“Matzo brei is not quite what I’d call a household food item, unless that household belongs to the Romans,” cookbook author Alison Roman explains in her hit book “Dining In.” Her father Dan’s matzo brei is a defining food for the Roman family — Passover or not. The quality of the batch on the breakfast table in their Los Angeles home — whether the onions were caramelized properly, if there was enough salt, and the proper amount of butter — “would set the tone for the rest of the day,” Alison told us.

The dish was a household food item in Dan’s childhood home in New Jersey too. “My mother got the recipe from my father’s mother — she was born in Kiev,” and immigrated sometime in the 1880s Dan explained. “My dad was the one who really liked matzo brei.” When Dan left home in his early 20s, one of his roommates, came from a family that made matzo brei into a pancake and served it with jelly. “We used to battle for who could make the better matzo brei. I won, I know I won,” Dan says.

Making a batch of matzo brei in the Roman family is equal parts preserving a family tradition and an exercise in perfecting a cooking technique. Each time the batch is different, and Dan’s cooking has evolved over the years. “I’ve learned to cook eggs better thanks to Alison,” who worked in restaurants and in the test kitchen at Bon Appetit, he explains. “If you do them slower, they’ll be fluffier. I took that process and incorporated into the matzo brei.”

Despite her culinary training, Alison says: “I still haven’t gotten it totally right. I’ve gotten the spirit of it. Everytime you make it, it’s a chance to make it better. It’s a thing you’re always trying to get the perfect version of.” For that, Alison asks her Dad to make it, telling him: “I’ll come home, but I want matzo brei.” Her grandfather was the same way when he came to visit. Dan recalls him saying: “Make sure you make matzo brei… [on] the last morning’ And then he’d sit there and he’d look at my mother and say ‘you never it made it this good.’ She was a terrible cook.”

“Make sure you make matzo brei… [on] the last morning’ And then he’d sit there and he’d look at my mother and say ‘you never it made it this good.’ She was a terrible cook”

When Alison doesn’t request matzo brei, she asks for her dad’s gravlax, a newer recipe in his repertoire. Growing up near New York, in a land of delis and appetizing shops, “we were always a lox and bagel type of family,” he says. But, in Los Angeles, the power duo of Jewish breakfast tables was harder to find.

The idea to make his own sparked on a trip to visit Alison in San Francisco, where she took him to the iconic fish restaurant Swan Oyster Depot. “I was sitting at the bar and I see the fishmonger bring out a huge piece of salmon and slap it on the [counter], cutting it for a woman flying back to L.A. I was thinking ‘That's the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,’” Dan says. From that moment, he was determined to make gravlax. He wanted it to have some of the smokiness of classic lox, so when he made his first batch, he replaced the traditional vodka in the recipe with Laphroig, peated Whisky from Scotland.

When Dan first told Alison about his gravlax, she jokingly thought, that her dad sounded like a hipster who had moved to Brooklyn and started to cure his own fish. But the results were impressive. His wide, translucent slices of gravlax won over his family. “I was surprised at how good it was,” she says. But, Dan says, “Genetically, I knew it was in my blood line.”