All products featured on Vogue are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.
For Olivia Michel, matzo is the consummate snack.
A theater props artisan and social worker who grew up in Harlem, Michel is not Jewish—yet her love of the infamous unleavened bread of Passover is still firmly rooted in nostalgia. During afternoons spent watching TV with her close friend Talia, whose family are Reform Jews, Michel would snack on plain, unsalted matzo spread with peanut butter and honey.
“It could be like the week after Passover or something, or any random Wednesday afternoon, and Talia would be like “do you want a snack?” And I’d be like “yeah, I want a snack!’” Michel says.
Responses like Michel’s are pretty bewildering to people who—like myself—associate matzo with the highly specific dietary restrictions of Passover, which this year starts at sundown on April 22. Because matzo is the only bread-like food considered kosher for Passover (with the exception of “bread” made from matzo meal, such as Passover bagels), it can sometimes feel more like something to be tolerated than like a treat. As a child—and now as an otherwise non-observant Jewish adult—I considered matzo’s only saving grace to be the fact that it took well to gobs of salted butter, the perfect chaser to a frond of parsley dunked in saltwater. Each year, out of a desire for continuity, I still dutifully swap matzo in for chametz—any food made from wheat, barley, oats, rye, or spelt which is not baked within 18 minutes from the moment it touches water—and forget about it for the other 51-ish weeks of the year.
I’m far from the only person who regards matzo as a strictly Passover food. Upon learning what I was writing about, several Jewish acquaintances reacted with complete disbelief that anyone would crack open a box of Streit’s or Yehuda—two of the major manufacturers of matzo purchased in the US—outside of Passover. “They’re lying to you,” insisted one person—a formerly Orthodox Jew—whom I met at a party. On the culinary forum eGullet, where I posted in search of answers on the topic, the responses ranged from baffled to outright defamatory: “You d have to be meshugge to eat that stuff year-round,” wrote one Jewish forum user.
Yet matzo clearly has value as a year-round snack or meal option in its own right—even beyond Ashkenazi classics like matzo brei and matzo ball soup. According to Aron Yagoda—a fourth-generation co-owner of Streit’s, which holds an estimated 40 percent of the US matzo market—only 60 percent of yearly matzo sales occur during the Passover season. High matzo sales in a supermarket with a very small kosher section usually indicate that a large number of non-Jewish customers are purchasing it, Yagoda explains over the phone. “We attribute that to maybe half non-Jews and half Jews,” he says.
With the recent rebranding of Manischewitz—one of the other major players in the US matzo market—that non-Jewish customer base may continue to grow. The boxes, which now feature a bold orange color palette, chunky new typeface, and doodle-like illustrations, look less like a kosher aisle staple and more like a product you’d find on the shelf of a boutique grocery, à la Graza olive oil. The new aesthetic is an effort to “capture the hearts of the culturally curious and kosher-keeping alike, offering a taste of Jewish tradition that is accessible to all,” Shani Seidman, the chief marketing officer for Manischewitz’s parent company, Kayco, told Forbes.
Outside of this kind of rebranding—plus the fact that a box of matzo is, Yagoda says, often much cheaper than a product like Carr’s Table Water Crackers—the simplicity of matzo is precisely what appeals to folks like Michel. “I can put anything on it,” she says. Peanut butter and honey remain her go-to combination of toppings.
That plainness is also what appeals to Adonis Icalina, a non-Jewish chef and author based in the Philippines. “There’s something comforting about its straightforwardness, especially in a world where food can sometimes be overly complicated,” Icalina says over email. The crispy texture and mildly nutty flavor of matzo, Icalina says, is “unlike anything I grew up with in the Philippines.”
Icalina has to scour local specialty shops and online retailers like the Filipino shopping website Lazada to get hold of matzo, and to “[ensure] that I get an authentic, high-quality product,” he says. He likes it so much, in fact, that he serves it at his restaurant, where he uses it as a base for a Filipino-style pizza or crumbled into an extra-crunchy crust for fried chicken.
In the Netherlands, where matzo has been manufactured since before World War II to cater to the once-thriving population of Dutch Jews, the product is slightly easier to get hold of. Like crackers or sliced bread, it’s nothing fancy—just the perfect carb-heavy filler food.
“People just eat them like they would with any cracker,” says Yvette van Boven, a food writer and chef based in the Netherlands, over email. While van Boven, the child of Dutch parents, grew up in Ireland, her husband—who grew up in the Netherlands, and is not Jewish—ate matzo from Dutch brands like Hollandia. “We buy them now and then, for lunch or for a snack,” says van Boven. In the Netherlands, she says, people often top them with butter and a sprinkle of sugar, or similar sweet toppings. “To [my husband], it’s very normal food.”
There’s also matzo’s portability factor: the crackers’ sturdiness makes them ideal for an “on-the-go, running meal,” Michel says. She even once brought matzo with her on the way to the Tony Awards, she recalls.
Michel isn’t the first person to turn to matzo as a portable meal option. Aside from the ancient Israelites, who famously made their exodus from Egypt with cakes of unleavened bread on their backs (hence the fact that we eat matzo on Passover to begin with), pioneers heading west from Cincinnati in the late 19th century would load up on matzo from the newly founded Manischewitz bakery. Matzo—which is made from just flour and water—provided a reliably nonperishable source of sustenance. “It was a way of having [bread] to keep your family fed while going into the prairie, and kind of settling the west,” says Jeffrey Yoskowitz, Jewish food expert and author of The Gefilte Manifesto, a cookbook of Ashkenazic Jewish recipes.
Even if you’re not an ancient Israelite or a pioneer, however, that shelf life is a major selling point for matzo. “The best thing about it is you forget about it and you find it in the cabinet three months later, and it’s still fine!” says Rebecca Firkser, a writer and recipe developer who, while Jewish, does not keep kosher for Passover. “So it’s like bonus crackers, which I’m never mad about.”
Instagram content
While I’m looking over my interviews, I’m shocked to find that my mouth is starting to water. I’m thinking of plain matzo spread thickly with soft butter, crumbled into a pan of beaten eggs for matzo brei, or even just nibbled on, mouse-like, as I walk past the box sitting on my shelf. I’m thinking of the peanut butter and jelly matzo sandwiches I used to take with me to school, the tam-tam crackers I spread with my bubbe’s homemade chopped liver, rich and gamy and rife with the taste of onion. I think of the plain matzo wrapped in a cloth napkin at my aunt’s house, the object in a heart-racing hunt for the afikomen.
As someone with both an anxious stomach and a caffeine habit, I often look to plain food like bananas and crackers as a soothing, neutral balm. I could easily go through an entire sleeve of saltines or a box of Carr’s water crackers if I wasn’t paying attention. What makes matzo any less deserving of a late-night snack session while watching back-to-back episodes of The West Wing?
Maybe this year, I’ll pick up an extra box or two of Streit’s—unsalted, of course.