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PESACH FOODS

One of my fondest and earliest memories of Pesach is eating matzo smeared with chicken fat for breakfast. Cholesterol heaven! In our home, when I was a small child there were no dairy products present in the house for the entire Pesach holiday. We ate chicken, meat, matzo and potatoes, with carrots thrown in for variety, all eight days of Pesach. (Remember that I did not live in Israel during my youth.) I also had walnuts and almonds to eat, but basically my friends and I used the nuts to play with - a sort of Pesach game of marbles. My mother baked some Pesach cakes with potato starch that were made of sugar, eggs and air and that, like the matzo that we ate, did not quite rise to the occasion. When I was about eight years old, certain dairy products suddenly made their appearance in our home. They were shipped to us in Chicago from a kosher dairy in St. Louis, MO. As a special favor because of a distant family connection that we had with the family that owned the dairy, we now had cream cheese, sour cream and cottage cheese for the first time in our home on Pesach. My mother reveled in the new additions to the Pesach menu, but my father and I viewed the matter with great suspicion. After all, as any food critic will tell you, cream cheese on matzo is a weak competitor to chicken fat on matzo. And did our grandparents in Lithuania ever eat cream cheese on Pesach? But I became accustomed to the dairy products and to all of the many other additions to our Pesach pantry and menu over the past decades of my life. I love all of the new Pesach food products, but I must admit that I swallow them with a slight pang of guilt. And to my silent dismay, chicken fat has disappeared completely from our Pesach table fare.

I was reminded of all of this last week during a short visit to Johannesburg, South Africa. A local super market - really a hyper market, the place is simply enormous - was having a "launch" (grand opening) of its Pesach food section The Chief Rabbi of South Africa no less was scheduled to launch the "launch" and I was told that many hundreds of anxious customers would attend to snap up the precious foods for their Pesach tables. As a privileged guest I was allowed to view the Pesach section before the "launch" was official. I was amazed and heartened to see the enormous variety of foods, manufactured on four continents of the globe that is available for Pesach. It seems that the only item not yet made kosher for Pesach is bread itself. I was especially impressed by the wine section (no pun intended.) The finest wines of Israel, France, South Africa, Chile, Spain, Italy, United States and Australia were on display. In my youth, the only Pesach wine was Malaga or Concord, laden with enormous amounts of sugar and after the second cup of wine on the Seder night, one's legs were made of lead and one's stomach and head were merrily churning. Who knew of merlot or chardonnay, of dry and semi-dry wines? But, we've come a long way, baby, haven't we?

The Pesach market is enormous for food producers. Ironically enough, the variety of Pesach products sold here in Israel is more limited than in the Diaspora - though nonetheless large. Supermarket chains see to it that their stores have an enormous Pesach food section beginning some five weeks before Pesach. Even though many thousands of Jews go to hotels for Pesach, still the demand for Pesach food products continues to grow from year to year. And the kosher hotels and tour operators themselves consume an enormous amount of Pesach foods. The Pesach food market is not limited to the traditional Jewish companies that have been marketing Pesach foods for many decades. Today it includes many giant general food manufacturers that have sought to capitalize on the Jewish appetite during the Pesach season. The market is judged to be worth many tens of millions of dollars if not even greater than that. The growth of the observant Orthodox community, combined with a greater degree of financial affluence than was known in previous times, has driven the market to produce all sorts of "new" Pesach products every year. So, in effect, the traditional stereotypical Jewish mother lives on within us for Pesach, pushing us to buy every food product in sight whether we really need it or not. But Pesach is a time of Jewish joy, so why not splurge a little on our food for the holiday?

Berel Wein