In the introduction to her book, The Book of Jewish Food: An Odyssey from Samarkand to New York, Jewish food researcher and historian Claudia Roden writes: “Every cuisine tells a story,” and she goes on to say later that the same is true for every pot, and plate. In her riveting book, which was published in the UK in 1996, she told the story of the Jewish kitchen as none before her had done.
“Jewish food tells the story of an uprooted, migrating people and their vanishing worlds,” she writes. “It lives in people’s minds and has been kept alive because of what it evokes and represents.” The book compiles hundreds of recipes; treasures she gathered over the course of fifteen years spent traveling the world. Since then, she has written many more books, which revolutionized attitudes towards Middle Eastern and North African cuisines, thanks in part to her in-depth research, and unique writing style - interweaving recipes, people, stories, culture, and history - which has become her trademark.
In anticipation of her arrival in Israel to receive a prize in recognition of her life’s work as part of the Jewish Film Festival at the Jerusalem Cinematheque, I asked her to describe the Israeli kitchen. “It is a cuisine that is made up of many lives and stories that are joined together,” she told me in an interview from her home in London. “It is a rich cuisine, which was built on the backs of a varied culinary tradition in a new land; a cuisine of immigrants from many countries. A cuisine of flavors and scents from faraway places, flavors mixed together to create something new.”
As someone who has visited and eaten in Israel frequently for 40 years, Roden has seen and experienced the changes that have taken place in this cuisine. “When I started coming to Israel, what I saw was the kibbutz breakfast of tomatoes, cucumbers, cheese, salted fish, yogurt, and olives, and the hummus and falafel that were sold in the street. Over the years, I was witness to incredible changes thanks to creative chefs, particularly in the restaurants. All this comes alongside simpler, more modest, but very tasty food.”
Jewish food comes out of the closet
Roden, who was born in Cairo in 1936, and later emigrated to Paris and to London, wrote about Middle Eastern cooking already in 1968, in her first book, A book of Middle Eastern food. Nearly 50 years after the book was written, the cuisine with which she is so involved has achieved global popularity: Middle Eastern and Israeli restaurants are conquering New York and London.
Why do you think this cuisine is becoming so popular now?
“Middle Eastern styles are not new. My Middle Eastern cookbook has not been out of print since its publication. Many of the foods I wrote about 48 years ago were gradually incorporated into the ‘new, eclectic, British cuisine,” and this has happened in other parts of the world as well. A long time ago, supermarkets like Marks and Spencer’s asked a Cypriot-owned factory to use my recipes to make Middle Eastern food. You can, for example, find my Orange-Almond cake (recipe to follow) in many London cafés and pubs, and for a long time it was also on the menu of the fast-food chain Pret-A-Manger. Some supermarkets still call it the ‘Sefardi Passover Cake.”
“I believe that the person responsible for the special attention that this food has received around the world in recent years is the Israeli chef Yotam Ottolenghi. He has a tremendous impact on what people eat today. He has achieved this through his popular restaurants, his television show, and the tasty recipes that he publishes in “The Guardian.” This is a rare and wonderful phenomenon. Furthermore, we are in a period of globalization, and food has become fashionable. The media is always looking for the next big thing in food, and people want to eat and cook what’s popular. Over the years, we have seen many culinary trends: from fine French cuisine, to new French cuisine, via Italian, Spanish and Nordic cuisines. Now, it’s Middle Eastern cuisine. And we can’t forget that Middle Eastern and Mediterranean foods are considered healthy, and they are also relatively cheap.”
In London, there are many Israeli and Middle Eastern restaurants, and many more are expected to open. They are all very popular. Have you visited them?
“Of course, they are among my favorite restaurants. Of them all, Yotam’s food is my favorite. He is wonderful. His food is tasty, healthful, and looks good in photos. He is a genius, and an inspiration to many.”
What’s the secret?
“We live in an era in which creativity is valued more than tradition. The reason Israeli food has become so popular in London is that Israeli chefs are very creative. By the way, most of the Jewish restaurants in London, which served Ashkenazi-style food, have closed. They were boring, and they innovated nothing.
“When you go to a Lebanese restaurant, the menu is standard; uniform. You will eat the same food at every Lebanese restaurant in the world: meze and grill dishes. They are called ‘ethnic restaurants’ - and ethnic restaurants don’t make a lot of money. But the Israeli restaurants with the new chefs are not like that. Each chef is an individual, who brings his own version and his own interpretation to Israeli food. They do things their own way. They make up dishes, innovate, and develop this cuisine, without completely compromising tradition. I think that this phenomenon is wonderful, and it does good for Israel - many people here are anti-Israel because of the [political] situation, but they still want to eat Israeli food. This makes another perspective on Israel possible.”
