This summer, I found myself between an aisle of pan-Asian foods and shelves of Tex-Mex trying to recount the story of Passover to a salesclerk at Safeway. I needed matzo for breakfast, because I refuse to eat cereal as the most important meal of the day, and I know how to whip up matzo brei in less than 10 minutes.
Matzo brei is essentially Jewish French toast—you break up the unleavened bread, soak it in hot water, drain it, and fry it with eggs. My nana taught me how to make the breakfast food when I was little, and she would serve it to my cousins and me even when it wasn’t Passover. From scratch, it’s easier to make than pancakes, and when I’m short for time and still want a hot breakfast, matzo brei is a nice alternative to scrambled eggs.
I didn’t explain all this to the Safeway salesclerk this summer, but I did ask him where the matzo was, and I received a blank stare in return. After stumbling though various descriptions—“Matzo is like a big, flat cracker with burnt dents in it”—he realized what I was talking about and pointed me in the direction of the ethnic food isles. When we couldn’t find any matzo, he apologized and told me Safeway only stocks it during Passover.
Despite the occasional setback in my quest for ingredients, I’ve done an oddly large amount of Jewish cooking in college. As a Cashew (the unofficial term for us Catholic Jews), I celebrate Christmas and Easter back home with my mom’s side of the family. But Jewish holidays seem to happen every other week, and with Georgetown’s calendar, we’re usually on campus for the celebrations.
While I don’t go to temple or even Georgetown’s Shabbat, a group of us Cashews (and quarter-Jews, and non-Jews who just like Jewish cooking) get together every once and a while to celebrate the holidays. Since freshman year, I’ve been invited to impromptu Seders where the Manischewitz is usually swapped out for Franzia.
That first year, I showed up to a Village A apartment filled with the delicious smell of matzo ball soup. Packed on chairs and couches, people were about to dig into their haroset when I asked where the Haggadahs were. Another Cashew realized we needed the books to read our way through the Passover meal, and we ran to Lau to see if the Woodstock Theological Library would lend us one for the night.
Last year, a Christian friend who attended our little Seder in Nevils expressed that he was uncomfortable with the unorthodoxy of it all. Who were we to host the dinner celebration four days late and read the Passover story from an iPad Haggadah app?
If unorthodoxy is a sin, though, then my family’s actual Seders are guilty as well. We skip whole chunks of the Haggadah’s prayers so we can get to the meal and crazy cousins knock over furniture as they race around the house trying to find the afikoman. It matters less that traditions are followed to a tee, and more that they bring us together.
So when I had my roommate grab apples from Leo’s for Rosh Hashanah last week, I didn’t feel bad. Cut up and served with the last of the honey from our tea shelf, it was the thought that counted.
Celebrating any holiday out of a dorm kitchen is hard. For Thanksgiving last year, a few fellow Californians and I managed to cook an Andre-basted turkey out of a minuscule oven. Last week, the matzo balls I made soaked up almost all of the broth in the pot, but they were still delicious, and no one cared if seconds were served without soup.
Even dorm-inspired unorthodox meals are a reason to celebrate, so long as you’re not committing outright blasphemy—Safeway finally brought its matzo back this week in a large food display for Yom Kippur, a fasting holiday.
