How I Make Brisket for Passover

My friend Adam asked me to make a main dish for Passover at his house, where there were going to be about 15 of us. I'd never made a brisket before, so I took the opportunity to give it a go.

It's actually very easy. Here's what you do.

First, you have to find a good brisket.

Then you trim off most of the fat, and brown it all over in boiling oil. Really brown.

In the same oil, brown some chopped onions and garlic.

Put the brisket in a very heavy pot, pour the onions (along with all the garlic, drippings and oil) and over it, sprinkle a package of dried onion soup mix over that, and then cover the whole thing with dried apricots. Lots of them.

Carefully pour as much water around the side of the brisket as will go, without getting the stuff on top wet.

Cover, and put the entire contraption in a 325 oven.

Now walk over to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where the National Theater of Bergen, Norway, is performing Henrik Ibsen's Peer Gynt in a production conceived and directed by Robert Wilson. From BAM's broadsheet:

Where does the real self lie? For Peer Gynt, an irredeemably hypocritical farmer’s son with more identities than an onion has layers, it’s a question that only a roguish life of loving, leaving, and stealing can answer. As envisioned by Robert Wilson, with a transcendent score composed by violin virtuoso Michael Galasso, Ibsen’s existential masterpiece radiates humor, pathos, and stunning beauty in its timeless look at our shared virtues and vices.

The performance is completely in Norwegian (there are supertitles), performed by actors in whiteface, on a stage that is starkly empty. This review captures the effect.

It is critical to sit through the entire show, even though it is in Norwegian, since the production runs for three hours and fifty minutes, which, if you add the time it takes to walk to and from BAM, is the perfect amount of time to braise the brisket, and steam the apricots into a delicious sauce.

Let it sit overnight, and reheat it during the four questions.

Anyway, I thought the result was delicious, and so did many others. There were no leftovers.