March 15, 2010
Passover Recipes

This week we received a request for a photograph from a 1938 issue of the Hadassah Newsletter. Because the exact month wasn’t known, I thumbed through each issue for that year. Although I didn’t find the photograph the researcher was looking for, I did find a page of Passover recipes from the March 1939 issue:

I was dissuaded from trying either of the first two recipes mostly because of the inclusion of suet, which I’m not ready to deal with.

The cinnamon balls, however, sounded delightful and easy so I made a batch last weekend.

They turned out to be light, chewy and very sweet drop cookies rather than balls; I recommend baking 20 minutes rather than 30.

This Manischewitz ad was printed with the recipes in the 1939 newsletter:

The Hadassah Archives contains a large collection of cookbooks, mostly published by Hadassah chapters as fundraising projects. Many of the copies now in the archives were sent to Joan Michel at Hadassah Magazine while she was selecting recipes for and editing the 2002 The Hadassah Jewish Holiday Cookbook: Traditional Recipes from Contemporary Kosher Kitchens, and turned over to the archives after this book was published.

Adeena Sussman’s “Season to Taste” in the February/March 2010 history issue of Hadassah Magazine gives a good overview of the collection.

Perhaps next I’ll try Wepawaug’s recipe for Brandy Balls. The Wepawaug (CT) chapter’s 1983 cookbook, “Matzo … Matzo … and more: a cookbook guide for Passover.”