The Foods of Israel Today by Joan Nathan
Alfred A. Knopf, New York
2001 433 pp. US$ 40.00

Before we even start on this review, let it be clearly understand that this is a book that, despite its faults, I intend to recommend highly, for the faults (at least to those who agree with this critic) are in the perspective and not in the recipes or the charm that are offered. In fact, if there is a problem at all it that like many Americans who have visited or lived in Israel for one, two or three years, Joan Nathan tends to be a romantic, clinging so diligently to images of what this country was twenty, thirty or even fifty years ago that she has, to some extent lost touch with today's Israeli culinary realities.

One of the things that Nathan seems to have forgotten is that even tiny little Israel has not been immune to the globalization (read in this case as Americanization) of dining habits. The golden arches of McDonald's stand tall, proud and profitably over every Israeli city and even at out-of-the way highway intersections. Kentucky Fried Chicken, Dunkin' Doughnuts, Pizza Hut, Nathan's, Sbarro, and a dozen other fast food chains have become so omnipresent that the eye cannot avoid them, and financial columnists and even editorialists frequently speculate, as if it were really important, about precisely when (or if at all) the first branch of Starbuck's will open here. We have not yet attained the exalted status of the United States, where fast food restaurants sell more than sixty six billion dollars of hamburgers, pizzas, fried chicken and roast-beef sandwiches every year, and where most of the coffee sold is sipped from cardboard or styrofoam cups. We are, however, well on the way.

Nathan also seems unaware that here, as in her own country, more and more people spend less and less time in the kitchen. Like our American cousins, dining at home for more and more people has been largely reduced to trips to supermarkets or hypermarkets there to purchase frozen, tinned, dehydrated and otherwise mangled and mutilated food products and that foods without preservatives, stabilizers, flavor, scent and color additives have become a rarity and foods that cannot be cooked in a microwave oven are perceived by many as a nuisance.

Even dining out at many restaurants has been reduced to menus that offer something vaguely identified as "international cuisine". Neither French nor Italian nor Greek nor Syrian, and certainly not Chinese, dozens of cafe-restaurants now grind out precisely the same mediocre, boring and bland fare. Restaurants that once might have reflected the ethnicity of a country or even a sub-continent have been largely replaced by places serving up dishes, the recipes which might well have been dreamed up by the staff of Disney World rather than of whatever nation originally boasted them.

None of this should be held against Nathan, for the only sin of which she is truly guilty is in having mis-named her book. The title should have been "The Foods of Israel Yesterday", and in that Nathan has done a splendid job indeed, for what she has done, somewhat in the style of the anthropologist, is to document and preserve many of the glories of what was once a truly splendid and varied table.

What this book is is a highly personalized compendium of many years of research and experience during which Nathan talked, cooked and dined with the men and women who cook the dishes of Algeria, Poland, Syria, Bucharia, Russia, the nations of the Maghreb, Yemen and Ethiopia, visited nearly every shouk, city, village and kibbutz in the country, and all the time of collecting recipes. It is also a collection of anecdotes and stories, many of them related to the local marketplaces, some related to the well known political and social figures with which she interacted.

The recipes, of which there are more than three hundred, may be the best English language collection to date of the dishes brought here by immigrants from dozens of countries as well as of those of the Bedouin and Arab populations that have been here for many years. Glance through and you will find recipes for Kurdish kubbeh, Czech style chicken stuffed with fruits, Tunisian couscous, Hungarian shlishkes (sweet noodles), Moroccan lamb tagine, Libyan mafroom (potatoes stuffed with spiced meat), Greek kourambiedes (butter cookies), Armenian style eggplants stuffed with garlic, Ethiopian Wat (spiced chicken), and Transylvanian bean soup.

The recipes are well thought out and clearly written and the anecdotes and tales that unfold through the book have great charm. If the collection is faulted at all it is in that it ignores many of the culinary developments that have taken place over the last two decades. Although Nathan consulted with many of the country's top chefs, she reflects not at all on the current influences of French, Italian and even the best aspects of American cuisine. Nor does she examine the impact of the impact of their own ethnic backgrounds on the cooking style of the most fashionable and talented chefs in the country.
Naive readers might be given the illusion that all Israelis maintain kashrut. Nathan deserves a great deal of credit for avoiding the use of artificial substitutes (parve cream or margarine) but being realistic, beef or lamb sauteed in vegetable oil will never be as tasty as meat sauteed in butter; moussaka without Bechamel sauce is not true moussaka; and Mediterranean cuisine without calamari and shrimps would be a poor shadow of itself. All of which is fair enough, however, for selling a non-kosher book about Israeli foods to Jews in America would be a Sisyphean task indeed. More than that, those not concerned with kashrut have come to learn over the years that margarine, vegetable oil are merely code-words for butter and will know when to make the appropriate substitutions.

Recent surveys in the United States and the United Kingdom have revealed that most of those who purchase cookbooks do not cook from them Even though all of the recipes here are relatively easy to prepare and make for rewarding dining, they will prove equally enjoyable to those who peruse cookbooks as a form of vicarious pleasure. What is most important is that Nathan has succeeded in documenting and capturing for future generations for posterity the flavor of hundreds of now rapidly vanishing ethnic and regional cuisines and hers is a book that belongs in the kitchen or on the book shelves of any devoted lover of the good culinary life.

© Daniel Rogov