Simple
Cooking
ISSUE NO. 69
MAY/JUNE 2000
ELECTRONIC EDITION
A short user’s guide to Acrobat Reader. ➙ ●
Contents
[TOUCH ANY TITLE TO BE TAKEN TO THAT PAGE]
Falafel .......................................................1
An Israeli mechanical falafel maker 5
Reading Notes: Israeli Cookbooks ... 6
I’ll Have That With ....................................6
Toppings for falafel sandwiches
At the No-Name Diner ................................9
Mange-Tout..............................................11
Reviews THE OXFORD COMPANION TO FOOD
Table Talk: ...............................................13
Coffee with the Bedouin • POT ON THE
FIRE—our latest book
❧ RECIPE INDEX ❧
Slightly Unorthodox Falafel ............. 4
Tahini Sauce .................................. 6
Israeli Salad .................................... 7
Onion-Sumac Relish ....................... 7
Zhug (Yemenite Hot Sauce) ............. 8
Shakshuka (Eggs in tomato sauce) .. 8
The Waldo Slaw Dog ..................... 16
In the narrow, exciting streets [of Jerusalem in
1881] there were little cookshops that sold
kebab—bits of meat, tomato, and onion broiled
on spikes. In the early spring bunches of green
chickpeas, roasted in the bread ovens, were
sold. These foods were sold to the peasants who
came into the city to work, and our nurses liked
them, and we liked them too.
—Bertha Spafford Vestor, OUR JERUSALEM
T
HEBREW LETTERS at the top of the page,
read back to front, spell “falafel,”✽ the
national street food of Israel—delectably
crunchy nuggets of ground chickpeas and
spicy seasonings, served in a pita, doused with
tahini sauce and smothered in add-ons that
can range from chopped salad to pickled vegetables to a generous dose of the fiery Yemenite
condiment called zhug.
Eaten all by itself, a falafel is a tasty but
carbohydrate-intensive mouthful—a few can
go a long way. It is as the foundation of a
sandwich that they come into their own. When
I ate falafel for the first time in my life—a few
years ago at an Israeli-run place called Rami’s
in Coolidge Corner, Brookline, just outside of
Boston—I was taken aback by the amount of
silage they heaped in...until I started to eat.
Granted, I had to do a lot of chewing, but
it was all delicious and left me happy and full...if
also a little confused. To habitual carnivores
like myself, a falafel sandwich can provoke a
feeling of cognitive dissonance—the gustatory
equivalent of being forced, after a lifetime of
doing the opposite, to read from right to left.
Although falafel is regularly described
as “the Israeli hot dog,” that comparison can be
HE
Many years ago, my mother-in-law opened a
falafel cafe in Givatayim. She made falafel every
day by grinding soaked chickpeas with fresh
garlic and spices. After frying the falafel balls in
vegetable oil, she served them the favorite Israeli way: inside a split, very fresh pita with
several spoonfuls of diced cucumbers, tomatoes, onions, and parsley. For those who wanted,
she added shredded green or red cabbage, hot
sauce, pickles and tahini.
—Faye Levy, The Jerusalem Post
G
IVEN THE AGE AND SIMPLICITY OF FALAFEL, its
exact origins are necessarily somewhat
obscure.✽ The Egyptians, and particularly the Coptic Christian Egyptians, claim it as
their own, making it with dried white fava beans
(ful nabed) and calling it ta’amia. Claudia Roden,
in her BOOK OF MIDDLE EASTERN FOOD, writes that
during Lent, when they are forbidden meat,
Copts make large amounts every day, giving
away what they don’t eat themselves as a form
of penance. Even so, such croquettes have long
been familiar food in Lebanon and Syria—again,
made as often with ful as with chickpeas—and
they are said to have been brought to Israel by
the Yemenite Jews, who played an important
part in shaping the Middle Eastern flavor of that
nation’s cuisine.
In fact, falafel vendors were present at
Israel’s very first Independence Day celebration, on May 14, 1947—as evidenced by this
excerpt from an Israeli newspaper article written at the time:
Entire Sephardi families arrived at Zion Square
and the other major squares, set themselves up
with their kids and their food right there on the
ground, and spent most of the day there among
the other celebrants. Many peddlers showed up
and sold sandwiches, crackers, cakes, falafel,
peanuts, candy, gum, and more.
Such scenes caused the government to consider banning falafel vendors as lowering the tone
of this important patriotic event. Instead, falafel
became the food associated with that holiday.
And why not? European immigrants to Israel
took to falafel for the same reasons that settlers
here fastened onto corn on the cob as a celebration of national identity: it was tasty, inexpensive, and about as easy to assimilate as anything
in this brave new world.
Simple Cooking 69
E LECTRONIC E DITION
taken only so far. True, like the hot dog, falafel
is ideally suited for a street vendor to prepare
and a strolling diner to consume. Each comes
wrapped in its own kind of bun; each allows the
addition of a range of condiments to substantially enhance the experience of eating it. At
this point, however, the two radically diverge—
as can be seen by the very different nature of
those eater-applied additions.
What the hot dog is about is meaty succulence; in fact, it is so meaty and so succulent that
only the most intensely flavored condiments can
hope to improve on it—hence, the hot dog vendor’s standard offerings of mustard, relish, ketchup,
and sauerkraut, sometimes, even, bacon and
cheese. The falafel, however—and I say this
intending no disrespect—is a meatball made
without the meat. Nutritious, yes. Delicious, yes.
