Gourmet guide
What to eat in Israel
Gazeta.Ru<\/a> tells how Israel turned into the gastronomic center of the Middle East. <\/em><\/p>
There can be many reasons for a trip to Israel. Religious zeal – and then you go to holy places. Interest in ancient ruins – and here you are torn between Caesarea on the Mediterranean coast, Megiddo in Lower Galilee, Beit She'an in the Jordan Valley, Masada, and a good dozen other testimonies of the three-thousand-year history of a 69-year-old country. Longing for relatives and friends – well, in that case you have a chance to see non-tourist Israel, to visit Petah Tikva, Ramat Gan, Rehovot and other cities where on the night of January 1 they eat Olivier salad, and in chess clubs they teach children in Russian to distinguish the Nimzowitsch Opening from the Alekhine Defense.<\/p>
You can come up with other reasons – there is still nightlife in Tel Aviv and spa on the Dead Sea – but in any trip you cannot lose sight of the fact that in Israel you need to eat first and foremost. That's right – eat: food in Israel is treated with reverence.<\/p>
Israeli cuisine should not be confused with Jewish cuisine. Traditional Ashkenazi Jewish dishes – chicken soup with kneidlach, kugel, gefilte fish and other tzimmes – are almost impossible to find in Israel today. A few restaurants in Tel Aviv run by Jewish grandmothers, where Jewish grandfathers go, for whom this is the taste of childhood – that's all Israel can offer to those who want to try stuffed fish as it was made in Odessa. Today's Jewish cuisine in Israel is like Yiddish, a dead language that is preserved only as a museum piece.<\/p>
The first repatriates and young Zionists who created the State of Israel came from Eastern Europe, but the language they spoke is now practically unused, and the dishes that were prepared in their families now look exotic. Their descendants eat hummus, falafel, baba ghanoush – in short, what their Arab neighbors eat.<\/p>
The disappearance of goose cracklings and stuffed fish from the diet of the first Israelis is explained by culinary historians for several reasons. The first is poverty: the pioneers could not afford to eat a lot of meat, fish and chicken, but they had vegetables, in particular eggplants, which could well replace meat. Especially if, following the example of Iraqi Jews, they made sabich from them – that is, stuffing pita with fried eggplant and egg, seasoned with tahini. Meat could also be replaced with eggs – that's why the dish of Tunisian Jews, shakshuka, today competes in popularity with hummus.<\/p>
The second reason lies in the desire of the first Israelis to distance themselves from their Eastern European past – they were creating a new country. Hebrew instead of Yiddish, hummus instead of forshmak: these people chose food that corresponded to the locality in which they now lived. To abandon their culinary habits, to adapt the local Arab culinary tradition to themselves meant becoming Israelis, taking root in their land.<\/p>
Following the Ashkenazim from Eastern Europe in the early 1950s, Sephardim began to arrive in Israel – Jews from Iraq, Yemen, Ethiopia, Morocco, Tunisia, enriching the local culinary tradition. Together with Arabs and Druze, people from different countries and their descendants today make up a very diverse picture, which is very interesting to examine. Especially from a gastronomic point of view.<\/p>
You should start exploring the Israeli gastronomic map, of course, with the basics – that is, with what Arabs and Jews now have in common. Pitas, hummus, falafel, fattoush (cucumber and tomato salad), labneh (thick yogurt), baba ghanoush (a Levantine dish of eggplants charred over coals) – all this is now classic Israeli cuisine. You can eat pita with falafel or hummus at any street food stall, but perhaps the best place for this is some old quarter of Tel Aviv (head to Jaffa and delve into the flea market stalls) or Jerusalem.<\/p>
If you have eaten Israeli hummus many times, you have a chance to understand how it differs from Arab hummus: in the Old City of Jerusalem, hummus may seem a bit sour – and that's normal. Arab hummus is generously doused with lemon juice, and it is often left slightly lumpy. A special chic is to get thick warm hummus in the village of Abu Ghosh near Jerusalem. This is a fairly popular place where foreign guests go to try authentic Arab cuisine dishes (in addition to all the mentioned, it's also fried cauliflower with tahini, tabbouleh salad of herbs with bulgur, and other salads from any vegetables dressed with tahini).<\/p>
Since we are talking about Arab cuisine, it would be strange not to visit Israeli Arabs, not to sit with them at the same table and not to try what is prepared for guests in Arab homes. The idea sounds wild – who would let a stranger tourist sit at their table? – but it's easy to implement. You need to know the places, more precisely, the families.<\/p>
In Tel Aviv's Jaffa live Alia and Mahmoud, a married couple who have been hosting guests at home for four years under the Eat With program. Visiting them, it's hard to understand why you are so interested and having fun. Is it because in front of you are exotic dishes – potatoes stuffed with rice (Arabs stuff everything, from onions to carrots), Arab moussaka (not to be confused with Greek – here it is more like an eggplant stew), siniya (meat casserole with tomatoes and tahini) and the main dish, maqluba, that is, rice simmered with tomatoes and onions in eggplant circles, which the experienced hostess flips from the pot to make a cake on the dish. Or because the hosts have told you such things that you will never hear in your life.<\/p>
Tea with sage or coffee with cardamom, baklava, if there is room – and now you roll out into the darkness of the Jaffa night, extremely pleased with the world in which such people live and cook such food.<\/p>
This is probably one of the most interesting and non-obvious tasks for a tourist in Israel – to see how representatives of different communities and cultures live here. How to get into the home of Yemenite Jews or get to know the Druze? The right answer is to invite yourself to lunch.
