I always stop and look at menus outside restaurants. Grilled halloumi is now a common vegetarian option, lentils and rice with caramelized onions a vegan one, shakshuka a breakfast special. There are bulgur, couscous, tagines and pilafs in fine dining restaurants.
Photographs in food magazine are full of dustings of sumac and za'atar, tricklings of harissa, pomegranate molasses and tahini, and slivers of preserved lemon. Last year for an article in Australia Gourmet Traveller magazine I asked an LA foodie friend about Middle Eastern food in America. He wrote: 'Hummus has become a de facto dip of every office party or book club meet-up. Pita chips are now an industry, sold everywhere. Feta, falafel, babaganoush are words that are firmly lodged in our vocabulary, much like, pizza, or croissant. Israeli restaurants have been all the rage in these last few years, and Ottolenghi books are in every foodie's kitchen.'
What is happening in LA is happening in many countries. On the last night of the Mumbai Literary festival last year that was held in a Bollywood studio, speakers were taken to the most fashionable bar/restaurant frequented by the Bollywood elite. After cocktails we were offered hummus, falafel, tabbouleh, and babaghanoush. They said it was an Israeli menu. Israeli cuisine is currently one of the most trendy and popular in the world even while there is heated discussion about what it is exactly and whether it exists at all.
While Turkish, Lebanese and other Middle Eastern restaurants serve the same traditional standard menus, that never vary, of grills and mezze, Israeli chefs feel free to pick elements from all the cuisines of Mizrahi and Sephardi communities and to do their own personal take on tradition. Their cooking is pan-Mediterranean because it spans the entire Mediterranean basin all the way to Spain.
How did Israel, where visitors always complained about the food and only praised Arab restaurants, most of which were kiosks at the back of petrol stations, get to be a food destination? I first went to Israel in the 70s when my Book of Middle Eastern Food came out in Hebrew. The publishers said they didn’t expect it to sell because the food of Mizrahi Jews was not appreciated. I realized only recently that they had changed the Hebrew title to A Book of Mediterranean Food.
Nor was Ashkenazi food appreciated. The Diaspora and its foods was then something to be forgotten and left behind. Ashkenazi dishes smelt of persecution, Mizrahi and Sephardi foods were seen as low class poor food from backward cultures. Food itself was a matter of embarrassment, was not something to talk about.
When I told people I was researching the food they said things like. “Please don’t write anything bad’. They joked about chopped liver made from aubergines, apple sauce from courgettes, semolina pudding simulating whipped cream - the fake foods from the time of austerity and rationing that lived on. They described the unidentifiable compressed fish mixture called ‘fish fillet’ imported from Norway and the non-descript cheese called “white”.
A few years later at a gastronomic conference in Jerusalem, I was in the kitchen with cooks from Poland, Georgia, Bukhara, Morocco, Iraq, and other countries. We were preparing our cooking demonstrations and tastings of Jewish festive dishes from our communities.
The first discussion, in Hebrew, was whether there was such a thing as Jewish food? Eastern European food was considered “Jewish”, the food of all those who were not Ashkenazi was labelled ethnic, and the local foods such as falafel, hummus, babaghanoush, and shakshouka were considered street foods. The only food identified as purely Israeli - not shared with neighbouring countries - was turkey schnitzel. Food writers talked of creating a distinctive national cuisine using biblical ingredients such as honey, figs and pomegranates, indiginous ingredients like prickly pears, chickpeas and herbs that grew wild on the hills, and new Israeli products such as avocado, citrus and cream cheese that the government was promoting.
The kitchens of the land, from the army, schools and hospitals to restaurants and hotels, recruited their staff from the working class population of Mizrahi Jews from countries like Morocco, Tunisia, Turkey, Iraq, Kurdistan and Yemen, as well as Israeli Arabs. All young men who went into cooking, went in through the army, and trained in the army catering school, Tadmor. A catering contractor who had taught at Tadmor told me: “The cooks rejected their mothers’ cooking because they saw it as part of a humiliating backward culture. But after learning the basics, they fell back on what they vaguely remembered from home. They were given ingredients that the nutritionists decided soldiers should eat and together they concocted a mishmash.”
Top restaurants served French cuisine and there were also Chinese and Italian restaurants. The big hotels that catered for tourists, where the executive chefs came from Switzerland, Austria and Germany, offered chicken soup with kneidlach, gefilte fish, pickled herring, chopped liver, tzimmes and lockshen pudding. Since the 1960s a few restaurants opened that did what Syrian, Bukharan or Iraqi Jews cooked at home, but they quickly closed because of lack of custom.
Moshe Basson, chef owner of the famous Eucalyptus restaurant in Jerusalem was one of the first to open a Mizrahi restaurant. He had Arabs from a nearby village to bring their own home cooking, and the village bakery to send local specialities. When I was there he had a young Syrian woman making fried kibbeh. My friend Ella told him I was a food writer and he brought out my book and showed me the recipes he was using, including the pudding we were eating - balouza made with corn flour and water, to which he had added his own rose petal jam.
His story is like that of many first generation chefs. His family came from Iraq and his early years were spent in a refugee transit camp in Talpiot until his father was able to buy a small house with a piece of land near the camp close to the Arab neighbourhood of Baka. When the family moved, they left their first home, an enlarged shack, to Basson and his brother who turned it into a restaurant.
