A note before beginning: Part Five addresses the preparations that accompany the unleavened breads, flatbreads, crackers, and pastries of Parts Two through Four at the festival table. These preparations are not leavened and do not need to be — they are soups, stews, spreads, dairy preparations, and beverages whose relationship to the unleavened season is one of complement rather than constraint. None of the preparations in this part requires any leavening agent of any kind, and all of them are appropriate at every level of unleavened observance without modification unless otherwise noted. They are written in the same voice and at the same level of practical specificity as the baking preparations in the preceding chapters, because a good unleavened table is only as good as everything that appears on it alongside the bread, and the preparations that accompany the bread deserve the same care and the same understanding as the bread itself.
The question I am asked most often by students preparing for their first seriously observed feast season is not about bread. It is about what to put next to the bread. This surprises some people when I describe it, because the bread is the obvious challenge — it is the thing the season’s observance directly affects, the thing that requires the most adjustment from ordinary practice, the thing around which the entire framework of this book has been constructed — and the assumption is that the bread having been solved, everything else falls into place naturally. This assumption is not wrong exactly, but it is incomplete, and the incompleteness matters in a way that becomes apparent the first time a person sits down to a festival table where the bread is excellent and the accompaniments have been treated as an afterthought.
Unleavened bread, at every level and in every form, is a more direct and more demanding eating experience than leavened bread. It has less interior complexity, less fermentation flavor, less of the yeasty richness that carries ordinary bread through a meal even when the accompaniments are modest. What it has instead is a clean, honest grain character and a surface flavor developed through heat that is genuinely good but that benefits more than leavened bread does from the contrast and complement of strong, well-made accompaniments. A plain Level 3 matzah eaten alongside a deeply flavored lamb stew is a different and better experience than either preparation would provide alone: the stew’s richness and complexity give the bread’s simplicity a context in which it registers fully, and the bread’s plainness provides a foil against which the stew’s depth is legible in a way that it would not be alongside a complicated, elaborately flavored leavened bread.
This mutual benefit — the bread improving the accompaniment and the accompaniment improving the bread — is the organizing principle of the festival table, and it is what the preparations in this chapter are designed to achieve. They are not modest or supplementary preparations. They are, in many respects, the preparations around which the bread is chosen and sized and flavored, and the baker who understands her bread well enough to choose the right accompaniment for it has understood something important about how a festival table is built.
The preparations in this chapter are organized by category rather than by occasion, though I note specific occasions and pairing recommendations throughout. We begin with the bitter herb preparations, which occupy a unique position at the Passover table as commanded accompaniments to the unleavened bread, and proceed through the lamb and meat stews, the roasted vegetable spreads, and the herb-and-oil preparations that round out the full range of what the unleavened table can offer across seven days of the feast.
On the Bitter Herbs: Theology and Practical Preparation
The commandment to eat bitter herbs alongside the unleavened bread and the lamb at the Passover is one of the most specific and most practically consequential directives of the feast calendar. Unlike the commandment to remove leaven, which requires interpretation and generates the three-level framework that this entire book is built around, the commandment to eat bitter herbs is direct in its requirement: the herbs are to be bitter, they are to be eaten at the Passover table alongside the lamb and the unleavened bread, and their purpose is commemorative — they recall the bitterness of the bondage in Egypt from which the deliverance of the Passover came.
What the commandment does not specify with equal directness is which herbs. The Hebrew word maror covers a range of bitter plants, and the Bravian tradition across its various regional communities has resolved the question of which specific plants fulfill the commandment in ways that reflect the agricultural realities of each region rather than a single national standard.
The bitterness required is genuine and unambiguous: a token scatter of mildly bitter salad greens does not fulfill the spirit of the commandment, in my reading and in the reading of most Bravian religious authorities I have consulted on the matter. The bitter herbs should be genuinely, assertively bitter — bitter enough that eating them requires a deliberate act of acceptance rather than a casual consumption — and the quantity eaten should be sufficient to be tasted and experienced rather than merely present on the table as a symbol. The feast commemorates a real bitterness, and the eating of the bitter herbs is a physical participation in the memory of that bitterness that deserves to be done with full intention.
