The meaning of traditions

When I was a girl, my grandmother told me that whenever her mother would prepare a brisket, she would cut a piece off the end and cook it separately. My grandmother thought it was simply a part of the preparation of a traditional Sabbath meal. Years later, when my grandmother was married with her own home, she found herself doing the same thing. It seemed a curious tradition, so she asked her mother,” why do you always cut that piece off the brisket?” To which my great-grandmother replied, “the butcher always gives me a piece of brisket that is too big for the pot I have!”

Lest any of my vegetarian friends become nervous, I am not cooking any briskets for Passover. But I was reminded of this story yesterday as I began to do some baking for the holiday. I always start with a lemon sponge cake that Barry likes.

When her sponge cake was done in the oven, my mother would invert the pan over a wine bottle (Manischewitz Concord Grape is what they always had) so it could fully cool without the cake collapsing. For the 30 odd years I have been making sponge cakes, I have done the same.  Over those years, my sponge cake pan had become rather sad, all bent and a bit leaky. This year I finally purchased a new one.

I have to say that coming out of the oven that lemon sponge cake was a vision of loveliness. I had the wine bottle (it was a kosher dry red) on the ready, but suddenly I could not seem to get the cake onto the wine bottle. Coming straight out of the oven, the cake was a bit hard to manage. Making a long story short, the bottle fell over and I nearly dropped the pan. I grabbed it with my oven mitts and managed to stand it upright on the little “legs” it has.

Ah, the little legs. My old one had these, too, but I never relied on them because of the family tradition to invert the cake over a wine bottle. When the cake pan was emptied and clean, I took the wine bottle and quickly confirmed that the diameter of the neck of the wine bottle was larger than the diameter of the hole in the sponge cake pan.

I think I was able to salvage the cake minus one small section. But I did pick up some more lemons and eggs and if I have the energy maybe I will try again. Sponge cake #2, the chocolate one that cooled in the inverted pan sitting on the counter, looks perfect.

Is there a lesson here? Try as we might, we will sometimes mess things up. We are just not perfect beings. The challenge is to accept our imperfections, do our best to correct them, and move on. My memories here are mundane examples of the charge to us on this most exhausting but richest holiday on the Jewish calendar.  

חַג כָּשֵׁר וְשָׂמֵחַ

Love,

Rebecca