to say that no one is less excited than I am to do my favourite thing on my most hated platform. Tonight and tomorrow evening, Jews all over the world will prepare small iterations of our large meals and pour out glasses of wine for those with whom we are confined, and then we will log on to connect with our families. My heart is breaking today for all the things that won’t happen tonight—my father won’t hide an afikoman for my children to find; I won’t switch seats to go gossip with my sister in law; a group of us will not break off towards the end of the night to go sing all of the songs we learned in Hebrew School as we wash the dishes dirtied by a large gathering.

There is the possibility that I am being slightly dramatic. That as the pandemic death rates climb, when millions in our country have found themselves suddenly in deep struggle, when the whole world is being careful, so careful, to help each other live longer, that maybe, just maybe, a remote seder is not that big a deal. It’s a useful place for me to put my grief today, though.

Each year we read in the Hagaddah, the text used to organize the rituals and meal of Passover, that we are meant to imagine the exodus as if we have lived it, as if we were personally liberated from the Egypts of our own experience into Freedom. This year, the metaphors are too rife, but also too mixed to make sense of. We are all collectively Jews attempting an escape from the Egypt of this pandemic to the freedom of a descending curve into wellness; and yet are we not also Egyptians, trying to survive a plague?

This would have been my third year hosting our family seder, a responsibility passed down from my grandmother to my mother to me, to invite the hungry amongst us to come and eat. My mother still cooks the bulk of our meal, and has just dropped off brisket, chicken soup, cnaidlach (matzah balls) and gefilte fish on our stoop. I, in turn, handed her a package of the one thing I could think of to add to the meal: matzah crack.

Matzah crack is chocolate and caramel covered matzah; you slather on toffee, then chocolate chips, and let it cool and harden in to the most delicious thing you can put in your mouth. It’s simple and addictive, hence the name, which necessitated me explaining the Opioid epidemic to my six year olds this afternoon as we made it. It is not an age old tradition in the Jewish pantheon of cooking—but it is a recent addition, with a North American diasporic flare to it. Although I remember eating it as a child, I don’t remember my mother cooking it, and she told me to just google the recipe when I asked her, and so I have.

At the seder itself, it offers a nice alternative to the fluffy sponge cakes made with no flour and every egg in the house, or the coconut macaroons (bearing no resemblance to any macaron ever) that come in waxy, cylindrical containers. But really, it’s Passover pastiche, the thing you do to tart up the matzah when you can’t face eating another carb that doesn’t contain yeast. Passover lasts eight days, during which Jews are meant to eschew any food made with leavening products. Matzah crack is how we make the best of it. It’s cousin, Matzei brei, a valiant attempt at making matzah intro French toast, is a classic weekend breakfast treat. It does well to follow matzah pizza, a savoury quotidian delicacy, which you must eat for lunch at least twice during Passover.

For me, this year, matzah crack represents the possibility of creative play, of quirky digression away from the gravitas of the Passover story and its attendant heavy proteins. Which is to say that in a year where the whole shebang of the stuckedness of slavery and the promise of freedom in uncharted territory feels too close to home, I was happy not to also be braising meat and stewing soup. Matzah crack cooks up quick, you can pick at little bits of the process, tasting the caramel as it cools, passing pieces of matzah around to have the first bite of the Passover season, sneaking a few chocolate chips as they make their way to melt atop the hot caramel.

How is this night different from other nights? Well, for one, I didn’t have to spend last night dragging all of the chairs in my house to the dining room, or vacuuming thoroughly, or setting a table for twenty. Instead, I lingered over bedtime stories, showing my kids the page of the Haggadah that contains the four questions, which they will sing tomorrow into the webcam. We practiced singing Let My People Go, which we taught them on a hike in a secluded field last weekend, when we ventured out for our daily, pandemic-era constitutional. Then I packaged up my matzah crack and walked around my neighbourhood surprising my friends with treats, leaving aluminum foil packages on their stoops and then texting them to go see what awaited them outside.

Ingredients
1 cup of butter
1 cup of packed brown sugar
4-5 pieces of matzah (any kind you like)
12 oz of chocolate chips
Handful of nuts
Pinch of sea salt for garnish (as preferred)

Preparation: Preheat oven to 350ºF. Line an oven tray with aluminum foil so that every bit is covered; make it go over the sides. Then line with parchment, and place 4-5 pieces of matzah atop it. Don’t worry if the matzah breaks, the caramel will hold it together

Caramel: Get the butter and sugar into a fairly substantial saucepan, and heat on Medium. Stir or whisk the mixture pretty regularly until it begins to boil, then whisk constantly for about 3 minutes until the mixture becomes quite sticky. Quickly pour the caramel atop the matzah, and spread it our evenly with a spatula. Stick it in the oven for 8-10 minutes, until the caramel is really bubbly but not burnt.

Chocolate: Toss the chocolate chips evenly across the surface. Wait 3-5 minutes for the chocolate to melt, then spread it evenly with a spatula.

Cool it: Stick the pan in the fridge for 45 minutes, or until it cools. Try to remember to grab it after that, or it will get a bit hard to cut. Cut it in any way you like; it breaks really nicely into attractive pieces if you want to eschew a knife completely. Serve and enjoy!

Rachel Berger is an Associate Professor of South Asian History at Concordia University. She has studied bodies and their desires for quite awhile, with a recent focus on historicizing the ephemeralities of food, its preparation, and its dissemination. She also likes to opine about parenthood, queer life, pop culture and other things. Find her on Medium, Instagram @rachel_of_montreal, or Twitter @slantgirl.