Adventures in authentic seasonal food

~Warning:  Occasionally I write posts that vegetarians - as well as people not fully committed to a carnivorous lifestyle - may find er, repulsive.  This is one of those posts.  Don't say you weren't warned.~

In the weeks leading up to Passover we begin seeing some of our favorite seasonal foods featured on the crisp, paper-lined shelves of our local supermarkets.  Of course Matzoh is the first thing that comes to mind when most of us think about Passover staples... but there are a whole range of seasonal cakes, candies and of course macaroons that only seem to make an appearance at this time of year.

However, the original, and most authentic food for this holiday was of course, the Passover offering; a lamb. 

We read every year about the Passover offering in almost every text related to the holiday, but I don't think we pay much attention to the extremely vivid and detailed descriptions of how it would be carefully selected, prepared and completely consumed by the Jewish pilgrims who would flood into Jerusalem.

Unfortunately, since the destruction of the Temple and the abolishing of the Temple service/sacrifices, we do not eat roasted meat of any kind at the Passover Seder.   This has always been frustrating for me because I've been captivated by the the description of many families banding together to bring an unblemished lamb to be sacrificed in the Temple and then sharing in what amounted to a big all-night Luau. 

Such mental images make even the most fantastic modern Passover food pale in comparison.

We are told that in Temple times that the reason many families would bring the sacrifice together was because of the requirement to consume the entire lamb at one sitting.  That's a lot of meat!  No leftovers were allowed from this feast, and anything not eaten had to be burned immediately. 

Even the plates on which the Passover lamb had been served had to be broken immediately after the meal!

Every year my carnivorous imagination runs wild picturing the hillsides of Jerusalem dotted with fires as clusters of happy celebrants enthusiastically consumed their freshly roasted lambs and loudly retold the story of the Exodus from Egypt to one another. 

With that image clearly in mind, you can imagine my excitement when I got an urgent phone call yesterday morning from a close friend. 

It seems that a long-time Arab friend of his had called him early in the morning to tell him that he wanted to make a gift of a lamb from his flock.  It was a hugely generous and completely unexpected gesture, and my friend was overwhelmed... not to mention at a loss for what to do.

The reason my friend started making phone calls was not simply to relate his good fortune... but also to ask his friends how the heck he was supposed to deal with such a gift!

In more rural/agrarian cultures, the offer of a prize lamb automatically sets into motion a flurry of well-coordinated activity designed to quickly reduce such a windfall to its most basic components. 

However, we suburban Jews don't exactly have a prepared check-list for how to deal with a sudden offer of a live barnyard animal.  As town-dwellers, we don't give much thought to what happens between the image of a fluffy lamb grazing happily on a grassy hillside... and the baby lamb chops that sit nestled under plastic in the glass butcher case. 

So, my friend started making phone calls... to Rabbis, friends, and anyone else who might be able to offer advice on how best to convert this gifted lamb into something that one might reasonably be expected to find in a Styrofoam tray under cellophane. 

Luckily the actual 'silencing of the lamb' had already been arranged as part of the gift and a well known kosher slaughterer was dispatched to the site to 'wack' several other lambs as well. 

Likewise, as part of the necessary kosher inspection/certification of the carcass, the grisly business of removing the skin and internal organs was already well underway by the time my friend arrived on the scene.

But even after this initial processing was completed there still remained something that looked remarkably like the little lamb it had once been... a reality that most meat-eaters never have to confront.

This is where the rest of the friends (including yours truly) were drafted into service. 

The carcass was quartered by a mutual friend of ours who is as strong as an ox... and the hind quarters were given to a skilled butcher with instructions that he would remove the necessary items to make it kosher* and to give the remaining meat to a needy family.

I was drafted to help with soaking, salting and rinsing the meat from the front quarters in order to make it permissible for kosher consumption.  This is a time-consuming process of first soaking the meat in cool water... then salting it with course salt to draw out any remaining blood... and then rinsing it repeatedly to remove any traces of salt. 

Only then were the various sections of the lamb ready to be carved into the recognizable cuts one would see in the butcher case.  The shoulder roasts and legs were cut up and placed in his freezer for safe-keeping, and the ribs were separated and placed in the refrigerator in anticipation of the evening's festivities.

Around 10:30 last night a bunch of us (including some of my friend's neighbors) took a break from our passover cleaning and converged on his back yard where an intoxicating aroma was being produced by the lamb ribs roasting noisily on the BBQ.

As we stood around in the dark with faces and hands smeared with grease, I couldn't help thinking that this was probably very similar to how things looked in ancient times when the passover offering was passed from hand to hand and shared in big communal feasts under the stars. 

OK, so they didn't have gas grills... but for me, eating this incredible gift into the wee hours of the morning helped move the whole concept of this authentic seasonal food from purely theoretical... into the realm of delicious reality.

Sadly, we don't yet merit to eat the Passover sacrifice in the appointed time and place... but I could really get used to this pre-passover reminder of what it must have been like. 

* A nice collection of information about how kosher meat is processed and prepared (including the special care needed for the hind-quarters) can be found here.