About Keeping Kosher for Pesach

My nuclear family doesn’t keep kosher. My sister and I didn’t grow up with separate dishes for milk and meat; eating only products with a hechsher on them; or observing the many other kosher laws. We didn’t usually mix milk and meat, and we avoided pork and pork products, but that was about it.

We did, however, grow up with and around a lot of folks who did keep kosher. Our paternal grandparents, for example, prepared and ate only kosher food. At our Jewish day school, everyone was supposed to keep strictly kosher while in the building, although practically that just meant that everything the school provided was kosher, but parents who kept varying levels of kosher at home sent their best efforts for lunch, and classmates from the most observant families didn’t trade with other kids. Likewise, regardless of individual attendees’ personal observances, events at Jewish institutions like synagogues would be strictly kosher.

Anyway, point is, even though I didn’t grow up keeping kosher myself, I do have some experience eating kosher food and knowing what careful, hard work goes into it.

From the outside, I know, keeping kosher seems at best weird and at worst, wasteful. When a cultural practice isn’t your own, it’s easy to see the downsides–to find other people’s investment in it to be irrational. Honestly, even when it is your own, you might occasionally think so. I sometimes do.

That makes even weirder for me the one time of year I do keep kosher-esque: Pesach (in English, Passover).

Kosher-for-Pesach is New Game+ kosher. Everyday-kosher is already complicated and difficult to explain to people who didn’t grow up familiar with the practice, but at least there are lots of systems already in place. There are numerous kosher certification agencies, and they’ve certified many mainstream products. Most institutions or events that provide food have a kosher option or can source one. Even if they don’t have an option that’s specifically kosher, many people who keep kosher will eat non-certified vegetarian food.

But Pesach is different. Pesach is regular kosher plus a whole bunch of complicated extra rules. Most of the time, things that aren’t specifically certified as kosher-for-Pesach aren’t suitable for Pesach . There’s no “typical” special menu option, like vegetarian, that will usually be OK.

It sounds simple enough: no eating leavened bread. But what that actually means in practice is a labyrinthine set of forbidden foods/ingredients that depend heavily on tradition and historical contingency. On Pesach, those who keep kosher don’t just avoid leavened bread: we also don’t eat anything containing the ingredients that could be used to make leavened bread, such as any grain, in any form. Are we aware that one cannot, in fact, make bread out of the wheat in some soy sauces? Yes, but that doesn’t change the ideology behind the practice.

To make things even more difficult for kashrut n00bs, Jews from some backgrounds have the tradition not to eat a class of foods known as “kitniyot,” such as rice, corn, legumes, and certain spices. How do you know if a particular Jewish person will eat kitniyot on Passover? You have to ask.

And how do you know what foods are kitniyot? Haha, good luck. You’ll have to look it up from a reliable Jewish source; some of the rules come from the arbitrary coincidences of history, so you can’t reason out the answer. (For example, potatoes are one of the few starches permitted on Pesach, but that’s mainly because they were introduced to Jewish communities and diets after some of the rules were already in place. They share plenty of traits with foods that aren’t allowed.)

So… Pesach is like, gluten-free? Enh… it’s similar, but matzah, made with wheat flour while following strictly delineated laws, is kosher for Pesach , and matzah or matzah products are in a lot of commercially produced Pesach food. And gluten-free food can include a lot of ingredients that aren’t kosher-for-Pesach.

Okay, so… it’s, like, keto? … Maybe? But, again, potatoes aren’t keto, and they’re kosher-for-Passover. And peanuts or cumin can be keto, and they’re not (for many) kosher-for-Pesach .

It also doesn’t help that many families’ traditions include foods that cleverly replicate non-kosher-for-Pesach foods, or at least have similar names. So you can buy “Pesach cake mixes,” but they won’t taste like regular cake mixes or have the same ingredients. Still, if you aren’t familiar with keeping kosher for Pesach, the names of these foods might confuse you about what’s OK for Pesach and what isn’t.

Ultra-confusing the matter are many mainstream magazines and cooking sites that, trying to be helpful and inclusive, add “Passover” recipes that often aren’t kosher-for-Pesach as written. I like to read food magazines and food sites, and I’ve made a little hobby of counting how many “Passover” recipes include ingredients that aren’t (or might not be, depending on your particular Jewish background) kosher-for-Pesach and/or don’t include a note mentioning this. So far, the vast majority of recipes from sources that aren’t specifically Jewish don’t pass this little test.

Similarly, although I’m very, very grateful that some branches of mainstream grocery stores, such as Loblaws, Metro, and Sobeys, located in areas with significant Jewish populations have kosher-for-Pesach sections as the holidays approach, I’ve often noticed non-kosher-for-Pesach items located prominently within those sections. Which makes sense–the employees and managers aren’t necessarily Jewish, and they don’t know what regular kosher stock to remove during Pesach and what is still appropriate for the holiday.

The point here isn’t that these publications or stores should stop trying to serve their customers who keep kosher for Pesach , it’s that, if you yourself are unfamiliar with keeping kosher for Pesach and are trying to help, accommodate, or gift food to someone who does, there’s no good way to do so without specific instructions from that person.

And that’s before we get into the things that aren’t laws but instead lived-experience knowledge about the food quality. This, again, is going to differ person by person, but I have some personal practices about eating kosher for Pesach to maximize my actual enjoyment of the food.

In general, my personal addendum is this: I try not to eat food that, by its basic definition, shouldn’t be kosher-for-Pesach. Especially if I don’t know how I’d make the kosher-for-Pesach version in my home kitchen or where to buy a non-specifically-for-Pesach version. For example, I avoid most Pesach cake mixes, Pesach cookies, and Pesach breakfast cereal. However, I’ll happily make a flourless chocolate cake from a recipe I’d serve any time of year, which doesn’t try to mimic regular cake texture.

(I apply this to regular kashrut too: if, at a kosher event serving a meat meal, I encounter a dessert that normally includes milk or butter as a key ingredient, I steer clear. Not saying you’re wrong if you don’t, but I know my taste, and I know my experience.)

Admittedly, having a non-Jewish spouse makes it easier to cook only what I want for Pesach. He doesn’t have any cherished memories associated with, say, Pesach “rolls” or matzah-meal box brownies. That gives me more leeway to include foods that, if made with appropriate oils*, seasonings, and minor substitutions, are “naturally” okay for Pesach: stuff like pavlova, hollandaise sauce, shakshuka, spiced nuts, and steak frites.

There’s a lot of thought and labour that goes into keeping kosher when you don’t live in a society where that’s the norm. And keeping kosher for Pesach isn’t even the “normal” kind of keeping kosher–it’s work for everyone, even those who already keep a kosher kitchen all year round. Frankly, I don’t do 99% of that work. My more observant family would completely clean the house in preparation for Pesach, re-lining drawers and cabinets, adding temporary covers to tables and counters, and changing over all the dishes and cookware to special Pesach sets, to name just a few of the chores. But even without that, it’s still plenty of labour.

That labour is important to me, though, even as an atheist–or, at least, aspects of it are. So I’ll keep on finding the ways to do them that make meaning for me.

* Oils made from plants/ingredients that aren’t kosher for Pesach, such as soybean, corn, or canola, are themselves not kosher for Pesach, even though one can’t make leavened bread from oil.