Seder in The Time of Corona

The first week of her stay, we kept the house clean. Jack took her dishes to the sink well before she could. The atmosphere was one of polite reserve. For Ava’s part, I never saw a stray item of hers left amongst my son’s laundry/shoes/books and the similar detritus from his 16-year-old brother and 12-year-old sister. I knew she missed her family, and I knew she was worried about them. I could tell she still felt more like a guest than truly “in the mix,” as my husband and I say about the kids’ friends who spend lots of time at our house.

So when Ava mentioned that she’d like to host a Seder supper for us as a way to say thank you, we were all enthusiastically on board. My great grandparents were Jewish and, although that’s where it ended in our family, I was familiar with the traditions of Seder. For my three kids, however, this would be a brand-new experience.

I began to text Ava links to all of my favorite recipes on Saveur.com that we might consider. Matzo ball soup? I’d always wanted to learn to make a proper version. While we’re at it, why not make the matzo from scratch? I was certainly embracing baking these days. And what was this brei, a matzo-and-scrambled-egg comfort food? Never tried it, but sounded right for these times. Brisket made with just three ingredients? Yes! And to really keep things easy, we could skip step one in this kugel recipe for a simple potato version. Bitter herbs? Would an arugula salad, minus the Parmesan, work for that? Here was a horseradish mayo we could serve with roasted root vegetables.

And that is when I learned that Ava could not cook. She’d been planning to have all the food sent from her favorite places in New York. Of course a Manhattan upbringing would mean the world at your door with a phone call, so why would you need to cook anything? (My own years there had involved a string of beloved restaurants, and a very under-utilized galley kitchen.) This also explained her gracious and somewhat stunned appreciation when we made homemade pasta a few days into her stay.

We would celebrate Passover (new to us), and we would cook everything from scratch (new to her). We settled on a menu, got up early to snag a curbside pickup time at the grocery store, and began planning.

Though we haven’t sat down to the actual meal yet, we turned the matzo-making into a team-building exercise, taking turns rolling one out then pricking it with a fork to prevent it from bubbling up in the oven. Homemade matzo is a snap—a simple combination of flour and water that cooks into a wonky-but-tasty cracker nothing like the store-bought version. We set aside a few of the pieces to be coated in caramel, dark chocolate, and flaky sea salt, a dessert Ava knew as matzo brittle.

In an attempt to impart the ways of the kitchen before she heads home, I occasionally go all Julia Child on her, as in “French toast is just eggs and milk—easy!” She plans to teach us the story behind the Seder supper, so she did have something sent from New York: Ten costume masks representing the ten plagues on Egypt. (Frogs! Locusts! Lice! Not Covid!) In other news, I am happy to report that just yesterday, I tripped over a pair of Ava’s shoes that were strewn with all the others in the mud room.