Published: March 14, 2007 04:36 pm      

FOOD: Planning Passover

Elaine Bloom’s Passover seder was interrupted one year when several guests had to leave unexpectedly to care for their child. The meal was delayed while another guest took them home.

Bloom figured her main course, salmon fillet, would be inedible. “My salmon was in the oven for over two hours,” said Bloom, a professional organizer with a business called A Place For Everything in Maplewood, N.J.

But the salmon “came out fabulous,” she said. She’d roasted the fish, along with a few other ingredients like wine, butter, garlic, dill and lemon, in an oven bag.

By accident, Bloom discovered that it didn’t matter how long the dish cooked. “If the seder is an hour shorter or an hour longer than you think it will be, it’s fine. Now I make that salmon every year.”

Flexibility, forgiving recipes and advance preparation are the keys to a successful seder - or any other feast where you have numerous guests, multiple courses and you can’t be certain when the food will be served.

This unpredictability is especially true of a seder, the ritual feast held to celebrate the Jewish holiday of Passover. Prayers, songs, games, and a retelling of the Biblical story of Exodus precede a multi-course meal that can include hard-boiled eggs, gefilte fish, matzoh ball soup; a main course of brisket, fish, chicken or lamb; and special desserts like sponge cake and flourless tortes. You can’t predict how long the ceremonial aspects of the meal will take, so you never know when you’ll be sitting down to eat the roast or the fish.

“It’s the hardest meal to orchestrate,” agreed Joan Nathan, a James Beard award winner and author of many cookbooks, including “Jewish Cooking in America.” Nathan expects 40 guests at her seder when Passover begins at sundown on April 2.

Despite all the work involved in hosting a seder, “for many Jews, it’s the warmest and most meaningful holiday of the year, perhaps the only time that person thinks about what it means or what they want it to mean, to be a Jew here and now.” said the novelist and poet Marge Piercy, who’s just come out with a new book called “Pesach For the Rest of Us: Making the Passover Seder Your Own.” (Pesach is the Hebrew word for Passover.)

Liberation is the theme of the Passover story, and the following tips can help liberate you from the stress of organizing the big meal, whether you’re making a seder or any other feast.

• Make to-do lists and start shopping far in advance. “Go through your menu recipe by recipe and put the shopping list together,” said Sandra Blank, editor of “The Kosher Palette” and “The Kosher Palette II.” “That to me is the most overwhelming part, but you can do that weeks ahead of time.”

Nathan keeps her list stored in the computer, which makes it easy to update the next year. As the big day approaches, she said, “I love crossing things off.”

Don’t forget chores like making place cards, and borrowing or buying a fold-out table, extra chairs or silverware to accommodate your crowd.

• Start cooking well before the big day. “I am a big advocate of things that can be made ahead of time,” said Blank, including soups, main courses, salad dressing, side dishes and desserts.

If you have freezer space, you can make many dishes a week or more beforehand, then freeze and defrost the day before or the day of the seder. Sponge cake “freezes like a dream,” said Nechama Cohen, author of “Enlitened Kosher Cooking.”

Soup can be frozen in a plastic container and defrosted by running the container under hot water until it loosens. Then flip it over the top of a pot. “Warm and defrost on a very, very low flame,” said Blank. “A thicker soup will burn on the bottom so stir it to keep it moving.”

If you make a roast in advance, slice and cool before freezing. Use bakeware that can go from oven to freezer, then back to the oven for warming, and right on the table for serving, Cohen advised.

• Use cooking techniques that don’t require a lot of last-minute attention to detail. Cohen undercooks her seder entrees a bit so that when they are warming up, they won’t overcook. A recipe with a sauce or gravy can also help “cover up whatever might happen to it,” she added.

Instead of hot vegetable sides, Nathan serves an asparagus salad and a leek salad with a beet puree.

Use a “very low oven, 180 or 200 degrees” to keep chicken or brisket warm until you’re ready to eat it, said Blank. “You want it to be a slow process so nothing will dry out.”

If you’re warming up a pan of hors d’oeuvres or some other side dish, Cohen said it will look fresher if you give it a light coating of nonstick cooking spray and cover with waxed paper rather than tin foil.

• Take shortcuts and don’t do everything yourself.

Take some tasks off your to-do list by asking guests to bring wine, juice for the kids or even flowers for the table.

Nathan actually assigns her guests recipes from her own cookbooks, and she serves the main part of her meal as a buffet.

To make serving and clearing easier, “have a lot of trays around,” said Cohen. “It also really pays to get a wheelcart.” Look for them at flea markets, she added.

Ask kids to help clear dishes, or hire a college student or someone else to help for the evening if you have a really big crowd, said Nathan.

Consider plastic plates from the party store as an alternative to china. (Paper plates won’t work for a seder; they can’t handle sauces and are too easily cut through with a knife.) Observant Jews have separate sets of dishes just for Passover, but no matter what, it can be a challenge to come up with enough plates for all those courses and guests.

The plastic plates are inexpensive and come in many bright colors, which can complement your tablecloth, napkins and table flowers.

Bloom made the switch to plastic for Passover after she walked into her kitchen one year, post-seder, to find “mounds of dirty dishes and pots and pans, because there were lots and lots of courses. I decided right there that I was not going to use regular dishes again.” With plastic, “at the end of each course, you just throw the stuff out.”

Bloom admitted that “it is very bad for the environment. But it’s something I only do once or twice a year.”