Within these parameters, the following plants are the most commonly used across Bravia’s regional communities, and I address each with some practical guidance for the baker preparing the Passover table:
Horseradish root, freshly grated, is the bitter herb preparation most common in the interior Amphoe communities and in much of the hill country. It is emphatically, sometimes aggressively bitter and pungent, producing a heat that affects the sinuses as well as the palate, and it leaves no room for doubt that one has fulfilled the commandment. Fresh horseradish root, grated immediately before the table is set — not prepared in advance, because the volatile compounds that produce its heat and bitterness dissipate quickly once the root is cut and exposed to air — is the correct preparation. Grate it finely, accept that the process will be uncomfortable for the eyes and nose, and serve a small but genuine quantity alongside the lamb and the flatbread.
In some households, the freshly grated horseradish is combined with a small quantity of grated fresh beet, which moderates the pure bitterness slightly with a sweet earthiness and produces a preparation of deep red color that is visually striking at the Passover table. This combined preparation is associated particularly with the eastern interior communities and has been described to me by hill country students as the taste of their childhood Passover tables with a consistency and a warmth of recollection that no other preparation in this book has inspired in them.
Bitter endive, chicory, and wild chicory greens are the bitter herb preparations of the port towns and the coastal communities, where horseradish root is less commonly grown and where the tradition of the Mediterranean bitter green — established through centuries of trade contact with the southern coastal cultures and adopted into Bravian festival practice in those communities — has taken firm root. The bitter green preparation for the Passover table in the port-town tradition is made as follows: fresh endive or chicory leaves, washed and dried, are torn into rough pieces and piled on the festival plate without dressing of any kind. The bitterness of fresh endive or chicory is genuine and assertive, though different in character from horseradish — more sustained and more vegetable, less volatile and less immediate — and it fulfills the commandment in a manner that is well-attested in the Bravian religious record.
Wild bitter herbs gathered from the spring landscape — specific to those communities with the knowledge of local plants to identify them correctly — represent the most ancient layer of bitter herb practice in the Bravian tradition and are still observed in some of the older hill country communities where specific wild plants have been used for the Passover table for as many generations as anyone can document. I do not specify these plants by name in a book intended for a wide readership, because the correct identification of wild bitter plants requires knowledge and experience that cannot be conveyed through a general text, and I do not wish to encourage the gathering of plants by anyone who is not already confident in their identification. The household that has this knowledge has it from its own tradition and does not need my guidance; the household that does not have this knowledge should use the cultivated preparations above.
A note on the preparation and service of bitter herbs at the Passover table: The bitter herbs are served at the beginning of the Passover meal, before the main preparations, as part of the ritual order of the service. They are eaten with the unleavened bread — in many Bravian households, as a sandwich of sorts with a piece of the festival flatbread — and in the traditional order they are eaten before the lamb is served, so that the bitterness is experienced on its own terms before the richness of the lamb moderates it. The quantity is small but genuine: a tablespoon of freshly grated horseradish or a small handful of bitter greens per person is sufficient, and the eating should be deliberate and aware rather than casual. This is the preparation that most directly connects the feast-day table to the event being commemorated, and it deserves to be treated with the seriousness that its position in the service implies.
Recipe 41 — Bravian Lamb and Root Vegetable Stew
Level: appropriate for all observance levels
A note on this recipe: the lamb stew is the central preparation of the Passover table and of the festival week’s savory cooking, and it is the preparation that most directly earns the status of the most important accompaniment to the unleavened bread in the Bravian culinary tradition. Lamb has been the meat of the Passover since the first Passover, and the Bravian tradition maintains this association with an unselfconsciousness and a lack of qualification that I find genuinely admirable: there is no hedging about the lamb, no suggestion that another meat would do equally well, no modernization of the association into a general meat preparation. The lamb is the lamb, and it is at the center of the Passover table because the Scripture put it there and the Bravian people have kept it there.
The specific preparation I describe here — a slow-cooked stew of lamb with root vegetables in a rich braising liquid — is not the only way to serve the Passover lamb, and I want to be clear about that before the recipe begins. The roasted lamb, prepared whole or in large pieces, is equally traditional and perhaps more commonly associated with the Passover table in the hill country and the more traditional interior communities. The stew is the preparation most commonly found in the grange hall communal context and in the port-town households where the distribution and sharing of a stew among a large gathering is more practical than the service of a whole or large-piece roasted lamb. Both are correct. The recipe below is for the stew because the stew is the preparation most directly useful alongside the full range of unleavened breads described in this book, providing the moist, richly flavored braising liquid that makes a plain Level 3 flatbread extraordinary when used to scoop and carry it.
