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Jewish Passover Bread
This is a thin wafer from eight to ten inches in diameter and is made of flour, water, salt only; must be quickly mixed and baked immediately. It takes the place of bread and is usually eaten without butter. To serve it with a dessert each motze may be brushed over with the beaten yolk of an egg, then sprinkled with granulated sugar, to each tablespoonful of which one-quarter of a teaspoonful of cinnamon is added. The wafers are then piled one on another and placed in the oven until the sugar is slightly melted; they may be served cold or hot.
The entry is more a description than a formula — it names the three ingredients and gives no weights, no oven setting and no time. What follows fills those gaps, and flags the one rule that governs the whole thing.
- Eighteen minutes, start to finishThe instruction to mix quickly and bake immediately is the hinge, not a stylistic note. Once flour meets water, wild fermentation begins; traditional practice allows eighteen minutes from wetting to oven, after which the dough is considered leavened and unfit for Passover. Have the oven fully preheated before the water goes in.
- No proportions givenA stiff, barely tacky dough is what you want; something in the region of two parts flour to one part water by weight is a reasonable starting point, adjusted by feel. It should be firm enough to roll paper-thin without springing back much.
- The saltThe recipe lists salt, but matzo, then and now, is generally flour and water only, and commercial matzo contains no salt. Whether salt may be added at all is a matter of rabbinic dispute rather than simple custom.
- Oven heatNothing in the text specifies a temperature. A wafer this thin needs the hottest oven available — 500F or above, on a preheated stone or steel — so it blisters and dries in two to three minutes rather than slowly toasting into a cracker that bends.
- DockingThe perforations on commercial matzo are not decoration. Prick the rolled sheet all over with a fork or a docking wheel before baking, or steam pockets will puff it into a pita.
- "Motze"An older English rendering of matzah, the plural of which is matzot. Eight to ten inches across is about right for the hand-made round sheets of the period; modern boxed matzo is square and machine-rolled.
- The dessert versionBrushing with egg yolk and baking with cinnamon sugar makes what is essentially a sweet matzo crisp. Note that enriched or egg matzo is not eaten at the seder by most observant Ashkenazi households, and that here the egg and sugar go onto wafers already baked -- a Passover-week sweet, not seder bread.
- Yield and servingAs a rough guide, half a pound of flour might give something like half a dozen wafers of this size, depending how thin they are rolled. Bake them in single layers, then stack for the sugar step; three or four sheets deep is enough for the sugar to melt without the bottom one steaming soft.
Matzo is the unleavened bread of Passover, eaten in remembrance of the Exodus account in which the Israelites left Egypt in such haste that their dough had no time to rise. The eighteen-minute rule that governs its making is rabbinic rather than biblical, a practical outer limit set on how long flour and water may sit before fermentation is assumed to have begun. Until the middle of the nineteenth century every matzo was rolled and perforated by hand, usually in a communal bakery working against the clock; mechanical matzo-rolling machines are generally traced to Europe in the late 1830s and were the subject of considerable rabbinic argument for decades afterward, which is part of why round hand-made sheets of the size described here were still the familiar form when this book was written. Its appearance in a general American household cookbook is itself worth noting, and accounts for the explanatory tone and the transliteration "motze."