What We Made For Seder And

There are foods you make once a year for holidays.  And each year you remember in mid-recipe, and too late, some improvement that you figured out the year before.  

Because this had happened to me more than once I started a notebook to record things I’d learned making holiday meals.  All sorts of things went into the notebook — where to get special ingredients, how big a roast was needed for how many people, whether a certain cake should be made the day before or might it be made in advance and frozen.  

The holidays at our house are Christmas and the Passover Seder.  Christmas, for me, mostly means baking, whether we have the holiday here or away.  Seder is always at our house.  It’s a meal with some ritual foods and, unlike Christmas baking, less that can be made in advance.  So a lot of my notes concern the Seder. 

After a while I began adding who was with us as well as what we ate and notes on preparation.  I wrote about the newborns and about people who had died, about people who grew up and went out into the world and people who came back with new families.  One year I read through the notebook and saw that 20 years had passed and that my notes told a story.  So I made a book and called it What We Made For Seder And Who Was With Us.  I made a copy for each of the people who are always invited to our Seder.

What We Made For Seder And Who Was With Us made in an edition of 5. 7 x 5 7/8th inches. Twenty-three pages of archival inkjet prints on Zerkall Laid paper, hardbound. 2016.