The daily morning journal and courier., 1907-05-07
BAKING TIE MATzOTH. AGED HEBREWS CINCH Machinery Used in Prepara- ton of the Unleav-
 ened Bread.

orthodox and patriarchal, with long beard and white prayer locks, who has practically monopolized the business of matzoth baking as 1t is carried on in New York.
 Matzoth, or the unlcavened cakes of the Jewish Passover. are baked in en- ormous quantities on the east side. This one man alone bakes almost two million pounds a year.
 His store is described by the Ameri- can Hebrew as no larger than an or dinary room-dark, low ceilinged, with out lights. Along one side runs the counter, in front of it two deep the customers, coming and going continu- ously.
 i Small dealers, individual buyers, Large Wholesalers, women with little children clinging to them, long bearded Jews, probably just landed, old, middle aged and young, all wait their turn to buy the Passover food. In the back of the room, square ten pound packages of matzoth,
 And at the top of the stair case in a little compartment which seems to have been broken into the wall, ma chine with a continuous whirr grinds the baked matzoth into matzoth meal. The meal falls into a large box which stands beneath it and an operator, white from head to foot with -four, dispenses it to the customers.
 The place where the matzoths are manufactured Is in reality the cellar. You descend from the street a few steps and look in through a glassless window, and the bakery appears be- fore you.
 Beneath the window stands man lfrantically mixing the flour in cop Iper bowl. Besides this man, whose lcurly yellow hair and beard were white with powder, there was, when the re- Iporter visited the place, boy who handed the flour, first mixing it with water which had been standing over night according to the ritual.
 The flour itself was of the finest wheat, for the old orthodox proprietor himself had attended to it's purchase. Every year about four months before Pesach he rents mill in Syracuse, buys the best wheat that is procurable in the market and after the mill is thoroughly cleaned of chometz sees that it is ground under conditions that . would be satisfactory to the most or thodoX.
 After the flour was thoroughly mix ed it was passed to a machine and run through heavy steel rollers, back and forth half dozen times until fiat tened out to the necessary thinness By this time 1t was in long thin rolls about two feet in width. It was gath cred up and cut in half lengthwise with a sharp, thin knife.
 The two rolls, now of the required breadth, were carried over to another machine, through which 1t was run down a groove under two smaller stee rollers, was perforated by wheel al the end from which struck little steeI protuberances like nails, and sliced of squarely by blades at the end of the machine These square pieces oi dough were then placed four apiece or wide, wooden platter, and thrust by long handles into small chamber where they were baked.
 There were two such chambers, mol more than two feet in height and ex, tending back some twenty feet oi more. The floor seemed to have beer made of blocks of asbestos and upor 1t, covering the greater part of the chamber, were cakes of matzoth whiel were baking.
 Tn less than three minutes the mar with the long wooden shovel is obliged to draw forth the matzoth cakes which now instead of being soft dougE are crisp cakes, the ordinary Passovel ' matzoth cakes. The matzoths from thi bakery are sold all over the country.