Eat This Newsletter 236: Leavened
Hello
A further celebration of Passover, fish diversity, citrus salads and livestock emissions.
Passover as Identity
Many Jews will be celebrating Passover tonight, a good three weeks after Easter, which was reason enough for me to publish last week a new version of my episode on Easter and Passover foods. Today, I want to briefly bring back to life a follow-up piece I wrote at the time and extend the discussion to one of the canonical foods of Passover, unleavened bread.
First, my investigation of an aspect of the Jews’ last meal in Egypt that I didn’t pursue with Susan Weingarten. She said that God told the Jews to sacrifice a lamb specifically because eating lamb “was an abomination to the Egyptians”. Why was that?
The sources I read at the time suggested it was because the ram (and the Jews were enjoined to sacrifice a male lamb) was sacred to two Egyptian Gods and also the Egyptians did not think much of shepherds. On this reading, not only was God asking the Jews to obey him and to entrust him with their safety, he was also setting them apart from Egyptians. Others, of course, have different interpretations, and I’m no biblical scholar, but that view does have some appeal.
For unleavened bread, the standard story is that there wasn’t time to let the bread rise before the Jews would have to make their escape. To commemorate, Exodus 12, among other instructions, tells the Jews to “put away leaven out of your houses”. The prohibition is repeated a fair few times. The big question, then, is what happens to the leaven during Passover?
Eric Pallant offers his story of sourdough and passover with versions of recent attempts to recreate the bread of the ancient Egyptians, who were obviously skilled bakers of leavened bread. On that basis, some religious scholars have said that the prohibition on leavened bread serves to further separate the Jews’ identity from that of their oppressors. There’s more, of course, but to me, that nicely extends the thinking behind the sacrifice of the ram lamb.
Pallant also brings the whole question up to date:
Before the return of sourdough to American tables, say, 50 years ago, the question of sourdough and Passover had mostly been relegated to discussions by Rabbis and Jewish theologians.
Passover, he points out, has even more stringent rules than the normal kosher restrictions, so although an ordinary sourdough starter is kosher, it is not kosher for Passover precisely because it is a leaven. (There’s a whole lot more to know on this tricky point, just don’t take their comments on baking seriously.)
What is an observant Jewish sourdough baker to do? Three options.
Sell the starter to a Gentile and buy it back at the end of Passover. The prohibition is against owning leaven, and this technique was also used during a Jubilee year.
Cook it and start again a week later.
Throw it away and start again a week later.
There's a spiritual dimension to each of these, Pallant points out, but questions remain. Are any of you observant Jewish sourdough bakers? What’s your solution?
More Fish in the Sea
A long read from The Guardian takes a global look at fish as food, at the heart of which is a strange paradox: in many countries, even those with advanced fishing fleets, most of the fish people eat is imported while most of the fish they catch is exported.
All of the usual suspects have been rounded up: industrialisation in the fishing industry; convenience and unskilled home cooks and professional chefs; marketing and fashion; supermarkets, which will always prefer reliable supplies that are easy to process, even if they come from further afield. The trade-offs make my head spin too. “A local, small-scale fishery may still be putting pressure on a delicate population, while a more distant fishery might have higher carbon emissions but be exploiting a more stable population.”
Examining my own attitudes to fish, I can see that I am guilty of almost all the sins described. I do choose frozen salmon steaks (Alaskan, not farmed, for preference) because they are easy and convenient. I eat mussels with great pleasure at restaurants, but never think to cook them. Same for small fish, like anchovies, though I do eat tinned sardines at home. Time to try and change that.
Orange Is Not the Only Colour
Citrus salad has, apparently, conquered the internet. I say apparently because the part I inhabit seems so far to have been spared. Elsewhere, however:
Just about everyone seems to have a recipe for Sicilian-style citrus salad these days. The colorful combination of oranges photographs beautifully, particularly since the fruits span a spectrum of deep red to pale yellow, from blood oranges to grapefruits. In the era of visual-forward social media like TikTok and Instagram, brightly colored foods get the clicks.
Ian MacAllen surveyed the socials and came up with a history and guide to citrus salads. The thing that surprised me most was that the simple idea of a citrus salad should have become so firmly attached, as far as the socials are concerned, to Sicily. MacAllen attempts to explain this with reference to the diversity of colours available in Sicilian varieties and other factors but, as he points out, early versions of the dish in American media tended to associate it with north Africa and especially Morocco.
Fennel salad, with a bit of orange and salty black olives is a personal favourite, but to my mind the best dish in the family is one of the simplest desserts — barely more than a piece of fruit — that I first came across in Morocco. Remove the peel and pith, slice thinly and sprinkle with cinnamon and the barest hint of brown sugar for crunch. Of course you can get fancier, but if the oranges are good, less is more.
Livestock Emissions Questioned
Agriculture is responsible for around a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions around the world. Estimating that is hard enough, but estimating the specific contribution of livestock to agriculture’s total is fraught with difficulties. You might expect the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations to have the most reliable numbers. You would be wrong.
According to a shorter read in The Guardian, the FAO systematically misused scientific evidence to downplay emissions from livestock and the impact of eating less meat. Pathways towards lower emissions, released for COP 28 in December 2023, was FAO’s third report on livestock and greenhouses gasses and the third to reduce its estimate of livestock’s impact.
Two academics have written to FAO “calling for an urgent retraction [of the report] on the basis of numerous framing, methodological, and data errors”. The Guardian has more details of the various errors and quotes one of the researchers.
“The FAO’s errors were multiple, egregious, conceptual and all had the consequence of reducing the emissions mitigation possibilities from dietary change far below what they should be. None of the mistakes had the opposite effect.”
Sounds pretty damning. FAO said it “will look into the issues raised by the academics and undertake a technical exchange of views with them”.
Take care
