My mother considered every holiday an ideal opportunity to exercise her culinary skills. She did turkey and pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving, roast beef and Yorkshire pudding at Christmas, latkes on Chanukah, and a ham for Easter so sinfully delicious it would have made Mary Magdalene blush. Her favorite festival was the Jewish Passover, not because of the meaning of the celebration but because it gave her eight full days of brand new menus to create. Passover was a marvelous marathon of cooking for my mother and she outdid herself every year.

Passover is a holiday that uses none of the ordinary staples of the kitchen. The sponge cakes we serve at that time of year are made with flour that has no wheat in it and are leavened with eggs. The traditional sponge cake was a dry, lemon flavored thing that could only be swallowed if it was dunked first in tea. My mother’s sponge cakes were moist masterpieces that even an anorexic couldn’t resist.

The saddest part of Passover’s final day was that we wouldn’t be eating those delectable desserts for another year. My mama made them with bananas and with apples. She invented orange sponge cakes with candied dates and figs on top and spicy sponge cakes decorated with sliced pineapple and maraschino cherries. She managed fudge sponge cakes with mint frosting and ginger sponge cakes with a boiled frosting dusted with brown sugar. Every one of these creations was sixteen inches high and so aerated you never realized that one bite was more than the average calorie allowance for an anemic child.

My mother managed to turn out two or three of these a day and still clean the house, do the ironing, run over to the hospital to spread cheer and cook banquets for twenty relatives every night. I can still see her putting her Sunbeam Mixmaster through its paces whipping up egg whites and folding them into the egg yolk mixture at the speed of light. She would fill angel food pans with the batter, bake them at 350 degrees and test them after forty minutes with a cleaned straw from the broom she used to sweep her kitchen floor. If no batter clung to the straw, she turned the cake over on a large seltzer bottle and let it cool. Each masterpiece came out of its pan without blemish and sat on the kitchen table ready for a dusting of confectioner’s sugar or a shower of frosting when I returned from school. Our house always smelled like restaurant heaven to me during Passover and I did exactly the same thing Marie Antoinette recommended for her starving subjects: I ate cake . . . A great deal of it as often as I possibly could.

My mother was absolutely nothing but a housewife and she devoted twenty-four hours seven days a week to the job. I was a graduate of several colleges and I was certain that when my time came to create a Seder, I could make one as delicious and impressive as my mother’s in a couple hours after dinner. All I had to do was read my mother’s recipes and follow them.

That was a bit of a challenge because my mother never wrote down exact ingredients for anything she cooked. She gave me a few 3 x 5 cards that said things like “Add potato flour until it feels right,” or beat egg whites until nice.”

When I married, I decided I would do my own Passover celebration just to show my mother I was as capable as she was in the kitchen. I invited everyone in my husband’s office and my in-laws to our one room flat for a Passover banquet. I reviewed the recipe cards my mother had given me on my wedding day and shopped accordingly.

Passover was on a Saturday that year. I purchased 6 dozen eggs, potato flour, three large angel food cake pans and quart bottles of Seven-up to invert the finished cakes on to cool. I couldn’t find any seltzer on the shelves at the local A&P.

On Friday morning, I took out several dozen eggs from the refrigerator so they would be at room temperature when I got home from work that afternoon. My intention was to bake three cakes that night and three more the next morning while I ground up the whitefish, grated horseradish, stuffed chickens and peeled the potatoes for my dinner that night.

Friday evening after I had served my husband his dinner, I whipped up the first 14 eggs, folded them into the yolk mixture, poured them into the pan and put them in the oven. I began beating up the next batch while I waited forty minutes for cake number one to finish. When the oven bell rang, I pulled out a doubtful looking mixture, stuck a broom straw in it and inverted the pan on a Seven up bottle. There was a startling whoosh and the batter spilled on the kitchen table. I was amazed. I had followed my mother’s instructions to the letter.

My batter was ready for cake number two. I squared my shoulders and poured it into its clean pan. My confidence was a bit tarnished and I did not begin beating up another fourteen eggs for cake number three. Instead I packed the fallen batter into a loaf pan and put it in the freezer to deal with later. After forty minutes, I turned the finished cake over on the Seven up bottle. I barely had time to turn my back on the little bugger before it collapsed on the table.

I reached for the telephone and I called my mother. I described my fiasco and said, “I think it was the bottle of Seven Up that caused the problem. I couldn’t find a seltzer bottle anywhere in this town.”

My mother laughed. “Seltzer bottle?” she said. “What does that have to do with sponge cake? You didn’t beat the whites enough, that’s all.”

I flushed. “Oh, yes I did!” I protested. “They looked exactly like yours always did before you mixed them into the egg yolks.”

“My cakes never fell out of the pan,” said my mother. “You go back in that kitchen and beat those eggs harder.”

“I tried twice,” I said.

My mother cleared her throat. “When you fall off a horse, you need to get back in the saddle or you’ll always be afraid to ride. Right?” said my mother.

“Right,” I said.

“Do you want to be afraid of a sponge cake for the rest of your life?” asked my mother.

“Of course not,” I said. “But I won’t spend any more money on eggs until I can find a seltzer bottle.”

“Lynn Ruth, “ said my mother. “Cake pans have little feet on them now. You don’t need to hang them on bottles like I did when you were in high school! A sponge cake always stays in the pan if you beat the egg whites stiff enough.”

“It’s too late for this year,” I said. “All the stores are closed and I don't have enough eggs. Do you have room for a few extra at your house for Seder?”

There was a pause. “How many?” asked my mother.

I cleared my throat. “About twenty, not counting the Cohens. They said they’d stop by for dessert.”

My mother’s response was instant. “No problem!” she exclaimed and I could see her mind sorting out new recipes for roasted chicken, candied brisket and greasy potatoes. “What's a few extra mouths to feed on Passover?”

“You’re sure, Ma?” I asked. “Will you have enough chairs?”

“On Passover, you recline,” she reminded me.

“Right,” I said. “What time should we be there?”

“Early,” said my mother. “We have the service first and then there’s a lot of eating to do. Remember?”

I made a mental note to pick up some alka seltzer for Passover on the way to her house. I remembered my mother’s Seders very well indeed.