Serves 8 to 10
Ingredients:
- 3 to 4 pounds bone-in lamb shoulder, cut into large pieces — bone-in rather than boneless, because the collagen and marrow of the bones contribute enormously to the richness and body of the braising liquid and produce a stew of depth and complexity that boneless lamb simply cannot match; the bones also give the braising liquid a silkiness — a quality that coats the spoon and the palate — that is one of the defining characteristics of a well-made Bravian lamb stew
- 2 tablespoons rendered lamb fat or olive oil, for browning the meat
- 2 large onions, roughly chopped
- 4 cloves garlic, crushed but not minced — crushing rather than mincing produces a garlic flavor that is present but not sharp, because the cell damage from crushing is less complete than from mincing and the volatile compounds are released more slowly during the long braise
- 3 medium carrots, cut into large pieces approximately two inches across
- 3 medium parsnips, cut similarly
- 2 medium turnips, cut into large wedges
- 1 small celery root, peeled and cut into large pieces, if available — celery root is a flavor contributor rather than a textural element in this stew, dissolving almost completely into the braising liquid during the long cook and contributing a savory depth that is perceptible but not identifiable by most tasters as celery specifically
- 1 cup water or light broth — not a deeply flavored broth, which would compete with the flavor development of the braising lamb itself; water is in fact preferable if you do not have a genuinely light broth available
- 2 teaspoons fine salt, adjusted to taste
- 1 teaspoon coarse black pepper
- 1 teaspoon dried thyme
- 2 bay leaves
- Optional: a small handful of fresh parsley, added in the last five minutes of cooking
Method:
Season the lamb pieces generously with salt and pepper on all surfaces. Heat the fat in a wide, heavy-bottomed pot or braising vessel over medium-high heat until the fat shimmers and a small piece of meat placed in it sizzles immediately. Work in batches — do not crowd the pan — and brown the lamb pieces on all surfaces until they are deeply caramelized: not merely colored, but genuinely browned to a dark, mahogany richness on each surface. This browning step is the single most important factor in the depth of flavor of the finished stew, and it cannot be rushed or abbreviated without proportionally diminishing the result. A pale, quickly browned piece of lamb will produce a pale, thin-flavored stew. A deeply caramelized piece will produce a stew of the kind that the festival table deserves. Take the time. Brown each surface properly before turning.
As the pieces are browned, transfer them to a plate and set aside. When all pieces are browned, reduce the heat to medium and add the onions to the fat remaining in the pot. Cook the onions, stirring occasionally, until they are soft and beginning to color at their edges — ten to twelve minutes. Add the crushed garlic and cook for two minutes more.
Return the browned lamb to the pot, along with any juices that have accumulated on the plate. Add the water or light broth, the thyme, and the bay leaves. The liquid should come approximately halfway up the sides of the meat: this is a braise, not a boil, and the meat should be partially submerged rather than swimming in liquid. If your pot is wide and the liquid does not reach halfway, add additional water in small increments until it does.
Bring to a simmer over medium heat, then reduce to the lowest possible heat that maintains a gentle, intermittent bubbling — not a full simmer, but a lazy, occasional bubble that indicates the liquid is hot enough to do its work without being so agitated that the meat becomes tough from the turbulence. Cover the pot with a tight-fitting lid and cook at this gentle heat for one and a half hours.
After one and a half hours, add the carrots, parsnips, turnips, and celery root. Replace the lid and continue cooking for an additional forty-five minutes to one hour, until the lamb is completely tender — the meat should offer no resistance when pressed with a spoon and should be beginning to fall away from the bones at the joints — and the root vegetables are cooked through but still holding their shape.
Remove the bay leaves. Taste the braising liquid and adjust the seasoning: it should be well-salted, deeply savory, and rich enough to coat the back of a spoon. If the liquid tastes thin or lacks body, remove the lid and increase the heat to a moderate simmer for ten to fifteen minutes, reducing the liquid until it concentrates and the flavor deepens. This reduction step is important if the stew has produced more liquid than expected — perhaps because the lamb had a higher water content than usual — and it is the correct remedy for a braising liquid that lacks presence.