It possesses both those qualities in spades. But
when it comes to succulence, meaty or otherwise, the falafel is simply a nonstarter.
This is why an order of falafel topped
with, say, a ladle of hot chili is as hard to
imagine as a hot dog served in a bed of salad
greens. Appetite coheres around the two in
almost entirely opposite ways.✽ Thus, while to
those of us used to having a piece of meat as the
focal center of a fast food meal, the falafel vendor
seems suspiciously like someone trying to sell
us the crust while withholding the fried chicken, to his regular customer, the crunchy falafel
balls are less the focal point of the meal than its
signal treat—the plums in the plum pudding.✽
More accurately still, they are equivalent to the bowl of toasted croûtons at the salad
bar. In fact, if you replace the salad bowl with
a round of pita, what you have is so much like
a falafel sandwich as to make no difference—
the mix of fresh and pickled salad ingredients
(onion, tomato, lettuce, cucumber, corn relish,
three-bean salad, marinated mushrooms), the
creamy soak of dressing, and, scattered throughout, those big, greasy, garlicky, Parmesanand-herb-sprinkled crusts.
As with falafel, a salad bowl full of croûtons, no matter the amount of dressing you
poured over them, would not be especially—or
even perversely—satisfying; it is not the salad
ingredients that serve the croûtons, but the
reverse. And this is why, in every narrative on
the subject of falafel, it is ultimately the “salad”
that turns out to be the most interesting aspect
of the story.
page two
Jews have other reasons to be drawn to
falafel. Because of its vegetarian composition, it
is classified as “pareve” under Jewish dietary
laws, meaning that it can be eaten with either a
meat or a dairy meal and—equally importantly—before or after either, a welcome quality in a
snack. (Although meat can be eaten soon after
most dairy meals, observant Jews may wait as
long as six hours after eating meat before
allowing themselves any dairy products.)
Another reason for falafel’s popularity is
that in combination with the toppings that are
served with it, a single order provides a filling
and nutritious meal at very little cost. This
means that in a country much given to socializing in public places, it is possible to sit down
with a friend for a leisurely bite without any
pain to the pocketbook. It also means that
teenagers, in Israel as everywhere always famished and footloose, are able to gorge themselves to their hearts’ content. Indeed, they
have transformed that gorging into a display of
adolescent cool, as Gloria Kaufer Greene explains in THE NEW JEWISH HOLIDAY COOKBOOK:
Israeli teens are masters at skillfully stuffing so
much into their pita sandwiches that the doughy
pocket seems on the verge of bursting. They
push in the salad with a vengeance, until the
falafel balls themselves are a mere pittance,
squashed almost into oblivion. These teens
then eat these meal-size sandwiches while
walking and chatting, losing nary a lettuce leaf
in the process. Tourists, on the other hand,
sparsely fill their own loaves, but still leave
behind a telltale trail of chopped vegetables and
dressing.
E LECTRONIC E DITION
The acquisition of the mastery necessary to adroitly devour an overstuffed falafel
sandwich has certainly done its part in creating a shared sense of identity among Israelis.
As Robert Rosenberg writes nostalgically in an
essay on the demise of the hatzi-mana [“halfportion”—i.e., a half instead of a whole pita,
with fewer falafel]:✽
It was the most appropriate thing to eat while
sitting on the iron bars of sidewalk railings.
This posture, which required an adolescent
agility and balance, was mastered by whole
generations whose financial resources were
limited to a weekly movie, the bus ride back and
forth, and the hatzi-mana that could only be
eaten without spoiling clothes by adopting that
same posture.
May/June 2000
Perhaps because I am part of such a
generation myself, that phrase “eaten without
spoiling clothes,” with its wealth of connotations (good clothes were next to priceless and
had to be carefully protected, without displaying any appearance of doing so), conjures up a
lost universe of white sport coats, Saturday
evening dates, hot summer nights, snack bars
with sliding-screen service windows and yellow outdoor bug lights, and hot dogs consumed at a casual but meticulously calculated
forward tilt.
However, it takes a stretch of imagination for me to recast the scene with a saladstuffed pita replacing the hot dog in a bun. Hot
dogs, packed as they are with protein and fat,
possess an aggressive potency, a regal swagger. They may be messy and cheap, but they
still let you nosh at the top of the food chain.
With falafel, if you want the same feeling
of satiety, the operative word is graze. It isn’t as
if you feel forced to do this, as I learned when
I ate my first falafel sandwich that day at
Rami’s. Without the meat, the appetite for all
the vegetation is somehow just there. Even so,
the notion of teenage swagger attaching itself
to prowess at managing a load of salad...well,
it really does stand the world on its head.
Falafel, it turns out, is not only delicious and
filling—it can also make you think. And that’s
the part of the meal I’m chewing on still.
The falafel-makers at Shuk Bezalel off King
George Street and just behind the bargain
clothing stands have announced that they will
no longer sell the hatzi-mana. “People come
down here, fill up half a pita with every salad
they can, and eat a whole meal for less than a
shekel [about twenty-five cents],” one kiosk
owner complained....