If you are in Jerusalem, you can go visit Yemenite Jews and even without lunch – they will still feed you buttery bread, give you wine and treat you to fresh cheese. And they will immediately teach you how to make it. In the Ein Kerem district, one of the most expensive in Jerusalem, twelve women live who participate in the project Women and Tales of Jerusalem. To get to visit one of them, Efrat Ginat, who conducts master classes on making goat cheese, you need to go through the gate, go down a narrow path among flowering bushes – and find yourself in a covered courtyard where kittens run around. And then sit down at a table under a canopy and, before learning how to make fresh goat cheese, hear a story.
Efrat's husband's family came to this area of Jerusalem, on the slopes of hills descending into the valley, in 1952 – four years after Ein Kerem became part of the city. At that time, there were no toilets, no electricity, and the houses consisted of one room, but each family that came here from Yemen was allocated a pair of goats by the Israeli government to make a living.
The goats still graze here, in one of the most prestigious parts of Jerusalem – although all the amenities due to a civilized person have already appeared here. You can get to know the goats, and very closely – they will let you milk them, and this will be the best impression of the entire trip. If a city person tried to describe the impressions, it would turn out almost erotic text, so just take our word for it.
You can understand Druze cuisine (it differs little from Arabic, but still interesting) in the Druze village of Daliyat al-Karmel near Haifa. One of the restaurants belongs to the Zidan family. Here, sitting at an ascetic wooden table, you will get for dinner everything that Galilee is rich in. Unusual in Druze cuisine is bread: it is not pita, but a thin flatbread resembling Armenian lavash, but with a special texture. The slightly crispy flatbread is eaten with numerous spicy salads of stewed eggplants, peppers and okra, beans and lentils, tabbouleh and dolma.
As in all of Israel, they take not only the volume but also the variety of all these small appetizers, pickles and spices. In the restaurant, you will have a chance to try kibbeh – bulgur meatballs stuffed with meat, characteristic of Arabic cuisine in general. There is a chance that, unlike muhammara, a spicy appetizer of peppers stewed in tomato sauce, you will not want to repeat this at home. But you will definitely want to understand what addictive spices the Druze use – and it is a mixture of turmeric, cumin, cinnamon and paprika.
Finding yourself in northern Israel, it makes sense to give it the attention it often lacks, and in vain. Acre fascinates with the history of the Crusaders, Haifa brings you back to earth, and from here you can go not only to the Druze, but also to Tiberias and the Golan Heights. The first city is a settlement on the shore of Lake Kinneret, where in gastronomic terms there is a cult of tilapia. The second will douse you with the freshness of winds and beckon with grapevines (Israeli winemaking is young but frisky).
Israel is, of course, not only national traditions and archaic but charming antiquity. Restaurants in Israel do not even have to be kosher.
If you decide to go to Acre to explore the Crusader fortress, do not forget to have lunch at one of the restaurants on the waterfront. This lunch will become one of the best gastronomic impressions of your life. Since 1989, the restaurant opened by Uri Jeremiah, a huge bearded man, an avid fisherman, has remained the best in Israel, if not the entire Middle East, establishment serving fish and seafood dishes. In his dishes, mackerel, salmon, sea bass and tuna, octopus and trout merge with traditional Israeli flavors. Quickly fried cubes of tuna combine with labneh yogurt and sour spices, sumac. Sea bass meets sage and lemon juice sauce, tilapia, the fish of St. Peter, which is caught in Lake Kinneret, neighbors beet cubes.
And you must order desserts here, even if you are full, even if you cannot anymore. At least ice cream with the taste of halva and cardamom, can you? And also, please, knafeh – this traditional Arabic dessert of soft cheese and thin threads of dough is not as sweet here as everywhere else.
Another famous restaurant in Israel is in Jerusalem – and it is kosher, because it would be strange to serve in an establishment that prepares biblical cuisine what is forbidden by the Bible. But here they feed dishes from products that certainly did not exist in biblical times in the land of Israel. Here you expect red lentil soup, olives, lamb with bitter herbs, figs, grapes, pomegranate and dates, but you find tomato soup, eggplants with tahini, confit tomatoes, salmon steak and sashimi of the same salmon with wasabi and nettle oil.
In fact, the menu here is quite diverse, and it is united by the figure of the chef and owner. Moshe Basson comes from a family of Iraqi Jews, hence the presence of Arabic sinia and cauliflower with tahini, and the serving of makluba turns into a show involving guests and Moshe himself. Biblical cuisine here is represented by stewed lentils "in the name of Jacob and Esau", figs stuffed with chicken, Jerusalem artichoke soup (also called Jerusalem artichoke), "King Solomon's couscous", stewed lamb. Moshe grows herbs in his garden, prepares stewed purslane, an edible weed that many criminally weed out in their gardens, and claims to creatively rework culinary ideas gleaned from the Bible.
By the end of a week devoted to exploring Israel's gastronomic space, you will be terribly tired. But don't get your hopes up – by the end of the trip, you will still be drawn to hummus just as much as on the first day. Israeli cuisine is truly addictive. It's unclear what they mix in – is it really just olive oil and lemon juice? Or za'atar, a spice made from dried thyme and sesame, which they sprinkle on everything? Or rosemary, cumin, cinnamon, paprika? Or simply the fact that in Israel, people love to eat. And they recommend it to others.
