If the title means nothing to you, then you really should read Jonathan Swift’s great satirical work, (under 3,500 words) here. And that’s the last high-brow reference today.

Is it a bit early to be writing about Pesach?

I’m prepared to bet none of you who think so are religious. The only good thing is that most of those who would have laughed out loud at the question are too busy to read my blog this week, since their every waking hour is devoted to cleaning for Pesach. Some of them are, at this very moment, standing in the kitchen, trying to work out how it is that they have dismantled the cooker, cleaned it thoroughly, and then precisely reversed their actions to reassemble it, and yet, having finished, they are left with one piece still sitting on the floor, and they have no idea what it does or where it goes.

Being men, they will quietly check that their wives are busy upstairs extracting imaginary leaven from the window-frame in the spare bedroom that nobody has slept in since the Shavuot before last. They will then back away a foot or so and, using a broom handle, turn the cooker on. Then, having satisfied themselves that everything works properly, and they have not blown up the house, they will quietly gather up the ‘spare’ part, and put it at the very back of the cupboard under the stairs.

Incidentally, if you have the feeling that Pesach cleaning begins too early in your home, let me tell you of a friend who can never enjoy Channuka, because he knows that every year, as soon as the Channukiyah is put away, he and his wife will start cleaning for Pesach. There’s always someone worse off than you.

It’s not actually Pesach cleaning that I wanted to talk about, but rather Pesach shopping. This is a surreal experience. Throughout the year, a trip to the supermarket is an exercise in replenishment: we buy what we either are soon to, or have already, run out of, and maybe one or two special things not on the list. Pesach shopping, however, is a completely different exercise, comparable only to the first shopping trip when setting up home for the first time. (Incidentally, when Bernice and I set up home in Bridgend, over 49 years ago, we went to Woolworths in the high street and bought all the household cleaning equipment we needed, brooms, buckets, bowls, dustpans, cloths and so forth. I remember the bill came to ₤1.50 and we were horrified.)

A Pesach shopping list, similarly, has to include everything from almonds to Zinfandel, via alumin(i)um foil, cling film (shrink wrap), and toothbrushes (toothbrushes). It is a list that goes on and on, and includes certain items in quantities that you would regard as laughable at any other time of year. (One more memory: my father z”l had a customer whose Pesach order was always larger than anyone else’s: she had a large family and was a very keen cook. She invariably ordered a long hundred of eggs (120 eggs). I remember one year her order came to over ₤21, or about ₤300 in today’s prices. Bear in mind that this was only for groceries and did not include fresh meat, fish, fruit, vegetables, or wine.)

This situation leaves us all with one main existential question: Do we go minimalist or maximalist? In other words: Do we buy everything that we might possibly need, or fancy, over Pesach? The upside of this is patently obvious: our chag is enhanced and we enjoy seven (or, outside Israel, eight) days of self-indulgence (knowing that the diet will start the day after Pesach). The downside is that we have to find somewhere to store all of this stuff.

The alternative is to buy what we need, reassuring ourselves that we can easily do without mixed spice, or two kinds of chocolate, or coffee, for a week. The downside here is that we spend the entire week looking for goods that we have forgotten that we didn’t buy, or opening the fridge, standing in front of it, and moaning: ‘Why is there absolutely nothing to put on a piece of matzo?’ or, at best, ‘Cheese again?!’

Revisiting that last paragraph, you might realise that there maximalism has other downsides. The first is that, when you reach the checkout, and the cashier tells you the amount to pay, you wonder for a moment whether they have accidentally charged you for a modest compact car as well as the contents of your trolley. The second, and the one that actually troubles me today, is that you know that, at the end of Pesach, you are going to be left with Pesach residue.

To give you a better idea of what I mean, let me tell you about some of the fallout from Pesach in our house.

The biggest single item is horseradish. Now, I know that there are strong arguments for using lettuce as your maror (bitter herbs) on Seder night, and I fully accept that, whereas lettuce can be bitter, horseradish is actually hot, spicy, pungent, rather than bitter. (Is there, I wonder, any other religion whose rituals involve tasting notes?) Nevertheless, horseradish is what we were brought up with at seder, and so horseradish is what we use. There is only one problem with this.

In my childhood household, we held two seder nights of about 20 people, in other words 40 servings of maror. Last year, Bernice and I held seder alone (as most of you did, I am sure), and, of course, in Israel we celebrate only one seder, so that is 2 servings. Unfortunately, when we went looking for maror in the supermarket, all we could find was great gnarled roots of horseradish, that looked as if they were hewn from Jack’s beanstalk: brewer’s dray carthorseradish, whereas what we really wanted was Shetland ponyradish. The solution we found was to get together (virtually) with a group of friends, and each buy a part-share in a root of horseradish.

A couple of days ago, it struck me that there is no reason why this solution should be confined to horseradish. There are all sorts of other things that we are forced to buy in much larger quantities than we need for Pesach. Most of them, I must admit, involve the baking that I do for Pesach.  

My cinnamon balls, for example, require one tablespoon of cinnamon, a spice that we use quite often but very sparingly through the year. I can’t tell you how many drums of cinnamon we have in our spice drawer. All I know is, if some freak tropical storm hits the cinnamon crop the way it hit the Madagascar vanilla crop a couple of years ago, bringing scarcity and rocketing prices, we will sell our stock and our children will never need to work again.

Or take potato flour. Please take potato flour! How many kilo did you want? My French chocolate cake takes 50 grams of potato flour, but our supermarket only stocks it in 500-gram bags. We currently have over 1½ kilo of potato flour, and we never use it other than at Pesach. This time next week, we will have over 2 kilo.

Vanilla essence? Throughout the year, we make our own essence from vanilla pods, but, at Pesach, we buy a small bottle, of which I use 4 drops in my almond macaroons.

Dessicated coconut? 200 grams for the pyramids, leaving 200 grams to sit unused in the bag.

For years, I bought a bottle of Israeli brandy every Pesach. For the sake of the 3 or 4 tots I would have over Pesach, I was never prepared to spend what a half-decent bottle would have cost me, so I ended up with firewater that sat in the cupboard all year. There’s only so much brandy butter you can make!

Ando so on, and so on.

Suddenly, this week, the solution sprang, fully-formed, into my consciousness. Google docs! This is how it works.

A Modest Proposal: For preventing the purchase of Pesach groceries from being a financial and spatial burden on purchasers, and for making it beneficial to the shul.

Step 1: A Pesach food spreadsheet! In every shul, a couple of weeks before Pesach, every family submits a form listing the goods they always buy but never finish every Pesach, stating the unit size of the product, and the quantity they actually require.

Step 2: The data is collated to produce a master list of the numbers of units the community requires.

Step 3: The shul buys the goods, and the members come to shul with their Pesach Tupperware and ziplock bags, take what they require of each item and leave a suitable donation to shul funds.

End result: A reduction in everyone’s shopping bills, an end to over-buying, probably a profit for the shul, nobody going without because the supermarket sold out of chraine. Win-win-win-win!

Despite my early start, perhaps a tad too late to implement this year, although we will be posting individually on our shul WhatsApp, offering 450 grams of potato flour, 6 inches of horseradish, and so on. And next year, I expect to see this proposal adopted by shuls worldwide.

Note to self: Sell shares in cinnamon.

Meanwhile, all around the world, Jews are using up their open bags of flour.