The Passover seder is over, but we are still eating matzo…
Here are a few images of matzo making equipment — machines and ovens — in several historic synagogues.
We have posted some of them before, but it’s alway fun to take another look.
Here below is a description of how matzo was made in the synagogue couplex in the Tuscan hill town of Pitigliano. It’s from the landmark (and now, sadly, out of print) 1981 book The Classic Cuisine of the Italian Jews, by Edda Servi Machlin — a native of Pitigliano — who describes in vivid terms how matzo was baked in the oven, which was opened just once a year, for Passover.
“[T]he oven was one of our most important facilities,” she writes. […] “At the time I was growing up [in the 1930s], the oven was not in operation all year round. But once a year, the opening of the oven just before passover was a thrilling event for children and adults alike.”
Morevover, she adds, amid the bustle of cleaning, kneading and baking, “for the young people the bakery was a happy hunting ground, a perfect place to gather to carry on flirtation and love affairs. Many a marriage was arranged while kneading the bits of dough, and perhaps even a few were wrecked during those vernal days.”
