Next: 22 to 29 Apr 2027
Passover seder
The festival of freedom, with a seder plate of bitter herbs and charoset, a paste of fruit, nuts, cinnamon and wine.
Spices for Passover seder
The seder plate holds symbolic foods: horseradish for bitterness, parsley, a roasted egg, a shank bone and charoset, a sweet paste meant to recall the mortar used by slaves. Ashkenazi charoset is apple, walnut, cinnamon and sweet wine; Sephardi and Mizrahi versions are made with dates, figs and raisins, scented with ginger, cardamom, cinnamon and cloves, in places like Iraq and Yemen, and they are often rolled into balls. Because leavened dough is barred, the week of Passover is also a week of spice-driven creativity with matzah.
The spices
Written by the EveryMasala desk with AI assistance. Background: "Passover" on Wikipedia. Customs differ from place to place and family to family. If this is your tradition and we have it wrong, tell us.
Photo credits on this page
The small pictures above come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences. Some are cropped to fit.
- Clove: Bayu Nugroho, CC BY-SA 4.0, source
- Horseradish: Pethan, CC BY-SA 3.0, source
- Cinnamon: Luc Viatour, CC BY-SA 3.0, source
- Ginger: Forest & Kim Starr, CC BY 3.0, source