—Robert Rosenberg
T
HE EARLIEST PHOTOGRAPH of a falafel vendor
I could find (circa 1960) suggests that
originally the day’s supply was cooked at
home and simply served from a heap at the
stand—an easy and much less expensive arrangement that may have also produced a better
product, since oil stales quickly when kept hot all
day. In a fuel-challenged culture, hot fried food is
an unaccustomed luxury. Its adoption by Israeli
falafel vendors may well reflect the creeping
page three
page four
As we experimented with the recipes we
had turned up in our research, we did a small
amount of fine-tuning to adapt them to our
taste. The most notable example of this is our
omission of parsley and cilantro—one or the
other or both of which almost always appear in
traditional versions. We did this not because
we don’t like those herbs but because we
thought they worked best as an addition to the
tahini sauce. Then, to give our falafel the
requisite flecks of green, we replaced the usual
onion with some scallions. Here is the result.
SLIGHTLY UNORTHODOX FALAFEL
In our experience, 8 falafel are enough for a
sandwich, and one sandwich, with the necessary additions, makes a meal. So calculated,
the recipe below will feed four.
[MAKES
ABOUT
32
FALAFEL]
6 ounces (a generous 3/4 cup) chickpeas
1 teaspoon cumin seed
1/2
teaspoon coriander seed
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1/2
1/2
1/2
teaspoon ground red chile
teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
teaspoon double-acting baking powder (see note)
3 scallions, trimmed of any wilted ends and minced
1 or 2 large cloves garlic, coarsely chopped
vegetable oil for frying
assorted toppings (see recipes to follow)
4 loaves fresh pita bread (see note)
THE DAY BEFORE. Pick through the chickpeas,
removing any pebbles, dirt clods, or other
detritus. Rinse them and put them in a bowl.
Cover with plenty of cold water and let them
soak until needed the next day. (If they soak
for more than 36 hours, they may sprout.)
•Put the cumin and coriander seed in a
small ungreased skillet and set this over a
medium flame. Gently shaking the pan to
keep the seeds from scorching, heat them
until they release their scent and just begin
to brown. Turn them into a mortar or small
Simple Cooking 69
E LECTRONIC E DITION
influence of European culinary taste. For whatever reason, as prosperity grew and competition
quickened, falafel is now almost always sold hot
from the fryer and there are special machines
that form the balls and fry them on command.
As Matt and I began our recipe research,
we quickly discovered that there were some
distinctly different schools of thought regarding falafel making, starting with the original
and purest form, where raw chickpeas are
soaked until tender, then pounded or ground
to a coarse consistency with onion, garlic, and
a mixture of herbs and spices. The result, when
properly made, is nutty-tasting, with a tender
but chewy texture also reminiscent of baked
nutmeats; frying renders the strong legume
flavor of the raw ground paste all but mute.
The more recent the recipe, however, the
more likely it is to call for cooked chickpeas
instead of raw ones, and for a portion of these—
up to half—to be replaced with bulgur or breadcrumbs. Certainly, this is the case with all the
falafel mixes I have examined. The result when
cooked is a puffy fritter that is more delicately
textured on the inside and somewhat crisper
and quite a bit greasier on the outside—sort of
the falafel version of “extra crispy” Kentucky
Fried Chicken. To my taste, these falafel proved
all first impression and not much else—predictably, those made from a mix had that bitter
aftertaste which comes in equal part from
granulated garlic and stale spices.
However, as much as I was drawn to the
honest,roughhewn character of the original version, I quickly discovered that I lacked the
equally roughhewn stamina of the cooks who
once prepared it by hand using a mortar and
pestle. We do happen to own a large stone
mortar, and after I easily pulverized a single
chickpea, I confidently poured in the whole
bunch of them. However, it only took a few
minutes of steady pounding before I threw in the
towel; my arm was already hurting and I could
tell I had at least a half hour more to go.
Every cloud has its silver lining, though,
since I used this experience as an excuse to
purchase a powerful (320 watt) electric meat
grinder, which ground the falafel to the texture
of very coarse damp cornmeal. A food processor fitted with the steel blade can do the same,
but the bowl will need constant scraping down,
since the paste has a tendency to cling to its
upper sides.
sturdy bowl and grind them to a soft powder with a pestle or the tip of a spoon. Stir
in the salt, ground red chile, black pepper,
and baking powder.
•Remove the chickpeas from the soaking
liquid, reserving 1/2 cup of this separately.
In a medium-size bowl, toss the chickpeas,
minced scallions, and chopped garlic together until well mixed. Then either grind
this mixture into a coarse paste in a meat
grinder fitted with the cutting disk with the
smallest holes or pulse-grind it in a food
processor fitted with the steel cutting blade.
•Blend in the reserved soaking liquid, bit by
bit, until the paste has the consistency of
moist cornmeal—just damp enough to hold
its shape when formed into a ball. Then
thoroughly mix in the ground seasonings.
To make traditionally shaped falafel (see
note below), use dampened hands to shape
small pieces of the paste into tablets about
1 inch in diameter and 1/2 inch thick. As
each is made, set it on a piece of waxed
paper. When all are formed, let them rest in
the refrigerator for half an hour.
E LECTRONIC E DITION
•Heat the frying oil in a deep-fat fryer to
350°F (or, if you have an electric fryer that
doesn’t show temperatures, turn it to medium high). Set the oven temperature to
warm and put a heatproof platter or a
cookie sheet on the rack. Fry the falafel in
batches of 8 for about 4 minutes, or until
they are colored a rich but not dark brown.
Use a pair of tongs to remove the cooked
falafel to the platter, returning this to the
oven while the next batch cooks.