If using fresh parsley, add it now and stir through. Taste once more and adjust.
Serve in deep bowls alongside the plain or oil-enriched Level 3 flatbread of Chapter 11 or the wraps of Chapter 6. The correct way to eat this stew with unleavened bread at the festival table — and I say this as a practical instruction rather than a cultural prescription, though it is both — is to use pieces of the flatbread to scoop and carry the meat and vegetables and to mop the braising liquid from the bowl at the end. This is not inelegant eating. It is what the bread was made for.
On the Passover table specifically: For the Passover table itself, the lamb stew is served after the bitter herbs and the ceremonial portion of the service, as the main meal. Some households serve a portion of the lamb roasted rather than stewed, keeping the roasted presentation for the ceremonial significance of the Passover lamb’s traditional association with the oven or fire. Others serve entirely from the stew. Both are practiced throughout Bravia, and neither is more correct than the other from a culinary or theological standpoint. The tradition of the individual household is the appropriate guide.
Hill country variation: In the hill country communities, the root vegetables in the stew typically include dried beans that have been soaked overnight and added to the pot alongside the vegetables, which produce a heartier and more filling stew appropriate for the cooler spring temperatures of the upland communities. A cup of soaked dried beans added with the vegetables and cooked for the full vegetable cooking time produces a stew of considerably more body and a more complete protein character that needs no other accompaniment to constitute a full meal.
A note on the quantity of fat on the finished stew: Lamb shoulder is a well-fatted cut, and the surface of the finished stew will carry a layer of rendered fat that varies in quantity depending on the specific shoulder used. Some Bravian cooks skim this fat from the surface of the stew before serving, both for aesthetic reasons and to moderate the richness of the dish. Others leave it entirely, on the grounds that the fat is part of the preparation’s character and that those who prefer less of it can simply avoid dipping their bread into the fatty top layer. I belong to the latter camp in principle and the former in practice, removing approximately half the surface fat before serving and leaving the rest, which I find produces a stew that is rich without being excessive and that the bread can carry without the fat becoming the primary impression rather than the meat and vegetables and braising liquid beneath it.
Recipe 42 — Slow-Braised Poultry with Bitter Greens and Lemon
Level: appropriate for all observance levels
A note on this recipe: the poultry preparation is the festival table alternative to the lamb for those days of the feast when a lighter main preparation is desired, or for those households that are serving a large number of guests and are supplementing the lamb with an additional main course. It is also, in the port-town and coastal tradition, sometimes served as the main preparation of the Passover table itself in households that do not keep sheep and for whom lamb is a purchased rather than a household product, making the decision about which meat to center the table around partly a matter of theology and partly a matter of what is practically accessible and affordable.
The combination of braised poultry with bitter greens is a specifically coastal preparation, influenced by the Mediterranean cooking traditions that reached Bravia through its extensive maritime trade, and the addition of lemon — available in the port-town markets throughout the year through the citrus trade — is characteristic of this tradition. The bitter greens in this preparation are not the ceremonial bitter herbs of the Passover service but the culinary bitter greens — endive, chicory, or whatever bitter green is in season — that are cooked as a vegetable accompaniment to the braised bird and that provide a counterpoint to the richness of the braising liquid in the same way that the bitter herbs of the Passover service provide a counterpoint to the richness of the lamb.
Serves 6 to 8
Ingredients:
- 1 whole roasting bird — chicken or a larger fowl as available — cut into eight pieces, or an equivalent weight of bone-in poultry pieces. The skin should remain on the pieces during the braise, because the collagen in the poultry skin contributes to the body of the braising liquid and the fat beneath the skin keeps the meat moist during the extended cook; the skin can be removed before serving if preferred, but it should remain during the cooking
- 2 tablespoons olive oil
- 2 medium onions, thinly sliced
- 4 cloves garlic, crushed
- Juice of one large lemon and the peel of that lemon, cut into broad strips with the pith removed as thoroughly as possible — the pith of the lemon carries bitterness that, accumulated over the cooking time, can overwhelm the other flavors in the preparation; the zest and the juice contribute brightness and the aromatic compounds of the lemon oil without this excessive bitterness if the pith is carefully removed
- 1 cup water or light broth
- 1 teaspoon fine salt, adjusted to taste
- ½ teaspoon coarse black pepper
- 1 teaspoon dried thyme or 2 teaspoons fresh thyme, if available
- 2 heads of bitter endive or the equivalent in chicory or radicchio, cut into quarters through the root end so that the leaves hold together at the base — the cutting through the root end is important, because leaves that separate from the head during braising become soft and dispersed through the liquid rather than retaining their identity as a vegetable component; held together at the base, they braise as coherent units that are served alongside the meat as a distinct element of the plate
Method:
Season the poultry pieces with salt and pepper. Heat the olive oil in a wide, heavy braising pot over medium-high heat and brown the pieces on both sides until the skin is deep golden and the flesh beneath it shows the beginning of color at the edges — eight to ten minutes total for the browning of all pieces, working in batches. Transfer browned pieces to a plate.
