What to take to a Passover (Seder) meal

  What food can you take to hosts who are Jewish or a dinner party where one of the guests eats kosher?

If all else fails, ask. 

A year or two ago I had to attend a festive Jewish occasion and knew the hosts were strictly kosher. My solution was to order wine from a shop supplying kosher wine. But what if they don't drink, are driving, and say they already have wine?

Passover

Pesach, or Passover, around Easter time, adds another layer of opportunities coupled with restrictions, because of the ban on leavened food, no bread, only matzah, and this affects cakes and biscuits. Your supermarket may have stocks of wines and food labelled kosher for Passover.

Another place to look is a mini supermarket or gift shop which specialises in Jewish or kosher products. The assistant can probably help you to find something suitable in their shop or direct you to another nearby shop.

You can often buy kosher chocolates or cake from a supermarket or an Israeli restaurant or kosher salt beef bar. Just ask. Or look online.

Green & Blacks

I recently was at a lunch party and was surprised to see that one of the guests who kept strictly kosher at their home had brought Green & Black's chocolates which had no kosher symbol or Hebrew or English wording saying that the product was kosher.

Gelatine

I was told that the main concern for a Jewish guest would be whether the chocolates contained gelatine. Gelatine is an animal product. (Although there are non animal substitutes). What could contain gelatine? Jelly babies? Turkish Delight? (That is the brand name now used in the UK for the Greek and Turkish and other countries' confection of that style).

Some wines have the debris removed with egg white which attaches to bits of twig and grape skin so that it clumps together, flats or sinks?, and can be removed.

American Chocolates

My informant additionally told me, "Almost all chocolates imported from the USA, US brands, are kosher. Look for the symbol or two letters OU, O for Orthodox."

Now you know what to ask about.

I asked a hostess if she would prefer food, drink, flowers, a pot plants, a piece of clothing, such as a scarf, or an accessory such as a scarf ring or ear-rings. She said, chocolates, kosher for Passover chocolates.

Googling

When I tried googling, I got lots of chocolates, not listed as kosher. I could just check

 for kosher food, and kosher for Passover. That brought up lots of offers of matzah/matzoh. 

Matzah

Also chocolate covered matzah. I had tried that previously and did not like it. I preferred matzoh on its own, as a savoury. The chocolate did not seem the best milk chocolate, more like cheaper cooking chocolate, based on non milk fat, or chocolate flavour, or different proportions. 

It was an interesting novelty. But, although one person was polite and said it was okay, nobody was keen on it.

Kosher Shop Opening Times

Another website, Exquisite chocolates, said they were closed until a date in April after the event. Buying food for a kosher even on the way there is risky. You might find the kosher restaurant or shop is already closed. 

Sabbath Closure

I once found that a branch of Tesco had curtained off the kosher section during the sabbath, before the Friday evening meal I was attending. Sabbath, starting like Xmas eve the night before, comes in around sunset, earlier in winter. In summer the sabbath, shabbat in Hebrew, goes out, finishes, later on Saturday in summer.

 I saw offers of hampers, beyond my budget, containing large numbers of small items, all of which were just cheap items, unexciting. Fine for a school. Nut nothing impressive and luxurious for a well to do hostess who had spent a week cleaning the entire house and removing all previous food. 

Discover Channel View Of Passover

A Discovery programme had proved, at least to me, that the origin of the festival was one event, or several, in which a rainy season had made stores of cereal, for bread, to go mouldy, leading to food poisoning. The contaminated food, would kill off the first born child, given double portions of bread.

If I remember rightly, the programme said that the favoured firstborn would get a double portion.

 Why did this not affect others? Bread was only part of the diet of adults. In a shortage, women would not receive it, only the firstborn adult male. Bread was not given to children breastfeeding to the age of four.  

The consumption of contaminated cereal would lead to what was known in the USA in previous centuries as St Vitus's dance.

Hence the using up of old flour and food in pancakes for lent. If you go to a kosher shop, before they close for Passover, you can ask them for chocolates or sweets which are kosher for Passover. 

The simplest solution is to go to a kosher shop, before they close for Pesach, and ask for kosher for Passover chocolates or sweets.

 I like halva. You can get variations, such as chocolate covered halva.

You can find kosher food in a shop in a synagogue or kosher school complex. They sell what looks like an Easter egg, a kosher surprise, like a kinder surprise, a chocolate egg with a small toy inside, such as tiny spinning top. My grand0daughter was given one at school where a (Jewish) child who had a birthday, and his mother had bought a chocolate egg for every child in his class of thirty children, instead of a cake. (Some schools have a cake every week from one child or another. Others ban cakes, because of peanut and egg allergies, crumbs attracting insects, time taken from lessons for cake cutting, parents who ban sugary cakes and snacks on health grounds.)

Useful Websites