When Basson served at the Suez canal, most of the cooks were Sephardi or Mizrahi from Arab lands. There was a kitchen book with recipes written in Hebrew which the head cook could not read so he telephoned his Moroccan mother and asked her for recipes. The lowest grades in the army were cooks. Whilst being in the army was greatly admired, Basson said the stigma of being a cook in the army continued outside. Being a chef was the lowest thing to be.
Ronit Vered, who has a prestigious food column in Haaretz, says that things began to change in the 1980s. A mini revolution took off in the upmarket Israeli kitchen when the economy and the security situation made it possible to enjoy eating out. At that time intensive attempts were being made by the government to restore the lost pride of ethnic communities by reviving and disseminating their cultural heritage. Womens’ magazines and radio presenters asked people to send in family recipes.
A third generation of immigrants, who didn’t have the complexes of their parents and grandparents about culture and identity wanted to rediscover the tastes of their ancestral cuisines. Chefs, mostly of Mizrahi origin, went to train in top restaurants in Europe and America and returned to develop a modern Israeli haute cuisine with the techniques they had learned, and inspired by ideas of innovation.
In 2005 at a conference in Jerusalem entitled there were papers by food writers, historians and nutritionists, as well as chefs from around the Mediterranean. Carlo Petrini, founder of Slow Food, Vedat Basaran from Turkey and Fatema Hal from Morocco were a big hit. Israeli chefs demonstrated their dishes. Ezra Kedem the then chef owner of the famous fine dining restaurant Arcadia in Jerusalem made his signature baladi dish (baladi means local). He cut an aubergine so that slices remained attached at the stem, roasted it, fanned out the slices, raked them with a fork and presented it with a drizzle of olive oil, a sprinkling of chopped walnuts and parsley, and little pools of tahina and yoghurt around them. This deconstruction of babaghnoush has become one of the dishes most identified with the new Israeli cuisine.
Kedem says he found his inspiration in his family and in the cooking of the old and the new inhabitants of Jerusalem. His family came from Kurdish North Iraq in a convoy of donkeys in 1929 to live in the Kurdish neighbourhood near Mahane Yehuda. On Saturday they exchanged food with their neighbours from Morocco, Urfa, Syria and Turkey. “When I go to the market now” he says “I discuss with other shoppers what they’ll be making and how, and with the vendor what he suggests.” This is what happens in Israel between neighbours, at markets and through chance encounters. For chefs it is a way of building a cuisine that is truly local.
In the last 10 to 15 years interest in food exploded. Cooking became glamorous and chefs became stars. In Tel Aviv everybody is out and about in the evenings and the city is full of packed and buzzing restaurants. Many who grew up on raspberry juice are now connoisseurs of wine. Boutique wineries make exceptional wines and win international awards. Goat and sheeps’ milk cheese makers make exceptional cheeses. The food scene is vibrant.
Vered says the country is not old enough to develop a deeply-rooted culinary tradition for all its citizens to share, that the new Israeli kitchen is still seeking its directions. But does it need direction? Things will keep changing as we should expect in a new country of immigrants from more than seventy countries where each new wave of settlers has brought something new. I was having lunch with Vered when she received calls from journalists abroad asking her why Israeli cuisine was now so popular. The Israeli chefs at home and those who have opened restaurants abroad and published books and had an impact on the international scene are at the forefront of a new global gastronomic culture that is innovative and creative. Each has brought their own personal interpretation of Israeli cuisine.
Theirs is a Mediterranean nouvelle cuisine. It is not likely to be dropped because it is based on ingredients that represent the healthy Mediterranean diet, full of vegetables, grains, pulses, fruit and nuts and olive oil as the main cooking fat. It is also beautiful and colourful and full of rich flavours and aromas. Chefs have at their disposal all the herbs, spices and aromatics of the Middle East and North Africa. They also have the best of Ashkenazi cuisine the pickles, the salt beef, the chopped liver, the cheese cakes and blintzes to play with.
Apart from giving pleasure, their dishes have something unique because they are inspired by old traditions from the vanished worlds of the diaspora. They are about roots and identity. A little pie, a stuffed vegetable, a flavour, an aroma, can trigger memories and emotions. That is what they do for me when I eat at Honey and Co and Ottolenghi or Palomar in London, and in Israel at MakhneYuda and Haim Cohen’s and Eucalyptus. It’s surprising how food can appeal directly to the emotions.
Vered says the new Israeli kitchen is still seeking its direction. But does it need direction? Things will keep changing as we should expect in a new country of immigrants from more than 70 countries.
Israeli home cooks and chefs who have opened restaurants abroad and published books have had an impact on the international scene and are at the forefront of a new global gastronomic culture that is innovative and creative.
Apart from giving pleasure, their dishes have something unique because they are inspired by old traditions from the vanished worlds of the diaspora. They are about roots and identity. A flavour, an aroma, can trigger memories and emotions. It’s surprising how food can appeal directly to the emotions.
On March 5, Claudia Roden will be talking about The New Book of Middle Eastern Food as part of Jewish Book Week www.jewishbookweek.com
