"To celebrate the start of the good part of the year, every culture has a spring feast with its own quirks and customs. For Passover, observant Jews avoid leavened bread for about a week; thin flatbreads, cooked quickly and dried to a cracker, are eaten instead – matzo. Dry and bland, it bears no comparison to bread. It doesn’t even compare well to most crackers: it’s too lean, too thin and too hard. In fact, matzo has so little going for it that generations of Jewish cooks have poured their ingenuity into creating something delicious.

Matzo-ball soup is the famous dish but there are many more besides. Bulgarian Jews have something called mina, a magnificent pie in which the matzo is layered with spiced meat, vegetables and eggs. Yemenis make F’tut in which matzo is fried in an obscene amount of clarified butter and finished with whisked raw egg-like carbonara without the cheese or the bacon. There are elaborate cakes and roulades from eastern Europe; crisp parcels from the Maghreb filled with greens. Our favourite matzo preparation is the simplest: matzo, egg and grated onion, salt and a bit too much pepper, some parsley and garlic if you wish to be fancy, though you can do without. Much more than the sum of its parts, this humble mix turns into something so special and moreish that we find ourselves going back to it all year round.

We always like to have a few packets of matzo in the pantry – they keep forever and, when there’s nothing else, we reach for them to make these fritters, a perfect sofa supper with some yoghurt and cut vegetables. You might see packets of matzo in large supermarkets and speciality shops. Right now, they are usually found on the “reduced to clear” shelf – leftover from the holiday that has just finished. We always grab a few boxes and we recommend you do the same." — Sarit Packer and Itamar Srulovich

This recipe originally appeared in FT.com/magazine and is reprinted with permission. Photographs by Patricia Niven.