Reduce the heat to medium and add the sliced onions to the fat remaining in the pot. Cook until soft and translucent, approximately eight minutes. Add the garlic and cook for two minutes. Return the browned poultry pieces to the pot, nestling them among the onions. Add the lemon juice, the lemon peel strips, the water or broth, and the thyme. Bring to a gentle simmer, cover, and cook over low heat for forty-five minutes.
After forty-five minutes, nestle the quartered endive heads among the poultry pieces. Replace the lid and continue cooking for an additional twenty minutes, until the endive is tender and beginning to collapse at its outer leaves while retaining its structure at the root end, and the poultry is completely cooked through.
Remove the lemon peel strips before serving — they have given their flavor to the braising liquid and are not pleasant to eat in quantity. Taste the liquid and adjust seasoning: it should be bright with lemon, savory from the poultry, and with a pleasant background bitterness from the endive that elevates rather than dominates the other flavors.
Serve in deep dishes alongside the soft wraps of Chapter 6 or the egg-and-flour flatbreads of Recipe 21 from Chapter 8, which are particularly well-suited to this preparation because their slight richness from the egg complements the lemon-bright braising liquid in a way that a plainer flatbread does not.
Recipe 43 — Roasted Root Vegetable Spread
Level: appropriate for all observance levels
A note on this recipe: the roasted root vegetable spread is the preparation I find most consistently useful across the full seven days of the feast, because it is infinitely variable in its specific ingredients — whatever root vegetables are in the spring pantry are the correct root vegetables for this preparation — and because it improves significantly in the days after it is made, as the roasted flavors develop and deepen in the cold room. A batch made on the first day of the feast will be notably better on the third day than it was when first prepared, and a batch made on the third day will serve well through the seventh. It is the spread of the patient baker, and patience during the feast season, when there is much to prepare and much to attend to, is always rewarded.
Makes approximately 2 cups of spread
Ingredients:
- 2 pounds mixed root vegetables — parsnip, carrot, sweet turnip, beetroot, celery root, or any combination available from the winter stores; I use whatever is in the pantry in whatever proportion it presents itself, because this is a preparation whose character benefits from variety and whose ingredient list is more a suggestion than a specification
- 4 tablespoons olive oil, divided — two tablespoons for roasting, two tablespoons for finishing the spread
- 1 teaspoon fine salt, divided
- ½ teaspoon coarse black pepper
- 4 cloves garlic, unpeeled — roasted whole alongside the vegetables and squeezed from their skins after roasting; roasted garlic is sweet and mellow where raw garlic is sharp and volatile, and the roasted version is entirely appropriate here while raw garlic would be too assertive
- Optional additions for flavor variation: a tablespoon of good honey stirred in after roasting for sweetness; a teaspoon of ground cumin roasted with the vegetables for a warmer character; fresh herbs stirred through the finished spread for brightness
Method:
Preheat the oven to hot. Cut the root vegetables into pieces approximately an inch and a half across — large enough to develop good caramelization on their surfaces without cooking through before the exterior has browned, small enough to cook fully within a reasonable roasting time. Place in a single layer on a heavy baking sheet. If the vegetables are crowded on the sheet they will steam rather than roast, and steamed vegetables do not develop the caramelization that is the entire point of this preparation: use two baking sheets if necessary to achieve a single layer.
