Categories
Brick Bats Reportage

Notta Lotta Matzo

Passover ends at sundown today, its eighth day. Just before the festival week of Pesach began, local stores that carry some kosher products year-round — and a few more items come early spring — began running out of unleavened bread. Again.

Must be those Christians.

Northwest Arkansas only has a few Jews, who surely are grateful for the number of stores that carry daily foods and ritual ones as well. It should be hard for them to sell out just on us.

In recent years, increasing numbers of churches hold community seders or encourage congregants to host them at home. That’s the festival dinner celebrated on either the first or second night that showcase foods (a few store-bought, many homemade) for their symbolic value. A seder for them teaches the historic and theologic beginnings of Christianity, the Jewish roots.

The Gentiles just might like the taste of matzo, too.

I enjoy store-bought matzo just enough to buy it at this time of year and perhaps one more box in the fall. I prefer making matzo at home, although traditionalists deem that unacceptable for Passover’s extra-kosher standards. Tough. Yet I need boxes of the plain crackers from stores to tide me over the entire eight days, and this year for the first time my house, Shady Hill, has run out. E-mails from friends say they have a few leftover boxes, but I’d rather do without and prove here the market demand.

It seems a contradiction that for most of this week groceries and even drug stores have displayed discount shelves loaded with extra Easter candy. Every year they overbuy, and every year I take advantage of the post-holiday surplus. This week, egg-shaped Whoppers malted milk balls caught my eye. Often available all the way to the end of the week after Easter are those bland pastel Peeps, odd, given their hype.

Too many leftover Easter treats and too little unsalted, unleavened crispy flatbreads. Maybe the country is improving its health. We’d like to think that sweets marked down 50 percent also are half the calories, but matzo genuinely is low.

If you look at their packages, top-brand Easter candies (Hershey, Cadbury, Mars) are everyday kosher with that K or a circle-U printed on the box. Even for Jews like me who do not keep kosher, we appreciate the extra steps that requires.

The taste of irony is sweet.

Print Friendly, PDF & Email