Baking challah in the shape of a key (schlissel meaning key in Yiddish) is an Ashkenazi tradition the Shabbat after Pesach, and is said to represent the key to the promised land. I’m usually team poppyseed but sesame seeds are traditional for schlissel challah, because they are supposed to resemble the manna we ate in the desert.
I couldn’t find a technique I liked so I just made one up- I did a 5-strand braid for the stem, and a standard 3-strand for the teeth and the head.
I set out with a dream. An impossible dream. To create a vegan dessert for my synagogue seder that was also kitniyot-free. Did I have to do this? Not really, my shul allows anything vegan, vegetarian or pescatarian that doesn’t have chametz, and we have a section for kitniyot. Am I vegan? No. Do I even keep kosher for Passover myself? Also no. But, you see, I have an almost pathological need to feed as many people as possible, and I am intractably stubborn, so once I realised how difficult this was going to be it only made me dig my heels in further.
It turns out to be borderline impossible to find vegan substitutes for pretty much anything that don’t contain soy, oats, cornflour, chickpeas, or some sort of forbidden legume. Subsequently this recipe is heavily reliant on coconut milk; luckily for me I live in an area with a large Muslim population and it’s currently Ramadan, so tins of coconut are front and centre of every supermarket display.
It’s taken almost a full month of trial, error and meltdowns in the butter aisle of Sainsbury’s, but I finally did it. I had to cobble bits of the recipe together from half a dozen different sources, so I feel relatively justified in calling this my own invention. The pecan crust is borrowed from a Tori Avey cheesecake recipe, I just swapped pistachios for pecans. I really think the crust is what makes it, to be honest. You could probably skip the ganache layer if you can’t be bothered, I just feel like it helps cut through the sweetness.
Recipe under the cut. Please please tag me if anyone decides to make this! I would be so delighted to see it out there in the world.
Crust
84g (⅔ cup) pecans
84g (⅔ cup) pecans
84g (⅔ cup) pecans
60g (½ cup) matzo meal
66g (⅓ cup) granulated sugar
71g (5 tbsp) Kosher for Passover vegan margarine (Rakusen’s Tomor*), melted, + extra for greasing
Pinch of salt (optional)
Ganache
113g KFP vegan dark chocolate (Lindt Excellence 70%, Green & Black’s 70%, Green & Black’s cooking chocolate are all KFP)
113g coconut cream/full-fat coconut milk
A few drops of vanilla extract (optional)
Caramel
200g caster sugar
100g KFP vegan margarine (Tomor)
200g coconut cream/full-fat coconut milk
Whipped cream
200g coconut cream/full fat coconut milk, kept in the fridge overnight
15-45g KFP icing sugar (check it doesn’t contain maize starch. You could probably omit the sugar and leave the cream unsweetened if you can’t find it, or grind your own- there are recipes for Passover powdered sugar online.)
¼ tsp vanilla extract
3-4 bananas
cocoa powder or grated chocolate to serve (optional)
chopped pecans to serve (optional)
Method
Make the caramel. Place the sugar into a medium / large saucepan. Place the pan on the hob over a low heat. Allow the sugar to melt, this will take around 5-8 minutes. Don’t burn the sugar! Make sure to stir constantly to prevent burning. You can use a wooden spoon or heat proof spatula.
When all of the sugar has melted and is a golden / amber colour, add in the margarine. Be careful, as the sugar is very hot. Remove the pan from the heat and stir to combine. Allow the margarine to melt into the sugar. It might bubble but that's fine. Once it’s combined, it might have a thick consistency. It might look like the margarine isn’t mixing with the sugar, but it should combine once you add the cream. Now add in 200g coconut cream. It will steam and bubble again so be careful.
Add the pan on the heat and allow to simmer for 3-5 minutes to help thicken it up.
Remove the pan from the heat. Set aside to cool for 30 minutes, then transfer / pour the caramel into a heat proof jar. Place the jar into the fridge. Allow to chill overnight. The coconut cream for the whipped cream should also be kept in the fridge overnight, to encourage it to separate and firm up.
If the caramel separates overnight, use an electric whisk to combine into a smooth consistency until there are no remaining lumps. It’ll be a more custard-like texture but still delicious. Keep caramel in the fridge until needed.
Make the crust. Preheat oven to 180˚C. Grease a loose-bottomed tin with margarine and line with greaseproof paper.