•Meanwhile, slit the top edge of each pita so
that it opens up like a purse. Although this
is not traditional, we like to put about a third
of the toppings into the pita before adding the
falafel—otherwise, half the sandwich has no
falafel and the other half has nothing but. In
any case, serve at once and let the eaters fill
their sandwiches as they wish.
❖
SHAPING AND FRYING. Falafel can also be
formed into hamburger-like patties and
pan-fried in shallow oil, turning them once
so that they brown on both sides. ❖ BAKING
POWDER. This is optional and does not appear in the earliest recipes. However, it
lightens the falafel a little without affecting
their taste. ❖ PITA. In our opinion, pita
loses a bit of character and charm every
minute it is out of the oven—i.e., we don’t
buy it unless we can get it at a Middle
Eastern bakery. We prefer to take a good
THE FALAFEL MAKER
In making falafel, a special tool (‘aleb falafel) is
used to give shape to the pureed beans. This
also has a lever which when released causes
the falafel to pop out into the hot oil.
—THE OXFORD COMPANION TO FOOD
The need for such a gadget must have been
almost immediately obvious, since I found
a reference to one in Lilian Cornfeld’s ISRAELI COOKERY, the earliest Israeli cookbook
I own. That I would ever find one, however,
seemed highly unlikely.
Then, during my Internet searches, I
came across a gift shop in Israel selling
them, complete with a packet of Israeli
falafel mix, for a very modest sum. I bought
one out of mere curiosity but ended up
putting it to serious use—it is not only an
incredible time saver, but the falafel it
produces are neat, cute as a button, and all
the same size, which makes them easier to
fry. And the device itself, made of brass and
cast aluminum, reeks of retro charm.
Falafel makers are $9 postpaid from The
Jerusalem Shoppe, 5 Otniel Street, 93503
Jerusalem, Israel • WWW.JERUSALEMSHOPPE.COM.
Major credit cards are accepted. (The text on
the packet of falafel mix is entirely in Hebrew;
if you want to try using it, stir in 1/2 cup water,
mix well, let sit for 10 minutes, form into a
dozen falafel, and deep fry.)
☛COOK’S
NOTEs. SEASONING. This varies
widely, especially regarding the amount
and proportions of cumin and coriander.
Feel free to adjust these to your own taste.
May/June 2000
page five
crusty Italian loaf, cut it in half, hollow out
the center, and eat our falafel in that.
Special thanks to Elisheva Urbas, for much assistance, tempered with a certain amusement at
our efforts. As she wrote to us in one e-mail,
Israelis would consider the idea of whole enterprise of making falafal at home “kind of weird
and not worth the trouble.” But then, living as
she does on New York’s Upper West Side, she
has a falafal joint just around the corner. If only
we did, too.
Reading Notes
❀Readers seeking works that embrace Jewish
CONTINUED
page six
➡●
Prefer a falafel stand that offers you a free
selection of pickles and vegetables that you can
add as you eat.
—ISRAELICULTURE.ABOUT.COM
F
ALAFEL, AS WE NOW UNDERSTAND, exists to be
dressed...hence, in the competitive world
of Israeli falafel sellers, to be overdressed.
What follows is provided simply to indicate
something of the range of possibilities; only the
most dedicated falafel enthusiast will want to
duplicate at home the multiplicity of offerings
available at a good falafel stand. The minimal
requirement is tahini sauce, along with some
Israeli salad, onion-sumac relish, and perhaps
a dousing of your favorite hot sauce.
Even so, if you are one of those who are
never happy without a real challenge to engage
you, let me point you to amba, which Phyllis
Glazer, writing in The Jerusalem Post, describes
as “an orange-colored sauce made from unripe
mango, turmeric, and fenugreek. It is used for
flavoring and thickening and usually is served
in places selling shwarma or falafel.” If you
track down a jar of the stuff, let me know.
RRR
TAHINI SAUCE
T
AHINI IS A RUNNY PASTE of finely ground
unroasted sesame seeds. The flavor is
gentler than the Chinese version made with
roasted seeds, but it still has a rich sesame
taste. Tahini is available at most supermarkets and natural food stores. As a dressing
for falafel, dilute it to the thickness of a
creamy salad dressing, and, since density
can vary from brand to brand, you may
need to adapt the following proportions to
achieve this consistency.
[MAKES
1/2
ABOUT
1
CUP]
cup tahini paste • juice of 1/2 lemon
1 clove garlic, very finely minced
1/4
cup cilantro and/or flat-leaf parsley, minced
1/4
teaspoon salt • 1/2 cup water or yogurt
• Put the tahini in a small pitcher. Stir in
the lemon juice, minced garlic and fresh
herb, and the salt. Stir in the water or
Simple Cooking 69
E LECTRONIC E DITION
cooking in its various manifestations should
begin with Claudia Roden’s groundbreaking
BOOK OF JEWISH FOOD: AN ODYSSEY FROM SAMARKAND TO NEW YORK (NY: Knopf, 1996), which
intertwines an adventure of personal discovery
with much historical research (including a
selection of archival photographs), traditional
tales and stories, and 800 carefully chosen
recipes, many of which have never appeared
before. There are informative sidebars on everything from knishes to kobea (rice dumplings
with meat fillings) to kaimak (clotted cream
made from buffalo milk) and instructions for
preparing everything from an eggplant to a
quince. Roden also explains Jewish dietary
laws, relates what the ancient Hebrews ate,
and describes the various holidays and festivals on the Jewish calendar. This splendid
volume should have pride of place in any
serious cookbook collection—certainly in any
devoted specifically to Jewish cooking.
