Thanks so much to Michael Makovi for this terrific guest post.  Michael is a seminary student in Machon Meir in Jerusalem, studying to be a layman and frequently comments on the Jew and the Carrot.

I had the pleasure of meeting Mia Rut in person the other day, and, among sundry other matters, we discussed our respective minhagim, i.e. the various customs we were raised with. She discussed her mother’s date cookies, and I discussed my mother’s Passover rolls.

Growing up, every year, my mother would spend the days before Passover baking ten to twenty thousand Passover rolls, and she’d fill up a few bags of them, to stuff into the freezer. For the week of Passover, and the weeks thereafter as well, we’d consume roll after roll, in lieu of bread. The secret, of course, is ten thousand eggs in place of every spoonful of yeast. The result is a fluffy and very pungent-tasting roll. When I was younger, I didn’t like them so much, but now that my taste buds have aged, I am much more fond of them. Be that as it may, however, their mere presence is what defines the occurrence of Passover for me.

I asked my mother for her recipe, which she says came from a college classmate’s bubbe. Unfortunately, we just now discovered that the relevant section of her homemade cookbook has been water damaged beyond legibility. Luckily, online we found some recipes that approximate hers. The two recipes (“Passover Rolls“, by Ida Fidelmanare and “Passover Rolls (Parve, Passover)“, by Giora Shimoni) are slightly different from each other, so perhaps my mother’s recipe was somewhere in between. The illustration at one of them is very similar to my memory of my mother’s, so hopefully this means the recipes are indeed equivalent.

(Author’s note: I very much enjoyed my conversation with Mia Rut. Very rarely do I have the opportunity for such a thoughtful conversation, even more rarely are others so willing to listen to me myself talk so long, and even more rarely, once the previous conditions are met, is the other one who disagrees on as many matters as she did with me. For her meeting all these conditions, I must therefore consider it an honor for me to have had this chance to meet her.)

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My Minhag Avot – My Charoset