Blitz the pecans in the food processor until finely processed. Add matzo meal, salt and sugar and pulse until the entire crust is uniform in colour. With the processor on, drizzle the melted butter into the machine.
Once all the butter has been added, turn the processor off and dump the wet crumbs into the bottom of the lined pan. Using the back of a spoon, press the crumbs evenly into the bottom and up the sides of the pan (it doesn’t have to go all the way up, just as much as you can).
Place the crust in the oven for 8-10 minutes, or until the edges of the crust start to brown a bit and smells fragrant. Leave crust to cool for about ten minutes and then transfer to the fridge to finish cooling.
Make the ganache. Finely chop the chocolate and put in a medium-sized bowl. Put 200g coconut cream in a microwave-safe bowl and heat in the microwave for about 1 minute, watching to make sure it doesn’t bubble over.
Pour the warm cream over the chocolate chips and let sit for 2-3 minutes. Don't stir yet.
After 2-3 minutes, whisk the chocolate/melted coconut milk until smooth. Add vanilla if desired. Let cool in the fridge for around 30 minutes.
Make the whipped coconut cream. Chill a mixing bowl in the fridge for ten minutes (you can do this while the ganache is cooling to save time). Put 200g coconut cream (the thick white part, not the clear liquid) in the chilled bowl. Beat for 30 seconds with an electric whisk until creamy. Add vanilla and icing sugar and mix until creamy and smooth – about 1 minute. Avoid overwhipping because it can cause separation. Taste and adjust sweetness as needed.
Carefully run a knife around the edge of the crust tin and remove the crust from the tin.
Spread a layer of the cooled ganache over the bottom of the crust. Top with a layer of sliced banana and return to the fridge to set for ten minutes.
Add a layer of the caramel, another layer of sliced banana, and return to the fridge for ten minutes again.
Top with the whipped cream (I like to leave the edge of the bananas visible around the edge). Dust with cocoa powder or grated chocolate and add chopped pecans if desired.
*Tomor contains sunflower oil, but sunflower oil is not considered kitniyot in England: https://www.kosher.org.uk/article/sunflower-oil-kitniyot
A friend invited me over for a small Seder and had a room for me to stay overnight. We davvened Maariv and had a Sephardic Seder. We were up until 2am talking Talmud and Halacha. It’s a night I will never forget.
Above, two accounts of a message released by Rabbi Jacob Schachter (1886-1971), a Romanian immigrant in Belfast, in the Belfast Telegraph, April 4th (left), and the following day's Belfast News-Letter.
From the Manchester Evening News, April 6th:
(Bylines were still rare enough in the 1940s that I decided to try and find out who Noah Elstein was. I didn't get very far. He was apparently born in 1900; in 1926 he wrote a play called Israel in the Kitchen that seems to have won an award, and in 1930 he published a novel, Plight of Peretz, but but after that the trail goes cold.)
Also on April 6th, the Western Mail, a Cardiff paper, published a letter to the editor from Rabbi Harris Jerevitch (1886- sometime after 1952), an immigrant from Russia. The page scan is too poor to include here, but here is what it appears to say:
Sir — As we usher in tomorrow (Friday) evening, the Passover, the "Festival of Freedom," your minds will naturally turn to the unprecedented horrible plight of Jews in Nazi-occupied countries and you will pray for them. The message of Passover to our time is the call to put away despair. Persecution is an evil thing which recoils on him who practices it. History has demonstrated it time and again. In the Passover all tyrants, oppressors, dictators, and all who deny to God-intelligent creatures the right to live and act as conscience dictates, must read their doom. The millions of Jews — men, women, and children — will not be forgotten when the day of reckoning comes.
Pray fervently for the victory of the United Nations, so that future generations shall never experience the tyranny and the suffering into which the enemies of civilisation have today plunged the world. In your prayers give thanks to God for having cast our lot in this blessed and liberty-loving country. Passover is the occasion for family reunions. May the day come soon when our sons and brothers, now engaged in the struggle which the Passover commemorates, namely, freedom for all mankind, be reunited with their families after a glorious victory.
And on April 13th, the Yorkshire Evening Post carried the following:
As was the case during the previous year, matzah was on the points system, thus forcing the Jewish community to once again deal with what was essentially a bread ration.
