Nextbook.org
April 1, 2006

GABRIELLA GERSHENSON

 

Do Americans really want cappuccino macaroons and Fluffy Puffs Cotton Candy?

Last month, on a rare visit to a suburban supermarket, I wandered into the kosher-for-Passover aisle. Filled with "fudgey gooey" brownie mix, triple-chocolate macaroons, chocolate-chip cappuccino biscotti, Fluffy Puffs Cotton Candy, wasabi horseradish, and other slickly packaged items, it bore no resemblance to the Passover section of my memory, a repository of marginal, ethnic, sometimes downright bizarre foods, like red pickled cabbage and jellied whitefish, that mystified the uninitiated.

While traditional items—like gefilte fish, borscht, horseradish, and of course, matzo—still make up the core of kosher-for-Passover sales, "there's a feeling out there that anything that can be made kosher should be made kosher," says Menachem Lubinsky, editor of Kosher Today. He says 500 new Passover products will be introduced this year. "But it doesn't mean all the products will survive." One recent casualty is "matzanola", a mock granola bar that made one Jewish blogger write, "If I wanted broken pieces of matzah I'd do it myself."

Perhaps because so many foods are off-limits—most grains, legumes, and all leavened goods—during Passover, sweets tend to take on an even more important role. When I was growing up, the only reliable sources of sweetness to be found in the kosher-for-Passover aisle were fruit slices, raspberry jelly rings, and chocolate-covered marshmallow twists. Store-bought cakes and cake mixes bore a suspicious resemblance to drywall.

Their 21st-century counterparts, however, show vast improvement. Armed with a free coupon, I recently picked up a box of Manischewitz chocolate cake mix, icing included. Once baked and frosted, the sheetcake more or less looked and tasted like any other cake from a box—which is to say, edible, if not great. I was both pleasantly surprised and slightly irked by the narrowing gap between Duncan Hines and chometz.

Cake mixes are not the only products that have undergone massive alterations. Manischewitz alone now offers 17 variations on the macaroon, including banana split, maple pecan, and cinnamon-raisin, which it markets as a breakfast food. Cappuccino is one of its most successful flavors.

These new products appeal to Jews who have not always been kosher but have returned to traditional observance. "They want them and demand them, "says Rabbi Shmuel Singer, the Passover director of the Orthodox Union, "while the original kosher consumer does not know to miss them." Passover foods represent 40% of a $9 billion annual market for kosher foods, which attracts millions of Muslims, vegetarians, and other consumers who rely on kosher symbols as marks of quality or purity. While most American Jews don't keep strictly kosher households, many tend to keep kosher for Passover, fueling the drive to create products that will appeal to contemporary tastes.

Still, nostalgia drives many consumers. Joyva's best-selling candy is still the chocolate-coated raspberry jelly ring; for Manischewitz, it's fruit slices and chocolate-dipped matzo. In fact, "fruit slices in four flavors" have been the most popular American Passover sweet since Gil Shwom's grandfather started manufacturing candy 75 years ago. Shwom is the president of Barricini Chocolate and son of the late Edward Shwom, who founded the EddyLeon Candy and Confectionery Company. Shwom has been in the Passover candy business for more than 40 years. Raspberry jells and fruit slices, he explains, evolved from the Russian fruit jelly candy, marmalade, brought over from the old country. (Likewise, marshmallow twists may be based on the popular Russian zefir, which is marshmallow coated in dark chocolate.) But these treats still reflect the tastes of the 1940s and 1950s, when the development of vegetable gelatin first allowed strictly kosher candy makers to manufacture marshmallows.

But refined additions to the Passover market reflect the growing sophistication of a Food Network-enlightened America. Last year, Manhattan patissier Francois Payard started a kosher-for-Passover line at the behest of a client who complained that there were no good petits-fours for Passover. Payard's two flourless kosher-for-Passover cakes, lemon almond and chocolate almond, are the missing link between commercial cake mixes and homemade Passover desserts. Although nothing can match a well-executed Passover recipe, Payard's cakes come pretty close. His ingredients (the lemon almond cake contains sugar, almonds, eggs, butter, and lemon oil) are impeccable, and embellished with confectioner's sugar and a dollop of lightly sweetened whipped cream, these cakes should please most finicky Seder guests. Of course, these cakes are off-limits to the kosher host or hostess who serves a traditional brisket, since—unlike the Manischewitz cake-in-a-box (and cakes from traditional kosher bakeries)—Payard's dessert is not pareve. Still, Whole Foods has ordered 3,000 Payard chocolate almond cakes to sell this year during Passover.

With so many choices available for Passover, will the once inconvenient holiday become effortless? Perusing those items at that suburban supermarket, I realized that the challenge of keeping Passover has been, for me, a personal demonstration of faith. All of these newfangled products seem to remove the element of sacrifice. Knowing that there is a decent chocolate cake mix to rescue me from Passover-induced despair is comforting, but it also introduces an element of instant gratification to a holiday that, for me, has been more about patience and restraint. If these companies keep refining their products, which they no doubt will, there will one day be an adequate substitution for every piece of chometz. And then, how will the eight days of Passover seem different from any other part of the year?

When I ran my theory past Rabbi Singer of the Orthodox Union, he told me, "I don't see why you have to sacrifice. I don't observe Judaism because of emotion, I observe it because that's what the law says. It's not a time of sacrifice, it's a time of simcha, joy, embracing, not denial. As far as we're concerned, there's only one day you're not allowed to eat. The less you suffer the better."

This comment alarmed me. Had all of those years of restraint been unnecessary, or even worse, contrary to the spirit of Passover? Strictly speaking, the rabbi is, of course, correct. But when I imagine eating kosher-for-Passover versions of cereal, granola, and cookies on Pesach, it does not feel right. The supermarket shelves may expand, but I think that I—and perhaps many like me—will keep reaching for the Joyva jelly rings.