Fried Matzah
Friday, 2. April 2010
There are two kinds of Jews: those who like their matzah brei with salt and pepper and those who eat it with cinnamon and sugar. I am a proud member of the former camp. I made my first batch this morning and it was gooood.
It wasn’t my mother who taught me to make it, however. It was my mother’s mother. Baba (accent on the first syllable), as my brothers and cousins called her. She left Romania as a young girl, maybe even as a teenager, and settled in Toronto, where she met her future husband, Joseph, a new immigrant from Kiev in the Ukraine.
By the time I was growing up, she and my grandfather – we called him Zaida — were living in Fresno, Calif., not far from their son, Ben, his wife, Shirley, and their three daughters, Lynda, Susy and Dana.
I can close my eyes and see Baba in her kitchen, making fried matzah; we never called it matzah brei. As a kettle of water boiled, she would break up several sheets of matzah and scramble a couple eggs into a bowl. She’d pour the boiling water on the matzah, let it soak, then drain it and add the eggs to the wet matzah.
Then – and here’s what made it so tasty, so memorable – she would add into a hot frying pan a spoonful of schmaltz, good old-fashioned chicken fat. Fry that up, add salt and pepper, and oh, what a taste. It’s that memory that sticks to my ribs, if I may mix metaphors, every time I eat fried matzah.
Rachel Says:
I can taste it now. Yum! I split my plate, half your way w/ salt & pepper & half Mom’s way w/ sugar.
Dana Says:
That’s exactly how I make it. It took me a long time to accept that there was another way, but, after tasting other recipes I still go back to Baba’s, mmm the best. Plus she would make all year round.
Julia Says:
Yuck! I’m strictly in the cinnamon and sugar camp.
rona Says:
Our way is similar, fried with onions and salt and pepper. However, we put maple syrup on it-the savory and the sweet are wonderful together. Sam is making it this Sunday; can’t wait.