Gil Marks’ THE WORLD OF JEWISH COOKING
(NY: Simon & Schuster, 1996) covers much the
same ground as Roden’s book and, if not quite in
the same class, is well worth exploring. Of particular interest are the chapters on pasta and
dumplings (which includes recipes for kubba
kari, a spicy rice dumpling from Calcutta stuffed
with lamb or chicken, and manty, a Chinesestyle dumpling from Uzbekistan); breads (which
offers recipes for miloach, a Yemenite flaky flat
bread, maali, a Romanian cornbread made with
eggs and cheese, and yutangza, a buttery, cilantro-flavored steamed bun from Bukhara).
I’ll have that with...
yogurt until the sauce has an easily pourable consistency. If done ahead of the meal,
stir again briefly before using.
RRR
ISRAELI SALAD
In the kibbutz dining room, a colorful selection
of whole salad vegetables [is] placed for
kibbutzniks to cut up and dress as they choose.
The ability to chop vegetables to the smallest,
most perfect dice for this salad is considered a
mark of status among many kibbutz cooks.
—Gloria Greene, THE NEW JEWISH HOLIDAY COOKBOOK
I
ISRAEL, this Middle Eastern salad of
chopped garden vegetables is a favorite
addition to every meal, sometimes eaten
separately, other times added to a pita
sandwich of falafel or shwarma. (By “every
meal” I definitely also mean breakfast—
Israelis take it very seriously, and salat
yisraeli is a featured component.) In an
article in The Jerusalem Post, Faye Levy
notes that while everyone knows the importance of good ripe tomatoes in this salad,
good cucumbers are equally important.
N
In the US, if you get into a discussion of cucumbers with Israelis, they become passionate.
“American cucumbers are inedible,” they say.
Their favorite type is what gardening catalogs
called Middle Eastern cucumbers. I too prefer
these small, thin cucumbers because they are
crisp and delicately sweet and have tender skins
with no trace of bitterness.
E LECTRONIC E DITION
Because of their fragility, this type of cucumber is not available in supermarkets,
but you may be able to find them at your
local farmers’ market, and you can certainly grow them yourself.✽ Otherwise, use
plump, tight-skinned, unblemished Kirby
(pickling) cucumbers.
[SERVES 4]
4 or 5 medium garden-ripe tomatoes
4 or 5 Kirby (pickling) cucumbers, peeled if desired
3 whole scallions, ends trimmed and
any tough or wilted green tops discarded
1 tablespoon full-flavored olive oil
1 tablespoon freshly squeezed lemon juice
salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
• Finely dice all the vegetables and put
them together into a salad bowl. Toss with
just enough olive oil to make the vegetables
glisten. There should be no puddle of oil at
the bottom of the bowl. Then toss with the
lemon juice and season to taste with salt
and pepper. This salad tastes best if served
directly after being made.
☛COOK’S
NOTEs. SEASONING. A small salad
onion often replaces the scallions. Individual Israelis might add some lettuce;
substitute radish, cabbage, carrot, or another garden vegetable for the bell pepper;
or add some garlic, hot pickled pepper, or
green olive bits to provide extra savor.
However, such additional ingredients
should not be allowed to overcomplicate
what is essentially a very simple salad.
RRR
ONION-SUMAC RELISH
P
has a deep burgundy
color and a pleasantly sour taste with
slightly citrus-y overtones—not unlike
lemon juice without the lemon taste (in
fact, sumac-ade became a popular summer drink in this country during the Depression, when a lemon was a rare treat).
Sumac is widely used in Middle Eastern
cooking, often combined with thyme and
toasted sesame seeds to make za’atar,
which is used as a garnish and, mixed into
a paste with olive oil, spread on top of pita
before it is baked. In this relish, it tempers
the harshness of the raw onions and adds
a piquant, not-quite-placeable sour note.
Any leftovers will make a welcome addition
to a bagel spread with cream cheese. Mandatory with shashlik or steak im pita.
OWDERED SUMAC
1 medium Bermuda onion, sliced into rings
1/2
tablespoon powdered sumac (see note)
1 large half-sour kosher pickle
several sprigs flat-leaf parsley or cilantro (optional)
1/2
1/2
tablespoon good olive oil
teaspoon salt • sprinkling of cayenne
1 red or green bell pepper, cored and seeded
May/June 2000
page seven
• Place the onion rings in a medium-size
bowl. Add the rest of the ingredients and
mix thoroughly. Let everything marinate
together for 3 hours, stirring occasionally.
The onion rings will lose about half their
original volume. Drain and serve.
☛COOK’S NOTEs. Powdered sumac can be
purchased at any Middle Eastern grocery
or from The Spice House • 1031 N. Old
World Third Street, Milwaukee WI 53203 •
(414) 272-0977 • WWW.THESPICEHOUSE.COM •
for about $1.50 an ounce.
RRR
ZHUG
(Yemenite Green Chile Paste)
A
NOTHER POPULAR ISRAELI FOOD introduced
by Yemenite Jews, this pico-de-gallolike condiment is often served by itself with
bread and puréed raw tomatoes as an
appetizer or snack, or as an accompaniment to broiled fish, meat, and poultry.