Drizzle two tablespoons of olive oil over the vegetables, scatter half the salt and all the pepper over them, and toss to coat every piece. Add the unpeeled garlic cloves among the vegetables. Roast in the hot oven for thirty-five to forty-five minutes, turning the vegetables once at the midpoint, until they are deeply caramelized at their edges and undersides — dark golden to brown at the high points and the contact surfaces, tender and yielding throughout. The caramelization is what you are after: pale, merely tender root vegetables produce a bland spread, while properly caramelized ones produce something of considerable sweetness and depth.
Remove from the oven and allow to cool for ten minutes. Squeeze the roasted garlic from its skins into a bowl or a mortar. Add the roasted vegetables in batches and crush them — by mortar and pestle for a rough, textured spread with visible pieces; by pressing through a sieve for a smoother preparation; or by simply mashing with a fork for the rustic and immediate version that most Bravian households produce, which lies between the two in texture and requires no special equipment.
Work in the remaining two tablespoons of olive oil and the remaining salt, taste, and adjust seasoning. The spread should be well-salted, deeply savory and sweet from the caramelization, and rich enough from the olive oil to hold a slight sheen on its surface.
Stir in any optional additions at this stage. Transfer to a container, cover, and store in the cold room. Serve at room temperature — remove from the cold room thirty minutes before serving — alongside any of the crackers, flatbreads, or hand pies from Parts Two through Four. This spread is particularly good on the shortbread crackers of Recipe 24, on the plain Level 3 matzah of Recipe 15 with a drizzle of additional oil, and on the twice-baked slices of Recipe 27, where its moisture softens the dry cracker slightly in a way that improves both preparations simultaneously.
On beetroot in the spread: Beetroot in the roasted spread produces a preparation of deep crimson color that is visually striking and of a sweetness somewhat greater than the other root vegetables, and it pairs particularly well with fresh soft cheese and fresh herbs. However, beetroot’s color bleeds into the other vegetables during roasting and produces a spread that is uniformly deep red regardless of the original variety mix, which some bakers find a limitation. Roasting beetroot separately on its own sheet and combining with the other vegetables in the mashing stage is the solution: the color of the combined spread will still be influenced by the beetroot but the other vegetables will retain their individual characters more fully.
Recipe 44 — Garlic Confit with Herbs and Oil
Level: appropriate for all observance levels
A note on this recipe: the garlic confit is a preparation of remarkable simplicity that produces a result of great utility at the festival table. Whole garlic cloves cooked slowly in olive oil until completely tender and sweet are one of the most versatile festival preparations available: they can be spread directly on flatbread as an accompaniment, stirred into the lamb stew of Recipe 41 to add depth, used as a base for the herb-and-oil preparations that follow this recipe, or simply set at the center of the table in their cooking oil for guests to use as they please. The oil in which the garlic has cooked is itself a useful ingredient, carrying the aromatic compounds released during the slow cooking into a deeply flavored oil that is excellent for bread dipping and for finishing the festival table’s savory preparations.
This preparation keeps remarkably well — up to a week in the cold room in a sealed container covered with enough oil to submerge the garlic completely — and is best made at the beginning of the feast season and used throughout the seven days, where it becomes a reliable and deeply flavored background resource for the festival kitchen.
Makes approximately one cup of confit garlic in oil
Ingredients:
- 3 full heads of garlic, cloves separated and peeled — the patience required to peel three heads of garlic is the primary labor of this preparation and should be approached with equanimity; some Bravian cooks soak the unpeeled cloves in warm water for fifteen minutes before peeling, which loosens the skins and speeds the process considerably, and I recommend this approach
- 1 cup good olive oil — the oil is as much a finished product of this preparation as the garlic itself, and its quality will be evident in both components; do not use oil of lesser quality than you would use for direct table service
- 3 sprigs of fresh thyme, or 1 teaspoon dried thyme if fresh is not available at this early point in the spring season
- 2 sprigs of fresh rosemary
- ½ teaspoon fine salt
- 6 whole black peppercorns
Method:
Combine all ingredients in a small, heavy-bottomed saucepan. The garlic should be submerged or nearly submerged in the oil; if the saucepan is too wide and the oil does not cover the garlic, use a smaller vessel or increase the oil quantity. Place over the lowest possible heat — the oil should barely shimmer and should produce occasional tiny bubbles around the garlic cloves, but it should not bubble steadily and should never approach a simmer. This very gentle heat is what distinguishes a confit from a fry: the garlic is being slowly poached in oil rather than fried in it, and the difference in result is substantial.
