Soak 6 matzoth crackers in water; press dry and mix with 1 tablespoonful of butter, a pinch of salt, the yolks of 5 eggs, a small cup of sugar, some cinnamon, ½ cup of raisins and a little grated lemon peel. Add the beaten whites and bake until brown. Serve with wine sauce.
A matzo kugel in all but name — the sort of Passover pudding that turns six sheets of unleavened bread into dessert. The original assumes you know the oven, the dish and the sauce, so those are the gaps worth filling.
- The hinge: press, don't wringSoak the matzot until they soften, a minute or two, then press the water out firmly between your palms or in a sieve. Too wet and the pudding steams into paste; wrung bone-dry and it bakes up leathery. You want the texture of a squeezed sponge.
- MatzothSix standard square sheets, about 6 oz total. Machine matzo is thin and crisp and takes on water fast — check it after 60 seconds.
- Fold the whites in lastThe beaten whites are the only leavening here; there is no baking powder, which many households avoided at Passover in any case. Fold them into the matzo mixture in two additions and get the pudding into the oven straight away.
- Oven and timeThe recipe gives none. Bake at 350F in a buttered 8-inch dish or 1½-quart casserole for 40 to 50 minutes, until set in the centre and browned on top.
- "A small cup of sugar"Read this as about ⅔ cup; the phrasing signals a deliberately short measure.
- ButterOne tablespoon for six sheets of matzo is lean even by the standards of the day; 3 to 4 tablespoons gives a richer pudding without changing its character. Note that butter makes this a dairy dish, so it would not follow a meat meal in an observant household.
- Wine sauceWine sauces of the period were generally sugar and butter creamed or cooked to a syrup, thinned with sweet wine — sherry, Madeira or a sweet red — and sometimes thickened with a little egg or cornstarch. Serve it warm and poured over.
- YieldRoughly six to eight servings.
Matzo puddings of this kind — variously called kugel, charlotte or simply "matzo pudding" — solved the Passover problem of what to do with unleavened bread when flour, and any leavened grain, is off the table for eight days. Softened matzo stands in for breadcrumbs or cake, and whipped whites supply lift that yeast and chemical leaveners cannot. Its appearance in a book organised by date, with national labels attached, says a good deal about how American cookery writing of the period worked: Jewish cooking was filed alongside German, French and Creole as one more "nation" to be sampled on a given day of the year. The butter would rule the pudding out at the close of a meat dinner, though it is unremarkable after a dairy or pareve one.