The Jewish celebration of Passover is a week-long Feast of Unleavened Bread, or “matzo” in Hebrew. Most Jews stick to matzo and avoid regular bread, wheat products, rice, corn, and beans. This may change, though, since an 800-year-old religious ban on rice and beans was just overturned.
Ingenious cooks over the centuries have found ways to make the most of matzo, by using sheets of softened matzo in place of lasagna noodles, for example, or transforming matzo crumbs into soup dumplings — so-called matzo balls. But what if you want a spicier treat, like nachos? Not to worry! This video from NBC’s TODAY SHOW has the recipe.
The rabbis’ rice and beans reprieve made NPR’s Maria Godoy a happy Hispanic:
As a Latina who married into a Jewish family, I’ve long lobbied my in-laws to include beans and rice on the Passover menu. The holiday is a time when Jews avoid leavened foods in commemoration of their biblical exodus from Egypt — when they had to flee so fast, they couldn’t even let the bread rise
But beans and rice aren’t leavened, I’ve argued, so why not include them in the Seder meal? The answer I’ve long gotten from my mother-in-law: tradition.