Cook at this barely-warm heat for forty-five minutes to one hour, until the garlic cloves are completely tender throughout — a clove pressed gently between two fingers should yield completely, with no firm center — and are pale golden in color. They should not be browned; browning indicates the oil was too hot and the garlic has fried rather than confited. If browning occurs at any point during cooking, remove the pan from the heat immediately and allow it to cool before continuing at a lower temperature setting.
Remove from the heat and allow to cool completely in the oil. Transfer the garlic and all of its cooking oil, including the herbs and peppercorns, to a clean jar or container. Store in the cold room with the garlic completely submerged in the oil at all times.
To serve: bring to room temperature. Place a small dish of the garlic cloves and their oil at the table alongside the festival flatbreads, with a small knife for spreading. The cloves spread effortlessly onto flatbread and melt against the tongue with a sweetness and depth that is utterly different from raw garlic and that is among the most simple and most satisfying of the festival table’s pleasures.
Recipe 45 — Fresh Herb and Oil Preparations: A Framework
A note on this recipe: the herb-and-oil preparation is not a single recipe but a framework within which a baker can compose an unlimited number of preparations from the herbs available in her spring garden or her dried herb stores, combined with good olive oil and appropriate seasoning. I present it as a framework rather than a fixed recipe because the specific herbs available at the beginning of the feast season vary considerably by region and by the progress of the spring, and a framework that the baker can apply to whatever she has is more useful than a recipe whose specific ingredients may or may not be accessible to her.
The essential structure of the herb-and-oil preparation is: fresh or dried herbs of the baker’s choosing, combined with good olive oil, seasoned with salt and perhaps with a small quantity of acid — lemon juice or apple cider vinegar — and left to macerate for at least thirty minutes before service so that the herb flavors infuse the oil. This structure can be varied almost infinitely within its basic parameters, and the following examples represent the range of what is possible rather than a definitive list.
Preparation A — Fresh Herb Oil for Immediate Service (spring garden)
When the spring garden is producing its first fresh herbs — which in the Western Reaches occurs during or just after the feast season, and in the Delta region and the southern coastal communities somewhat earlier — the fresh herb oil is the simplest and most immediate of the herb preparations.
Combine a generous handful of fresh herbs — parsley, thyme, chives, or a combination — very finely minced, with half a cup of good olive oil, a generous pinch of coarse salt, and a few drops of lemon juice if available. Stir to combine and allow to rest for thirty minutes before serving. The preparation will be bright green from the fresh herbs and brilliantly aromatic. It does not keep beyond one day, because the fresh herbs begin to discolor and lose their vibrancy within a few hours of cutting, and the preparation should be made as close to serving as possible and consumed at the meal for which it is made.
Serve in a small shallow dish with pieces of festival flatbread for dipping, or drizzle over the roasted vegetable spread of Recipe 43 immediately before serving.
Preparation B — Dried Herb and Garlic Oil for Storage (available throughout the feast week)
Where fresh herbs are not yet available at the beginning of the feast season, the dried herb preparation serves as the working herb oil of the festival kitchen and is made in a larger quantity at the beginning of the week rather than freshly for each meal.
Combine in a jar: two teaspoons dried rosemary, crumbled; one teaspoon dried thyme; half a teaspoon dried oregano; two cloves of garlic from the confit of Recipe 44, pressed through the oil and mashed to a paste; one cup good olive oil; half a teaspoon fine salt; a pinch of coarse black pepper. Stir thoroughly, cap the jar, and allow to infuse at room temperature for at least four hours before service, shaking the jar occasionally to redistribute the herbs. This preparation keeps in the cold room for the full seven days of the feast and improves in character through the first two to three days as the herbs continue to release their flavor compounds into the oil.
The dried herb oil is the preparation I set at the Stone Hearth Bakery’s festival table counter throughout the feast week: a jar of it beside the basket of flatbreads, replenished as needed, available to every customer who comes in during the feast days for whatever they have come to buy. More than once I have had a customer tell me that the oil is the best thing we make during the feast season, which I take as a comment on the quality of the oil and the herbs rather than on the baking, and which I accept as the highest compliment I could receive on behalf of a preparation that takes five minutes to assemble.
