An ode to lightly salted matzos

Where have you been all my life?

Welcome to It’s A Shanda, one Northeastern Jew’s quest to find a decent bagel in Seattle (and beyond). Along with free bagel reviews every Sunday-ish, we also offer bonus posts each week. If you’re already subscribed, I hope you’ll consider upgrading to a paid subscription! Thank you for reading.

I recently rewatched my Bar Mitzvah service and was surprised to see how my memories of that day differ from reality.

Long sequestered to a VHS cassette gathering dust in a box, I finally had the video recordings of my service and afterparty digitized (shoutout to Mercer Island’s TapedMemories.com). Watching them now over 30 years later (!!!), I was struck by how the scaffolding of my memories was correct, but the intricate details deviated or weren’t present in my mind at all.

There was a confidence present that I do not remember having. The kind of bluster that only comes from being a 13-year-old boy on your big day, blissfully unaware of the many things you do not know. Standing there on the bema next to Rabbi Weiner, I peppered my prepared thank you speech with jabs at my younger sister and wry smiles in the direction of my family to see if they were laughing. I seemed like someone very happy to be the center of attention.

My presumption that I had always been an introverted writer masked my performance roots.

That makes sense. We’ve long known that memory is a reconstruction of what you believe happened based on how you’re interpreting and understanding it at this moment. There are many moments that I’ve come to realize I remember differently than how they actually happened, often to embarrassing realization.

For Hannukah this year, I decided to re-commence a tradition of making matzo ball soup and latkes. It went…okay. I’d taken a year off and all the hard lessons I’d forgotten beforehand rushed back to me each time I made a familiar mistake. Still, the matzo balls were fairly fluffy, the latkes were somewhat crispy, and the soup was mostly edible.

As you might already know, you can’t have matzo ball soup and latkes without some matzo. I forgot to put it on my shopping list but was invariably reminded to grab a box when I arrived at “The Jewish Shelf” in my local supermarket. You know the one, the shelf (or two shelves) where they pack all the Jewish foods in the month leading up to a holiday. Matzo, matzo ball mix, latke mix, gefilte fish, macaroons, egg noodles, borscht, and grape juice. It’s all there, regardless of what Jewish holiday is approaching.

I grabbed a box of matzo off the shelf and dropped it into my cart. I didn’t think much of it, other than to note that I was buying Streit’s brand matzos. It hadn’t occurred to me until this moment that I was subconsciously brand loyal to Manischewitz and felt like I was doing something bad.

I always forget how much I love to eat matzo. Every time I have a box in the house, it becomes a go-to snack, good any time of the day. I love the process of eating it. Starting at a corner and working my way in. Biting hard enough to get a decent mouthful but not so hard that you destroy the integrity of the sheet. Appreciating the delightful blandness of the flavor. Locating and devouring the crumbs left behind when you’re done.

In this instance, I might have simply appreciated this matzo as the many I’d eaten before. But after one bite, I immediately noticed a difference. Something was there that shouldn’t be there. Salty goodness.

It turned out I’d bought lightly salted matzos. I’m a tried and true plain matzo consumer, but all of a sudden I was faced with the stark reality that I had in my possession an entire box of matzo dusted with light salt.

And it was amazing. Gamechanging. One of the moments in one’s life when you realize everything up until then has been a lie and only now do you understand the meaning of life.

Lightly salted matzos was that meaning.

Surely I’d had lightly salted matzos, right? I’ve been served it before, haven’t I? I’m a creature of habit but surely I’ve been to enough Passover Sedars and Hannukah dinners to come across it at some point. Plus, the good people at Streit’s don’t strike me as the experimental type. I get the sense their audience has been pretty set in stone since 1916. Jews have been salting the hell out of their food long before that. There’s nothing new about lightly salted matzos.

And yet…here I was, experiencing it for the first time. Or was I? Had I eaten lightly salted matzo at some point when I was younger? Did I not enjoy it? Was it too much flavor for my fledgling palate? Had I enjoyed it but simply forgotten all about it the next time I grabbed a box of matzo off the shelf?

It’s a feeling I had the first time I ate Indian food in my late 20s, simultaneously thrilled by the taste sensations and furious that I’d wasted so much time having never tried it.

Please don’t tell anyone I just compared Indian food to matzo. I’m just trying to make a point about how forceful a flavor experience can be when you realize it’s exactly what you’ve always been looking for but didn’t know it.

I have no memory of lightly salted matzos, and yet it was always right there.

I’ve got a whole year before Hannukah comes back around. Well, that’s not entirely true. Hannukah begins on Dec 14 next year. But this time, I plan on practicing my matzo ball soup and latkes beforehand. And I am damn sure going to make sure I buy lightly salted matzos on purpose.

This is a memory I refuse to let go.

Thanks for actually reading this far. If you enjoyed my bagel review and want to read more of them, make sure you’re subscribed to It’s A Shanda. Know someone in the Greater Seattle Area (or beyond) who would appreciate way-too-detailed reviews of local bagels? Please forward the link their way.