Duff Goldman's Ideal Last Meal Is A Traditional Home-Cooked Feast

"What would be your last meal?" is a great question to ask if you want to get to know someone. After all, finding out how someone would want to tickle their taste buds for their last meal reveals a lot more about a person than just their favorite foods. Are their tastes on the high end, requesting the lobster or filet mignon from a restaurant with three Michelin stars? Or would they go low-brow and indulge in forbidden fast food fare like pizza or french fries? Maybe they would go nostalgic and ask for something prepared by a loved one. Duff Goldman, the Food Network judge and owner of Charm City Cakes, falls into the latter group. "Everything my mom makes," he told podcaster Rachel Belle on her podcast "Your Last Meal." "Everything."

More specifically, he wants everything his mother makes for the family's Passover Seder, the ritualistic and festive meal served on the first two nights of the holiday that celebrates the Jews' exodus from Egypt to Israel. The Passover seder is one of Goldman's favorite meals, he told Belle, the creator and host of the "Your Last Meal" podcast, because it includes several of his most beloved foods: brisket, gefilte fish, and charoset. Charoset is a relish-like dish made of fruit, nuts, and wine, that has symbolic meaning on the seder plate. His mom's brisket, he said, "is the best one I ever tasted."

Duff Goldman is known for his show-stopping decorated cakes, but one of his favorite desserts is his mother's Port cherry Jell-O molded dessert, for which she stuffs cherries with roasted walnuts and suspends them in the flavored gelatin. For Goldman, even dipping parsley in salt water — another seder ritual — "is such a vibe," turning him into a six-year-old again. Although the baker's family is of Jewish Ashkenazi Eastern European descent, his family's Passover recipes tend to have a more Sephardic — Mediterranean and Middle Eastern Jewish — flair, with spices like cumin and fenugreek.

Goldman isn't the only chef who wants his last meal to be rooted in familiar tradition. Gordon Ramsay hopes for some traditional English foods like a full English breakfast, beef Wellington, and sticky toffee pudding. But he also wants some decidedly American foods like an In-N-Out burger and a deep-fried Mars bar. Ina Garten's choice for her last meal is French, but hardly what you'd expect: a hot dog from a now-shuttered Parisian cafe called Frenchie To Go.