Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi[/caption]
Jerusalem is a beautiful, inspiring work, as much about communities and cultures, festivity and family, as it is about food.
As its authors note, "The flavours and smells of this city are our mother tongue. We imagine them and dream in them… They define comfort for us, excitement, joy, serene bliss. Everything we taste and everything we cook is filtered through the prism of our childhood experiences."
Jerusalem is an unlikely primer on the history of Jerusalem itself. It turns out that chefs and cookbook writers may be more level-headed and honest in their telling of history and complex conflicts than the usual commentators to which we turn to understand contemporary realities, whether they are journalists or academics.
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Jerusalem, Yottam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi[/caption]
Their style of writing is direct, candid, and without stridence or tendentiousness.
The bulk of the book is devoted to recipes, but there are commentaries that situate food culture in the context of culture as a whole, as well as political developments, patterns of immigration, and social change.
This creates a fascinating juxtaposition between a larger political and cultural narrative about the peoples who have settled in, loved, and fought over Jerusalem and the more intimate day-to-day lives and food culture of families and friends, passing on recipes from generation to generation.
What is so refreshing about this book is that it is narrated through two voices: Ottolenghi is Israeli and Tamimi is Palestinian, although both have lived in London for a substantial amount of time. Despite being honest and open about the Arab-Israeli conflict and its toll in many contexts—particularly in the narrowing of communication and interaction between Palestinians and Israelis in Jerusalem—this is a work of optimism and a true labor of love that celebrates the bounty of Jerusalem’s cuisine and its peoples and cultures with infectious enthusiasm.
The authors clearly identify with Jerusalem and its people even as they criticize its intolerance, internal divisions, and increasing religious fundamentalism.
Their cosmopolitanism is moral and humanistic in orientation but also culinary: they defend it as vigorously on the basis of what’s cooking in a pot on the stove as on basic principles of respect for difference and equality.
They caution that one cannot usually find singular answers to questions about where particular foods originated, and that such exercises are generally futile and serve no one when they are aimed at scoring jingoistic points in support of a particular nation or people.
[blockquote]Hummus, for example, a highly explosive subject, is undeniably a staple of the local Palestinian population, but it was also a permanent feature on the dinner tables of Allepian Jews who have lived in Syria for millennia and then arrived in Jerusalem in the 1950s and 1960s. Who is more deserving of calling hummus their own? Neither. Nobody ‘owns’ a dish because it is very likely that someone else cooked it before them and another person before that. It is completely impossible to find out who invented this delicacy and who brought that one with them. The food cultures are mashed and fused together in a way that is impossible to unravel . . . Jerusalem was never an isolated bastion. Over millennia it has seen countless immigrants, occupiers, visitors and merchants—all bringing foods and recipes from four corners of the earth. [/blockquote]
Despite the tensions and injustices of city life and the relative lack of dialogue between Arabs and Jews and even within these communities, Ottolenghi and Tamimi still find much to celebrate and savor.
[blockquote]There is something about the heated, highly animated spirit of the city’s residents that creates unparalleled delicious food. It also has a very obvious effect on the flavours, which are strong and bold, with lots of sour and sweet. . . On top of that, there is a spirit of warmth and generosity that is sometimes almost overbearing. Guests are always served mountains of food. Nothing is done sparingly. It is a combination of the famous Middle Eastern hospitality that goes back to the days of Abraham and the typical Jewish Ashkenazi way of always showering guests and relatives with delights, lest they ‘go home hungry.’ Heaven forbid.
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Food is for the authors the one area where Jerusalemites sometimes cross barriers a little more willingly, openly, and substantially.
Even as they describe and illuminate Jerusalem’s food culture, they acknowledge that there is no shared, unified melting pot of a cuisine as much as a mosaic in which all of the parts are integral and retain their distinctiveness even as they contribute to a greater whole.
[blockquote]Is there even such a thing as Jerusalem food, though? Consider this: there are Greek Orthodox monks in this city; Russian-Orthodox priests; Hasidic Jews originating from Poland; non-Orthodox Jews from Tunisia, from Libya, from France or from Britain; there are Sepharadic Jews that have been here for generations; there are Palestinian Muslims from the West Bank and many others from the city and well beyond; there are secular Ashkenazi Jews from Romania and Germany and Lithuania and more recently arrived Sepharadim from Morocco, Iraq, Iran or Turkey; there are Christian Arabs and Armenian Orthodox; there are Yemeni Jews and Ethiopian Jews but there are also Ethiopian Copts; there are Jews from Argentina and others from southern India; there are Russian nuns looking after monasteries and a whole neighborhood of Jews from Bukhara (Uzbekistan). All of these, and many, many more create an immense tapestry of cuisines. Jerusalem is an intricate, convoluted mosaic of peoples.[/blockquote]
Their recipes tap into a cultural diversity that is little known outside of Israel in that they incorporate the recipes of the diverse Middle Eastern Jews—many who came to Israel from Arab lands as refugees—and brought with them the culinary traditions of Iraq, Yemen, Morocco, Libya, and Tunisia, amongst other Arab countries. Much of the richness of Jerusalem’s cuisine stems from the culinary heritage of these communities.
Although far less prominent in the recipes included in the cookbook, the authors also incorporate a few of the better-known recipes of European Jews from countries such as Hungary and Poland, as well as from smaller communities from lands with well-established culinary reputations, including Georgia and non-Arab countries of the Middle East such as Turkey and Iran.
Jerusalem also provides a rich selection of distinctly Palestinian dishes alongside the cuisine of the wider Arab world—from the simple and much-loved humus to salads that many peoples and cultures consider their own but that either have multiple provenances, multiple admirers and claimants, or both.
This is particularly true in the case of Palestinian or Israeli salad consisting primarily of finely chopped tomatoes and cucumbers, but also of Lebanese salads that have migrated south and influenced Jerusalem’s cuisine, and particularly its Palestinian cuisine.
Rarely has a cookbook contributed to interfaith and inter-ethnic understanding in such a potentially significant, positive, and genuinely all-embracing way.
It is a work of vitality, often quite humorous and even cheeky and playful, delightful to read as much as to use for practical guidance when cooking.
Virtually every individual resident of Jerusalem will find something to relate to and appreciate in this fine work. And anyone who loves food and loves culinary syncretism and diversity will found a cornucopia here.
Many of the photos are predictably focused on food. They are quite striking and able to induce hunger with only a quick glance. But the book also does an excellent job of illustrating the city of Jerusalem itself with photos from marketplaces, street corners, and neighborhood nooks that give a window to the city and its peoples and individuals that is earthy, unglamorous, and resonates as true to its spirit.
The authors inform the readers at the very start of the book that this is a work of personal preferences—rather than a comprehensive account of Jerusalem’s food culture. It is not encyclopedic; rather it is passionate and personal.
Consequently, they omit some commonly-loved Jerusalem foods—Arab and Jewish alike—such as kugels and sesame bagels, (quite different in density, texture, and taste depending on whether they are the Arab or Eastern European Jewish variety), cholent, and challah.
Anyone with a love of food will relish Jerusalem’s recipes, commentaries on food culture, and artistry.
We’re lucky to have an English edition; one hopes that an Arabic and Hebrew one will also follow.
