David Lebovitz is a big foodie. He worked at Chez Panisse for years in Berkeley. Now he’s in Paris. So he’s hip. Yes and he hasn’t got a clue. Here he is riffing on a recipe for an Israeli dessert. By the way, I think this is unconscious hasbara. That is to say, the guy is so immersed in mainstream culture and its assumptions– Israel is his hostess’s “favorite place in the world”– that he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know.
I’ve never given Israeli food all much thought. Sure, I’d had my fill of falafels and hummus in my lifetime, but there is a trip in my future and I was at a dinner party the other night and the woman hosting us had lived in Israel for a number of years and said it was her favorite place in the world.
Other people at the party chimed in saying also that the food was great – especially the salads, something I miss from years of living in California – all those vibrant, fresh greens and luscious tomatoes bursting with flavor that we had an overload of at the farmers markets! But I’ve never given much thought to Israeli desserts.
Update. Thanks to Henry Norr for changing Israeli desert to dessert.
Let me guess – baklava?
Thought they were Russian. Didn’t Russians invent everything?
How about this fraud that is claimed as Israeli but in fact isn’t
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20925954•
According to the autosomal polymorphisms the investigated Jewish populations do not share a common origin, and EEJ (Eastern European Jews) are closer to Italians in particular and to Europeans in general than to the other Jewish populations… EEJ are Europeans probably of Roman descent who converted to Judaism at times, when Judaism was the first monotheistic religion that spread in the ancient world. Any other theory about their origin is not supported by the genetic data.
o The origin of Eastern European Jews revealed by autosomal, sex chromosomal and mtDNA polymorphisms (2010), Avshalom Zoossmann-Diskin, Department of Human Genetics, Sackler Faculty of Medicine, Tel-Aviv University, Israel, Biology Direct 2010, 5:57 5:57 doi:10.1186/1745-6150-5-57.
The concept of Jewish food is interesting.
Coming to USA from Poland, I was surprised with lox and bagel. While the word bagel was familiar (there are complex issues how bagels and bubliks are related to each other and to the ethnic background to bakers and consumers), lox was a totally new thing, a delicacy from the frigid north of Europe. And where is the carp? “Fish Jewish style” is a typical appetizer in Poland, and is made with carp.
In general, food forms a complex geographical continuum. Various forms of falafel are known all over Western and South Asia. Mongols, Russians and Poles have quite similar barley soup, so a food geographer could map Eurasia with zones of barley soup, cabbage soup, tea drunk from glasses, Wiener schnizel (a favorite Polish dish) and there are also zones of grape leaves, falafel and humus.
In any case, falafel is, first and formost, a German dish. Over there you can eat it “mit alles” or make your pick what veggies you want, get the standard souse or also “scharf”, select Turkish or Syrian bread, and wash it down with ayran. Or if you feel less vegetarian, get a doener, all cheerfully served by German girls with neat scarfs covering their heads.
Cuisine is the one thing that almost every group appropriates willfully, ignorantly. Almost no dish is where it claims to be from, not sushi, not pasta, of course not the potato.
I can understand with important things in peril like land, access to loved ones and the land farmed on, walked on, loved by parents and grandparents, that calling falafel Israeli stings too, but the food wars are silly on multiple levels.
Pizza is Italian except that it is Arab too, ultimately, like the Falafel, which by the way really is Israeli because Israelis make it and eat it. Tempura is Japanese, right? (though Portuguese and before that perhaps from Guinea). Next time you eat a yellow banana know you are the appropriator of Wolof-Jamaican culture stolen by colonial south Americans.
Or, just realize that food shows us we are actually one species sharing the same planet and we should follow its democratic example.