The Jewish Chronicle announced this as early as January 14th:
I have to take issue with the statement that this was "on a basis similar to that which was adopted last year." In 1943 there was a 5-pound per person allowance, and I found nothing like that for 1944; while in 1944, the points value of matzah was lowered from 4 points all the way down to 1 point per pound for several months at the beginning of the year, which as far as I know didn't happen in 1943.
This was duly announced in the Ministry of Food's "Food Facts" in February (as printed in the Manchester Evening News on February 10th; I haven't been able to find anything about it having been "announced last month"):
And then, on April 30th, the value went back up to 4 points per lb.:
(Printed on May 1st in a newspaper that I haven't been able to identify. As a side note, the "Food Facts" series began in 1940 and continued for ten years, and are absolutely fascinating. They beg for a serious scholarly study! I recommend them to anyone with an interest in the British home front.) This was big enough news that it was covered in The People on April 30th ...
With all that's been written about the vast movement of Allied troops to England's South coast in the Spring of 1944, in preparation for the invasion of Normandy, it's easy to forget that the liberation of Europe had already begun, with the Sicily landings of the previous July. So it comes as no surprise that groups of soldiers observed Passover in Italy in 1944. I've found evidence of at least five such Seders.
What seems to have been the largest was mounted by the 5th (U.S.) Army. Here's a write-up, from a wire service story printed in The Sentinel (Chicago) on April 13th:
In London, The Jewish Chronicle took note of it on the following day:
A much fuller account had appeared in The New York Times on April 8th. That article is so long that I decided it was impractical include it here. Here's a link (but there's no transcription and I'm not sure whether non-subscribers will be able to view the page image). Here are some salient details:
There were more than 1,000 people present.
Among them were three nurses and one WAC.
The WAC, Private First Class Frances Smith, sat with her husband, Private Isidore Smith. (You read that correctly: she held the higher rank! There were a great many married couples in the military by this time, and I'm wondering if that wasn't a fairly common situation.)
The chaplain, Major Aaron Paperman (1914-2002), "smilingly and explicitly compressed ten pages of service text into 'thirty seconds flat'." I have trouble imagining such a thing happening today — especially given that he was ultra-Orthodox. Awarded a Bronze Star, he had served a congregation in Plainfield, N.J., before the war.
Meanwhile, pan-Allied troops were making a Seder with only a slightly smaller number of people in attendance, as The Jewish Chronicle reported on April 21st:
Press coverage of that event may have been relatively sparse, but there are photos, with captions indicating that the Seder took place south of Cassino:
From Yad Vashem, here is an image of an American military-issue Hagadah that was used at a Seder at a British base in Bari attended by both American and British troops (many of the latter were from Mandate Palestine):
Finally, click here and here to see the covers of two home-made Hagadot used by members of British transport companies.
Since at least 1941, there had been concerns about the lack of a Jewish chaplain serving British troops in India, as noted in this letter in The Jewish Chronicle's January 28th, 1944, issue:
India does, of course, have its own long-established Jewish community (or at least it did then), which did try to help out, as noted in The JC on March 31st:
At last, though, a British chaplain was dispatched, as reported on April 14th:
And on April 28th, there was the following account:
By contrast, the American mentioned in this article, Captain David J. Seligson (1907-1992), a New York City native, was one of at least nine American Jewish chaplains to serve in India at some point during the war; I'd actually had no idea that American troops were stationed there! A Reform rabbi, he had previously led congregations in Birmingham, England, and Port Chester, N.Y. After the war he rose to national prominence, serving as the senior rabbi of Central Synagogue, in Manhattan, for 20 years.
Passover, 1944: With the Forces across the country
Not all military personnel were massing on the South Coast, of course, and greater London wasn't the only place that saw large numbers of people in uniform observing Passover. The article below, from The Jewish Chronicle's April 21st issue, describes Sederim held under military auspices in Belfast, Birmingham, Bury St Edmunds, Buxton, Cambridge, Cheltenham, Glasgow, Hereford, Hull, Ipswich, Liverpool, Northampton, Nottingham, the Okney Islands, Peterborough, Portsmouth, Reading, the Shetland Islands, Torquay, Watford, Winchester, and at least one location that couldn't be specified for security reasons. In other papers, I read of Sederim in Bedford, Chester, Glastonbury, Plymouth, and Windsor. As in past wartime years, in a number of cases this was the first Seder ever held in that place. There was also a major, and apparently quite successful, campaign for provision of home hospitality in Manchester.
(If anybody wants information about the American chaplains mentioned in this article, please let me know.)
