Tag #118961 - Interview #100488 (Leya Yatsovskaya )

Long before the holiday honey wine was made from hop. It was in the bottles covered by gauze in several layers for the chametz not to fall into it, God forbid. Of course, the matzah which my father brought from the synagogue in the basket, covered with a clean bed sheet, was the main food. We ate it instead of bread and made keyzele, cookies and cakes. Every day during the Pascal period we ate eggs fried on goose fat, with matzah. It was delicious. Apart from traditional gefilte fish, chicken and chicken broth with matzah kneydlakh and all kinds of tsimes and stew, there were also desserts. Imberlach is a dessert cooked as follows: carrots, ginger, sugar and orange peels are stewed for a long time until it gets thick. Then it’s spread on the board and cut after the mixture cools down. There was also angemach. It was made from sour beets with nuts. Beets were pickled before Pesach. My mother also cooked Pascal borscht from those sour beets. We ate it with matzah. On seder night we put a goblet with wine on the shelf in the hall. The wine was meant for the Prophet Elijah. The door to the hall wasn’t locked. When I was a child, I believed that Prophet Elijah really existed and that he went over to every Jewish house. Other holidays were marked in our family as well, but we didn’t prepare for them like for this one, so I don’t remember them that well.