In your opinion, is Israel a Jewish-food superpower (as we might expect), or has it “murdered” this cuisine?
“For a long time - and for many reasons - Israel rejected the foods of the diaspora. When The Book of Jewish Food was published, people started asking: ‘Where can we find all this food in Israel? Why has it disappeared? Later, these foods began to be rediscovered, and chefs returned to them.”
What caused them to return to this cuisine?
“When this cuisine became fashionable, chefs came out of the closet. In the past, they were ashamed of this food, and called their food Mediterranean, and not Middle Eastern, but today, when these cuisines are popular, they say: ‘As a Jew, this also my culture. I am a part of this,” and they even travel to Morocco and Turkey to learn, and to return to their roots.”
What is the status of Jewish food today, globally?
“When I worked on the The Book of Jewish Food, people always told me - mostly Jews - that there is no such thing, because the origin of the dishes is the Old Country. They also felt sorry for me, because, in their eyes, Jewish food was not good, and certainly was not worth the years I spent researching it. But, when the book came out, and I began speaking at events, people came to give me recipes, and said that I had missed the Jewish food of Sarajevo, and Afghanistan, and the sofrito of the Cairo Jews, for example.
“Today, the world is very interested in the ‘secrets’ of the Jewish kitchen. A pop-up restaurant in New York set up an Iraqi-Jewish restaurant last year. Another trendy restaurant in New York serves various Jewish foods for Passover. In the US, Jewish food is constantly evolving.”
History in the pots
As a historian, how would you describe contemporary cuisine?
“Until not so long ago, people everywhere cooked what their mothers cooked. Culinary traditions were passed from generation to generation within a family. Now, people in many countries get their recipes from the Internet, or from the media. Supermarkets and chefs are welcome to create and invent, and at the same time, there is a contradictory trend that seeks tradition and intimacy.”
What has influenced cuisine in recent years?
“There is a great deal of emphasis on healthy eating, and the purity of ingredients (such as organic), on sustainability, environment, locality, biodiversity, and preserving traditions that are in danger of being lost. And there are also many contradictions - people today eat more and more mass-produced food, while the elite, who can afford to, take care to eat high-quality foods.”
What do you think about molecular gastronomy?
“The use of science and technology in the kitchen is very exciting. It put Spain on the gastronomical map, thanks to its great contribution, and it led to tremendous excitement about cooking. When I studied Spanish food, I ate many unusual and exciting dishes with all sorts of unexpected textures, flavors, and scents. Every cooking student I met there just wanted to be like Ferran Adrià. At the same time, Spaniards still eat their local foods, and the innovative chefs with whom I spoke were happy to say that they were influenced by their history, and that, aside from pleasure, they want to espouse memories and emotions. Personally, I prefer to eat traditional foods.”
How do you view the connection between food and environment?
“The Catalan author Josep Pla described cooking as “landscape in a cooking pot.” The plants, fruit, sheep, goats, and doves that we see in the landscape end up in the market, and in the cooking pot. But I always saw history in the cooking pots as well. The scents, the flavors, and the sights in the pot tell me what happened here in the past.”
The Jerusalem Jewish Film Festival is taking place at the Jerusalem Cinematheque, December 16-23. Culinary events will take place as part of the “Delicatessen” Culinary Festival. Among the events are “Mediterranean Odyssey A Tribute to Claudia Roden,” moderated by chef Haim Cohen and journalist Ronit Vered; “Memulaim Capital of the World,” in which chefs will cook various “stuffed” foods for Roden; Afro-Sephashkenazi Cuisine with Michael Twitty, and more.
Orange and Almond Cake
Ingredients:
-2 oranges
-6 eggs
-1.25 cups sugar
-2 tablespoons orange blossom water
-1 teaspoon baking powder
-1.25 cups (250 gm) coarsely ground blanched almonds
-22 cm diameter spring-form pan, preferably non-stick
Directions:
1) Wash the oranges and boil them whole for an hour and half, until they are very soft.
2) Grease and flour the pan (use matzo meal if preparing for Passover)
3) Pre-heat oven to 190 degrees Celsius
4) Beat eggs and sugar together, add the orange blossom water, baking powder and almonds, and mix well.
5) Halve the oranges, remove the pits, and puree in a food processor
6) Add the pureed oranges to the almond mixture, and pour into the prepared pan.
7) Bake approximately one hour
8) Allow the cake to cool before removing it from the pan
Recipe from The Book of Jewish Food: An Odyssey from Samarkand to New York, by Claudia Roden.
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on December 18, 2014
© Copyright of Globes Publisher Itonut (1983) Ltd. 2014