Little Stories: The Incriminating Matzo Butter Stain
Half a century later, evidence of my snacking sin still persists. Plus a recipe and a new Inconspicuous News Roundup!
Little Stories, focusing on memories from my youth, is a recurring feature of Inconspicuous Consumption. You can see more Little Stories here.
Passover begins at sundown tomorrow night, which brings up some very specific memories for me. As I’ve mentioned before, my family is nominally Jewish but mostly secular, but one of my parents’ few nods to Judaism was that we always had matzos in the house for Passover. You can buy matzos anytime, of course, but only certain matzos are certified as being kosher for Passover, which basically means some rabbi got paid a lot to stand around at the bakery and give his blessing to the flour and water. What a racket!
Anyway, my Mom would buy Passover matzos every year around this time. She was brand-loyal, always purchasing Streit’s matzos, which came in a pink box (just like the ones shown above). She would use them to make mazto brei, and very occasionally I’d be permitted to have a buttered matzo as a snack. I discovered at a young age that I really, really like a sheet of matzo slathered in butter and then sprinkled with salt. Even better: several sheets of matzo slathered in butter and sprinkled with salt. But of course I wasn’t supposed to be snacking in between meals without permission, so I had to keep my matzo consumption on the sly. And therein lies a tale.
One afternoon when I was about 10 years old, I was scarfing down a nicely buttered sheet of matzo — my second of the day, I believe. As was my usual custom, I had redistributed the remaining matzos in the box to make it look like it was still fairly full, just as I always did when sneaking an extra Hydrox out of the cookie jar. Everything seemed just about right with the world, and then I heard something I wasn’t supposed to be hearing yet: a car door slamming closed in our driveway.