I dreaded Passover, because the foods tasted consistently awful. We had to give up our cereals, our bagels, our challah, and replace them with tasteless matzohs that required a sweeping layer of butter and strawberry jam, or pimento cheese, to make them edible. We had to have only "Kosher for Passover" foods, which meant different brands, some of them Israeli. Humpty-Dumpty potato chips were out in favour of Mad Hatter; sugary jelly candies in the shape of fruit slices that made my teeth ache for a different reason; no more Betty Crocker or Duncan Hynes cake mixes, or my mother's honey cake, but hard mandelbrot that made you think you were going to break your teeth. They even managed to make apple juice taste terrible. There were only two things that made Passover bearable. The first was the Israeli chocolate syrup to make chocolate milk; it tasted better than Quik and mixed more easily. The other was the Montreal tradition of celebrating the end of Passover by going to Yangtze's Chinese restaurant on Van Horne.

After a week of enduring all those dry, tasteless, or sour foods, we could enjoy the egg rolls, the glorious pineapple chicken that my mother, after some years, figured out how to make, and the spare ribs. We would either order from Yangtze's or go out to the restaurant. I always preferred ordering in, because if we went there we would have to line up, and then once we were seated my parents would inevitably meet lots of people they knew (I noticed there were never any Chinese people eating there), mainly my mother's friends from B'nai Brith. "Shirley, hi!" "Jack, what's doing?" "You look like you've had enough--look at that pot!" They would all start chatting loudly, meaning even further delays in ordering, and breaking the sort-of fast.