Bea Lewis

Laurie just left a message on my telephone voice mail, asking for a holiday recipe she loved so much growing up. "Please e-mail me the Passover mandelbread recipe,''

I was so thrilled she wanted to recreate some of the dishes I made while she and her sisters were growing up.

I scurried through my old recipe file, many of the recipes there were ones I had published in Newsday when I was a food writer a million (or so it seems) years ago.

Her request came at a particularly bad day: a very good friend died, he literally dropped dead in the street.  He was someone younger than me who seemed in perfect health. That scared me because I'm never sick. Like a teenager, I feel invincible.

So Laurie asking for a recipe made me feel no matter what will happen to me someday, my mandelbread recipe will continue to be made - and hopefully, the grandchildren will be told that this is what grandma made every Passover.

Food can serve as a link between generations. The aroma whafting through the house can set a memory in motion - good or bad. With that Passover mandelbread on my children and grandchildren's Passover seder table, I know I will be remembered, long after I am gone.  

I don't have good memories of Passover growing up. My mother died when I was six - and the following year  my dad took my sister, Evelyn and me, to a communal seder for German immigrants someplace in Manhattan where you had to climb up a long, dark staircase to get to the catering hall.  Many of the people there had the tattoos on their arms from when they were in Nazi concentration camps. It was so depressing. No one seemed to be smiling.

I remember the awful smell of brisket  as I entered the very large dining hall, with long tables stretching from one end to the other.  I remember fearing I would vomit, keeping my lips tightly sealed as a protection. To this day, brisket evokes an unhappy Passover memory and I have never made it. I don't even have a recipe for it.

I guess, it's not only the aroma of the potted meat simmering for hours that evokes a sad memory, but the connection of that aroma with the loss of my mother.

But cooking for Passover should not only be about looking back, it should be about enjoying the present and making memories for the future. That reminds me, I have all the ingredients in the house to prepare the Passover mandelbread for this year's seder, but I forgot to get the chocolate chips. How can I expect a happy memory be made without them?