Zhug✽ has no set formula—feel free, for
instance, to substitute flat-leaf parsley for
half the fresh coriander leaves, and cumin
seed for the caraway.
[MAKES
ABOUT 1/2 CUP]
4 or 5 green or red serrano or jalapeño peppers,
stemmed and seeded (see note)
a small bunch cilantro, destemmed
6 cloves garlic
1 teaspoon
EACH
1/2
dried coriander and caraway seed
teaspoon black peppercorns
☛COOK’S NOTEs.
PEPPERS. Authentic zhug is
reputedly fiery stuff. If you like the heat, go
with the serranos; otherwise, use
jalapeños. ❖ CARDAMOM. Apart from its use
in Scandinavian pastries, cardamom is
little known in this country, but it is one of
the most ancient of spices and also one of
the most expensive, third after saffron and
vanilla. In India it is used as a component
of curry powders, an ice cream flavoring, a
breath freshener (said to be especially effective on garlic), and a digestive aid. The
Bedouin flavor their coffee with it. Consequently, there is a thriving market in seeds
that provide a passable imitation of the
flavor of cardamom at a cheaper price—all
of which, unfortunately, have an unpleasant mentholated aftertaste. The real thing
is labeled “fancy green” and is available at
The Spice House (see note above) for about
$3 an ounce.
Random Receipts
SHAKSHUKA
(Eggs in Tomato Sauce)
The name of this Sephardic dish means
“shaken” in Hebrew. In its simplest form,
the garlic and green pepper are omitted, but
they make a nice addition.
[SERVES 2
AS A MEAL]
2 tablespoons fruity olive oil
1 large onion (finely chopped)
1/2 green bell pepper, cut into strips
1 tablespoon freshly squeezed lemon juice
1 clove garlic, minced
•With a food processor, use the steel blade
to pulverize all the ingredients until they
form a well-blended but still coarsely textured mass. If using a mortar and pestle,
separately mince the chile peppers,
cilantro leaves, and garlic cloves; pulverize
the coriander and cardamom seeds; then
put all the ingredients into the mortar and
pound them into a rough paste. Thin the
result with a little water until the mixture
has the moist consistency of a salsa.
4 ripe tomatoes, coarsely chopped
page eight
4 eggs
salt and black pepper to taste
•In a large frying pan, sauté the onion, green
bell pepper, and garlic until soft. Stir in the
tomatoes and cook over low heat for 10
minutes. Break eggs over the surface, cover
and cook for about 3 or 4 minutes or until
eggs are set. Season to taste with salt and
pepper and serve with warm pita.
Simple Cooking 69
E LECTRONIC E DITION
6 green cardamom seeds (see note)
Hanging Out
at the
No-Name
A Diner Story (with Recipes)
THE STORY SO FAR: On a run-down part of Water
Street sits a tiny, brightly painted, nameless
diner. Alec, our narrator, who owns a used-book
store in the row of Victorian commercial buildings that loom beside it, has gradually become
a regular, getting to know the Professor—the
burly, bearded proprietor and grill cook—and
Greg—the Gen-X waitron-busboy-dishwasher.
E LECTRONIC E DITION
I
WOKE UP ONE LATE OCTOBER MORNING to find
sunshine blazing on my face. I groaned and
pulled a pillow over my head. Three days of
heavy rain had stripped the leaves from the
maples outside the bedroom window, leaving
me exposed to the slings and arrows of a
gloating morning sun. I reached over to nudge
my wife, Jo, to go do something about this
situation, but my elbow made no contact—she
had already left to make an early class. I rolled
over onto her side and into some lingering
shadow...but I could feel the brightness inching toward me. I was faced with two equally bad
choices: get roasted or get out of bed.
So it was that, fifteen minutes later,
Sasha pulling on her leash ahead of me, I
slipped out the front door about an hour earlier
than usual. As we headed down the sidewalk,
treading gingerly on the mass of fallen leaves,
I noticed that they were coated with a thin slick
of rime and that the puddles of rainwater by
the curb were iced over. All this would be gone
the moment the sun got free of the rooftops,
but even so....I thought of Greg in his minitrailer behind Randy’s Tire Barn and shivered.
As we entered the No-Name, we found
the breakfast rush at full throttle. But by the
time I had poured myself a cup of coffee, a
booth emptied out and we immediately claimed
it. Sasha squirreled her way under the table
and then, as I retrieved an abandoned newspaper from the seat, began nosing me for anything left behind that might be of more interest
to her. The usual dog owner debate—discipline
versus indulgence—erupted, and, as usual,
discipline lost. As I gingerly plucked a half-
May/June 2000
eaten piece of toast from one of the plates, Greg
suddenly appeared, holding a plastic tub.
“Alec!” he said, sternly. “Bad customer!
Put... that...down!”
“Hey,” I answered, slipping the crust
under the table. “How else do you get something to eat in this place?”
“You wait your turn, like the rest of the
patrons.” Greg swept the dirty dishes into his
tub and swabbed down the table with a wet
rag. As he did, I reached over and liberated a
scrap of fried ham, passed it down, too, and
wiped my fingers on a used paper napkin.
“Jeez,” Greg said. “I’d better take your
order; otherwise I’ll be hauling you out of the
dumpster. What’ll it be?”
“Poached eggs on corned beef hash,” I
replied, adding, as I felt some more nudging from
under the table, “with an extra order of toast.”
