Big Little Recipes
I Can't Stop Snacking on This Matzo Toffee
A Passover dessert that’s too good to eat just during Passover.
A Big Little Recipe has the smallest-possible ingredient list and big everything else: flavor, creativity, wow factor. That means five ingredients or fewer—not including water, salt, black pepper, and certain fats (like oil and butter), since we're guessing you have those covered. Inspired by the column, the Big Little Recipes cookbook is available now.
Decades after she started making it, my mom can’t remember where this recipe came from. Maybe she got it from her mom, or a magazine, or her mom got it from a magazine. Who knows?
There are thousands and thousands of recipes for matzo toffee online. A lot of them look a lot like ours, from the ingredient list to the short-enough-to-fit-on-an-index-card instructions. Even the specifics I can’t make sense of.
Take, for example, “4-6 matzo - unsalted.” Why the range? When four? When five? When six? Who knows?
Many recipes call for just that, “4-6,” no explanation. It’s evidence that this crispy-crunchy Passover favorite comes from the same publication, only to be claimed by innumerable American Jews, like my mom, like me. So it goes with holiday recipes and traditions. They belong to us, but only sort of.
Based on the timing and similarities to my mom's index card, it's safe to say that Marcy Goldman's recipe, first published in the mid 1980s in The Montreal Gazette (and later printed in A Treasury of Jewish Holiday Baking), was the source. As Leah Koenig writes in Tablet, "Goldman’s matzo buttercrunch is among the most popular, and most copied, Passover desserts made by home cooks."
I could have typed up my mom's index card and called it a Big Little Recipe and done. All you need are matzo, of course, and brown sugar, butter, and chocolate (plus toasted pecans if you’re my mom). But I couldn’t help myself.
I switched the unsalted matzo to salted, the unsalted butter to salted, and, yeah, a pinch of flaky salt on top too. Toffee is too sweet for its own good. The salt provides balance, like one kid on a seesaw joined by another. Same reason why I also switched from semisweet chocolate to dark—the darker, the better.
They’re little adjustments that make a big difference, yielding the salty-bitter-sweet combo I crave. What I didn’t change, and wouldn’t dare, was how stupid-easy it is to make. The sort of dessert that you don’t have to stress about if you’re hosting a whole hoopla for Passover.
And even if you’re not celebrating Passover—who doesn’t want another easy dessert?
| 6 | salted matzos |
| 1 | cup (226 grams) salted butter (or unsalted butter plus 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt) |
| 1 | cup (213 grams) dark brown sugar |
| 1 1/3 | cups (226 grams) bittersweet chocolate chips or chopped (the darker, the better) |
| Flaky salt, optional | |
| Your pick of toppings (see Author Notes), optional |
| 6 | salted matzos |
| 1 | cup (226 grams) salted butter (or unsalted butter plus 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt) |
| 1 | cup (213 grams) dark brown sugar |
| 1 1/3 | cups (226 grams) bittersweet chocolate chips or chopped (the darker, the better) |
| Flaky salt, optional | |
| Your pick of toppings (see Author Notes), optional |
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Written by: Emma Laperruque
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11 Comments
My guess? If History.com staff didn’t invent it themselves, Midwestern Jews found the recipe for the saltine toffee their neighbors were enjoying and realized it could be adapted for Passover. I make matzo brei during Passover and top it with marinara sauce and cheese; I could probably, prior to frying it, press the wet matzo brei into a pan, top it with sauce and cheese, bake it, and have kosher-for-Passover pizza. You do what you have to in order to make the eight days as painless as possible.
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