Preparation C — Roasted Garlic and Walnut Paste (a substantial spread)
This preparation moves from the light herb oils into the territory of a substantial spread, appropriate as an accompaniment to the plainer flatbreads of Chapter 11 where a richer and more filling preparation is wanted.
Combine in a mortar: six roasted garlic cloves from the confit of Recipe 44; half a cup of fresh walnuts, toasted briefly in a dry pan until fragrant and roughly crushed; two tablespoons of the garlic confit oil; half a teaspoon of fine salt; a pinch of dried thyme. Pound and press the ingredients together until a rough paste forms — not a smooth cream but a textured paste with visible walnut pieces. Taste and adjust seasoning.
This paste keeps in the cold room for three to four days and is particularly good on the walnut flatbreads of Recipe 37, where the walnut-to-walnut resonance in the pairing produces a preparation of considerable coherence, and on the plain wheat matzah of Chapter 11, where the paste’s richness and complexity provides everything the plain bread’s simplicity invites.
Preparation D — Bitter Herb and Oil Dressing (for the Passover table)
On the Passover table itself, the herb-and-oil preparation takes on a specific commemorative character when it is made with the bitter herbs rather than with culinary herbs. This preparation is not a spread for the festival flatbread in the ordinary sense but a dressing for the bitter greens of the ceremonial service — a way of presenting the bitter herbs in a form that acknowledges their commanded function while making them as pleasant to consume as possible within the constraint of genuine bitterness.
If your household uses bitter endive or chicory as the bitter herb preparation: combine the quartered endive or chicory with a dressing of two tablespoons of olive oil, one tablespoon of apple cider vinegar, a pinch of fine salt, and a very small quantity of honey — a quarter of a teaspoon, not enough to sweeten the preparation but enough to provide a background that keeps the bitterness from being one-dimensional. Toss to coat and serve immediately, because dressed bitter greens begin to wilt quickly and are best at the moment of combination.
If your household uses freshly grated horseradish: no dressing is appropriate or needed, because the assertiveness of the horseradish preparation is itself its most important quality and any addition would moderate what should not be moderated. The horseradish stands alone.
A Note on Broth as the Foundation of the Festival Table
I want to close this chapter with a word about the preparation that underlies several of the stews and soups of the feast season but that I have not addressed as a recipe in its own right, because it is less a recipe than a practice: the keeping of a good cooking broth throughout the seven days of the feast.
The Bravian household tradition of the feast week, at least in the communities I know best, includes the maintenance of a broth pot that is refreshed daily with the bones and vegetable trimmings of each day’s cooking. The bones of the lamb from the Passover table go into the pot on the first evening; the parsnip and carrot trimmings from the root vegetable preparations go in throughout the week; a handful of dried herbs and a head of garlic, halved crosswise, go in each morning when the pot is refreshed. The resulting broth, skimmed of its fat and seasoned with salt, is the liquid base for the soups and stews of the subsequent days and the moistening medium for preparations that have dried overnight in the cold room.
This is not a complicated practice and it requires no special knowledge beyond the habit of paying attention to what would otherwise be discarded and directing it instead to the pot. The reward is a festival table whose savory preparations all share an underlying depth of flavor that comes from the accumulated cooking of the week — the lamb bones’ richness, the vegetable trimmings’ sweetness, the herbs’ aromatic persistence — and that gives the feast’s later days a continuity with its earlier ones in a way that individual preparations made from scratch each day cannot achieve.
My mother kept a broth pot throughout the feast week. She skimmed it every morning with a ladle and added to it every evening after the dinner preparations were cleared, and the broth from the seventh day tasted of every meal that had preceded it in the week, which she considered appropriate: the feast is seven days, not seven separate one-day events, and the broth was her way of cooking the whole feast as a single continuous act rather than a series of disconnected preparations.
I have tried to do the same in my own kitchen, and I recommend the practice without qualification to every baker who has followed this book from the foreword to this point in Part Five. You have learned, over the preceding fourteen chapters, to pay very close attention to what ingredients are doing and why. Apply that same attention to the accumulated materials of the feast week, and let nothing that could contribute to the table go to waste. The feast provides for the feast, if the cook is paying attention.
Chapter 16: Dairy and Egg Accompaniments begins on the following page.