“Sweep the kitchen floor,” Greg shouted,
“ throw on Adam and Eve, and give me extra
dough well done with cow to cover.” I braced
myself for the string of curses that usually
greeted such diner slang, but the Professor,
who was busy at the grill, uttered nary a peep.
I looked at Greg.
“Finally getting him trained,” he whispered. “Who says you can’t teach an old dog
new tricks?”
I was about to ask Greg how he was
surviving the frigid nights, when the outside door
opened. “All right!” Greg said, glancing up. “Time
for the passing of the bun.” Leaving that enigmatic statement hanging in the air, he picked up
the tub of dishes and vanished from sight.
I twisted around to look over the back of
my booth. A large, florid-faced man, wearing a
red-and-white-striped butcher’s apron, was
making his way toward an empty stool at the
counter, rubbing his hands up and down his
arms to warm them as he did. As he settled
himself in, the Professor came over, spatula in
hand, and said, “Waldo! I was wondering when
you were going to throw in the towel.”
“That spell of warm weather last week
tricked me good,” the man answered. “First I got
drowned in rain and then I got frozed to death.”
“Well, you can warm up some now.
Breakfast’s on the house—you know where the
coffee is.” However, even as these words left the
Professor’s mouth, Greg appeared with a steaming mug. “Allow me,” he said. “You rest your
dogs.” This time, the Professor did groan as he
page nine
went back to the grill.
When my corned beef hash and eggs
arrived, I nodded at Waldo and asked Greg
what was going on.
In turn, Greg gestured toward the window. Parked right outside was a rather vintagelooking hot dog cart bearing the legend WALDO’S
WIENER WAGON. The front of the cart bore a
hand-lettered menu, which, if I pushed my
face up to the glass, I could just make out.
“Pretty impressive,” I said. “What’s a
Frenchie?”
Waldo half-turned on his stool and eyed
me. “Cross my palm with two bucks and two
bits and you’ll find out.”
Greg said, “Right. Next, you’ll be wanting
to push your cart up and down the aisle. Go on
and tell him, you old grump.”
Waldo glowered at Greg. “I’d answer you
right back, son, but it’d spoil my free breakfast.” To me, he said, “Just jokin’. Take a teninch portion of a French baguette, use a length
of broom handle to hollow out the center, seize
your hot dog by one end, twirl it in some French
mustard, and squeeze it into the hole. Voilà—
there’s your Frenchie.”
“Oh, You Saucy Dog”
The Big Dog .................................. $2.00
The Frenchie ................................. $2.25
The Chili Dog ................................ $2.50
with cheese ..................................... $2.75
Waldo’s Famous Onion Sauce ......... Free
The Mustard Selection .................... Free
Top It Up...................................... Free
Ketchup•Chopped Onion
Chopped Kosher Dills•Sweet Pickle Relish
Mustard Pickle•Louisiana Hot Sauce
Corn Relish•Horseradish
Extras (each)....................................... 25¢
Sauerkraut•Cheddar Cheese•Cole Slaw
Cold Soda ......................................... .75¢
page ten
Simple Cooking 69
E LECTRONIC E DITION
Regular•Spicy Brown•French•Cajun
“Sounds delicious,” I said.
“Well, it sure gives you something to
chew,” Waldo replied. “And it’s popular with
the ‘I don’t want to get mustard on my mohair’
crowd. For me, it’s...,” he made a mezzo-mezzo
gesture with his hand. “Those baguettes ain’t
cheap, but I sort of make up for that from what
I save on condiments.”
“Waldo’s claim to fame around here is
actually his secret onion sauce,” the Professor
said, as he set a plate heaped with eggs,
sausage, and toast on the counter. “He has
customers whose standard order is ‘Heap the
sauce on a bun and hold the frank.’”
Waldo, who had turned and buried his
face in his plate, paused long enough to make
an affirmative grunt.
“I’m so glad to learn about this at the
close of the season,” I said. “Where has he been
hiding all this time?”
“Waldo holds court in the parking lot at
the minimart,” Greg replied. “You’d know him
well if you did your laundry at Connie’s SelfServe Laundromat.”
Waldo nodded, saying through a mouthful of food, “I get the bowlers from Roll-o-Rama,
the boozers from the Hideaway Lounge, and
the bored washer-watchers from Connie’s. Why
I ain’t rich, I’ll never know.”
“Can’t stay away from the product,” the
Professor said from where he was scraping
down the grill. He and Waldo both laughed.
“I can still eat a dog or two for lunch,”
Waldo said. “But, after twenty years, I guess
you can say the thrill is gone.”
“Well, now you have the winter break to
look forward to,” the Professor said. “You’ll be
chirpier in the spring.”
“Nah,” Waldo replied. “This time I’m throwin’ in the towel for good. When the board of
heath told me my cart had to have hot and cold
running water—and I ain’t jokin’—it was either
get a van or get out. And if I got a van, I’d have
to sit out there all winter breathing exhaust
fumes to pay it back.”
“I believe you can get a cart built totally
to code,” the Professor said. “That would be a
lot cheaper.”
