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Whether the last supper was a Passover Seder I do not know. I do know that the rituals of the Passover dinner have been in place for thousands of years, although always open to evolution. And yet, there don’t seem to be any universal elements about Easter celebratory foods. The episode looks at these two contrasting aspects of ritual food.
First, Susan Weingarten talks about an essential item on the Passover table that is not mentioned in God’s original instructions for the last supper of the Israelites in Egypt.
Then, I talk to Lois Long about a recipe made famous by her mother, Edna M. Holmgren. Magic Marshmallow Crescent Puffs won the Pillbury Bake-Off in 1969 and were subsequently expropriated by some Christians to retell the story of the resurrection.
The recipe
This copy of Edna Holmgren’s recipe is not quite the original. Lois Long told me that “the flour in the cinnamon sugar mixture was Pillsbury’s idea. I cut it down to 1 tbsp but I don’t like it. The original recipe has no flour.” I do wonder what it is there for. Possibly to soak up melting gooeyness, because many of the comments on the Hall of Fame website are complaints about the mess if the pastry isn’t very carefully sealed.
Notes
- Susan Weingarten’s book Haroset: A Taste of Jewish History is published by The Toby Press.
- Huge thanks to Lois Long for sharing her time, her memories, and copies of some of her memorabilia.
- The cover image is a print by Jacob Cornelisz van Oostsanen after Albrecht Dürer, from the Rosenwald Collection of the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC.
- The banner image of The Last Supper is by the workshop of Pedro Berruguete, circa 1495–1500, a gift of the Ahmanson Foundation to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
- Oooops. Oh dear. I thought I had double checked the date of Pesach, but I apparently got it wrong. I said Thursday. It is Friday. Sincere apologies.
Of course I am going to resurrect my podcast episode about Celebrating Passover and Easter. Maybe a bit late for tonight’s seder, but plent
Thank you‼️ Happy Easter to you both🌸
So fascinated was I with everything I was learning about the Passover meal from Susan Weingarten that I allowed something she said to pass without further comment. The lamb that God told the Jews to sacrifice was chosen, she said, specifically because eating lamb was an abomination to the Egyptians. I’m glad I did ignore it, in a way, because the distraction didn’t seem worth a detour then. But a podcast listener found herself distracted from the episode itself by this casual remark. I promised I would investigate further.
My only sources are those available online, and they seem clear enough. Egyptians worshipped the ram. Or rather, the ram was sacred to two Egyptian gods, Amun and Khnum. And the Egyptians did not think much of people who tended to the needs of sheep.
Amun with his ram’s horns, part of a Roman grave at castle Hollenburg in Austria
Joseph – he of the many-coloured coat – coaches his brothers when they come to Egypt in search of grazing to say that they are keepers of cattle, not sheep, “for every shepherd is an abomination to the Egyptians”. They don’t obey him, and confess to Pharoah that they are shepherds, and yet he welcomes them and even tells Joseph that he could use a few good shepherds himself. So the status of shepherds is somewhat doubtful.
Online sources, however, say that the Egyptians also did not think much of people who ate lamb, and that Moses and “any educated person” would have been well aware of this. In fact, Moses objects when God tells him about the sacrifice. “If we sacrifice the abomination of Egypt in front of them, will they not stone us?”
God, on this view, is commanding the Jews to obey him and, when they do, to trust him to protect them. “Sacrificing the Egyptian gods and smearing the blood of their gods on our doorposts was an amazing act of bravery on the part of our Jewish ancestors,” according to this site
A further twist is that the astrological sign of the month of Nisan, when the Passover slaughter and the exodus take place, is Aries, the ram. The slaughter, in fact, is ordained for the middle of the month, the time of the full moon when the ram-gods ought to be at the height of their powers, “and the Egyptians would be powerless to prevent it!”
That all holds together more or less, for a non-scholar like me. Others, however don’t buy it, because “the Egyptians themselves ate meat of animals that they worshipped”.
There are other opposing views too, of course. This is a question of Jewish interpretation, after all. Why a sheep? suggests that the choice of a lamb is not because it is an affront to the Egyptians but rather a circling around to God’s original promise to Abraham, after he has agreed to sacrifice his son Isaac. The clinching detail here is that the Passover lamb must be male, “just like the ram that replaced [Isaac]”.
Well, maybe.
Photo of Amun with his ram’s horns, part of a Roman grave at castle Hollenburg in Austria by Johann Jaritz / CC BY-SA 4.0.
“Sometimes it explodes if I’m not careful.” :-))))))
Oh dear. I thought I had double checked the date of Pesach, but I apparently got it wrong. I said Thursday. It is Friday. Sincere apologies.