The Fruits of Their Labor: A Sephardified Seder

I had no idea you could host a Passover Seder without gefilte fish.

I have always served this cold, ground-up fish in jellied stock because my mother did, because her mother did, and so on, back to some very small village in Lithuania. That's what most Ashkenazic Jews eat to start the meal that commemorates their liberation from slavery in ancient Egypt.

From there, we go to chicken soup with matzoh balls; hard-cooked eggs in saltwater; simply stewed brisket, lamb or chicken; a green vegetable; cake made with potato flour; and tooth-achingly sweet jellied fruit slice candies.

It turns out, though, that Jews in many parts of the world have an entirely different holiday meal. At Yash and Gail Shirazi's Seder in Rockville, there's turkey stuffed with rice, nuts and fruits; chicken soup flavored with sour lime; cabbage stuffed with ground beef, mint, raisins, carrots and rice; and choresh, a Persian stew of meat, eggplant, tomato paste and spices. Desserts are lots of fruits and nuts, and cakes made with almond flour, nuts and honey.

Who knew it could be so colorful and exotic? I didn't even know there were options. That's because the majority of American Jews are, like me, Ashkenazi, meaning our relatives came, in droves, to Ellis Island from Europe. The Shirazis are Sephardic, which means, among other things, that they have better food.

The term Sephardic comes from the Hebrew word for Spanish and originally referred to Jews expelled from the Iberian Peninsula in 1492. The exiles settled in countries along the Mediterranean Sea: North Africa, Italy, Syria, Palestine. Rabbi Joshua Maroof of Magen David Sephardic Congregation in Rockville says the term now applies to any community with customs different from those of Ashkenazic Jewry. "It's even applied to Yemenite Jews, who have a culture all their own," he says. "It's come to refer to communities with common culture but not really common ethnic background."

There are differences in culture and philosophy between Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jews, but in the basics there are far more similarities, except at the table. Sephardic cooking "is so immensely varied, eclectic and regional -- different in every country and sometimes in every city -- that it defies definition," Claudia Roden writes in "The Book of Jewish Food." "Its main characteristic is its diversity."

That diversity is on parade at the Shirazi Seder. They have 40 to 50 people, and it's a very international group. They read the Haggada, the story of the Jews' exodus from Egypt, in Greek, Spanish, Judeo-Arabic, Turkish, French and Farsi.

Yash Shirazi, 57, and his wife, Gail, 54, serve the foods Yash has been eating at Passover since he was a child in Tehran. Some guests bring their own traditional foods, and they always have a small plate of gefilte fish for Gail's brother.

"I have become Sephardified," says Gail, who grew up in an Ashkenazic family in Rockville.

Gail, a senior acquisitions specialist for Israeli and Persian collections at the Library of Congress, learned to cook Persian food from her husband and from her mother-in-law, who she says "was the best Persian cook in the area." But Yash presides over the making of the haroset, a word that comes from the Hebrew word for clay and symbolizes the mortar that the Israelites built with while slaves in Egypt.

At Ashkenazic Seders, the haroset usually consists of chopped apples, walnuts and cinnamon mixed with wine. I always thought it was delicious. Then I tasted the halek, or Persian haroset, that Yash Shirazi learned to make from his mother. I once was blind, but now I see.