“Yeah,” Waldo said. “It’d also be the size
of a blimp. You and what mule are going to help
me drag it over to the parking lot every morning? No, I say enough.” CONTINUED ➡ ●
mangeetout
The Oxford Companion to Food
I
E LECTRONIC E DITION
S THERE ANYONE READING THESE WORDS who is not
already familiar with this astonishing book,
edited by Alan Davidson, which swept the
competition at both the IACP and James Beard
cookbook awards and was declared “the publishing event of the year, if not the decade” by
Corby Kummer in The New York Times? Perhaps not unexpectedly—the book was twenty
years in the making, fifteen of them past the
original delivery date—THE
OXFORD COMPANION TO FOOD
(Oxford University Press,
$60) is as massive in size
as in authority, weighing
in at 6 pounds and 890
pages, and containing 2650
entries, more than threequarters of them authored
by Davidson himself.✽
The Oxford Companions—at this point, there
are over a hundred of them,
dealing with everything
from Edwardian Literature
to American Military History to Australian Sport—
are reference works directed
at the literate enthusiast.
They may not be as allinclusive as a true encyclopedia, but they are just
as rigorous—and, unlike
an encyclopedia, they are
meant to be not simply
consulted but actually read.
Alan Davidson was the perfect choice for
such an work, possessing as he does an admirably clear, unaffected, and often slyly witty
prose. He is, indeed, a gifted essayist, and he
has produced one of very few reference books
that will enthrall those readers who pick it up
out of simple curiosity and inform those seeking the most recondite information.
Also, apart from its weight, the book is a
pleasure to leaf through, thanks to its wellproportioned pages, readable typefaces, and
overall attractive design. This experience is
further enhanced by the supple drawings by
May/June 2000
Soun Vannithone, whose work has for so long
graced the pages of Petits Propos Culinaires,
the eccentric scholarly journal of food studies
that Davidson has edited for decades.
Even so, as much as I admire this book
and stand in awe of the enormous effort that
went into its production, it would be dishonest
of me to pretend that I don’t have my problems
with it, too. Food writers like myself, who keep
at least one foot firmly in the kitchen, don’t
always feel entirely comfortable in the company of those whose work is
for the most part anchored
in the study.
No matter how many
books a particular culinary chase may take me
through, there is usually
something that I plan to
eat waiting at the end of
the hunt. Because of this,
when seeking information,
I tend to find most helpful
those books where this
same pattern holds true—
Julie Sahni or Madhur Jaffrey, say, instead of K. T.
Achaya and his INDIAN FOOD:
A HISTORICAL COMPANION.
This isn’t to say that I
don’t find scholarly food
writing helpful or interesting or even, occasionally,
entertaining. However,
such works are most often
shelved with my general
reading—as are those very different books which
relate the adventures of an appetite. I read a lot
but I also read widely, and books on culinary
history, sociology, or anthropology have lots of
competition. It was cookbooks that first drew
me into reading about food, and, for better or
worse, it is almost always a cookbook that gets
me to read about it now.
This, of course, is a criticism of me, not THE
OXFORD COMPANION TO FOOD. But it does help us
view the book from a slightly different perspective. After all, this “companion” to food contains
not a single recipe, nor even a proper explanation
as to why this is so. All Davidson says in the
page eleven
introduction is “There were to be no recipes, and
there are none.” If you have to ask, the implication is, maybe you should think again before
submitting your application to the club.
However, we cooks think, too, and the
truth of the matter is that recipes help us do so,
and the more recipes the better. My quarrel
with most food writers is that they seem to
think one recipe says it all, when in fact a single
recipe is mostly mute. The excitement comes
when you grab hold of two or more recipes for
the same dish and start rubbing them together. Learning how different people at different
times and in different places have taken the
same idea and run with it has proven the
keystone of my culinary education.
Take falafel. The entry on the subject in
the OCF is solid enough (although it contains
little that I hadn’t already discovered reading
Claudia Roden and other writers on Middle
Eastern food). But it answers none of the
questions that arose when I began to think
about making it—how is falafel made in Yemen, where the Israeli version is said to originate; why is bulgur or breadcrumbs often
added to the mix; did street vendors always fry
it up to order or did they originally make the
day’s batch all at once at home?
I’m not saying the OCF should have
answered these questions, but I think that
more of the mindset that generated them would
have made the book a different—and, to my
mind, a more stimulating—reference. It might
even have made it a better one. Consider the
entry for “hamburger.” A mere two paragraphs
long, the first gives a potted history of its
origins; the second reads in its entirety:
Ayto points out that many other terms
(such as cheeseburger) which followed hamburger were based on a misapprehension that
a burger was a thing in itself which could be
made of ham or something else.
I don’t know about you, but I sincerely
doubt that the person who coined the word
“cheeseburger” was under any misapprehension that hamburgers were “burgers” made of
ham; he was giving fresh vernacular life to a
word that had lost all connection with its
original referent—the German city of Hamburg. John Ayto is a professional British lexicographer, and his is the sort of observation
made by someone whose experience with food
page twelve
words comes mostly from other books. To do
the hamburger justice, a writer needs a sturdier link to the richness of the thing itself.
Alan Davidson does know his way around
the kitchen—and not just at the stove, as his
perceptive entry on “washing up” reveals. I just
wish he had done more of his thinking there.
Despite this bit of carping, however, I can
affirm that anyone who enjoys reading about
food will find this a book to treasure. Among
the many rave reviews it has garnered, my
favorite was this one by Emma Cookson, posted at the British Amazon.com site:
Alan Davidson is my grandfather and has been
writing this book for twenty years, way before I
was even born. I'm thirteen, so he started
writing it when I was minus seven years old. I
have read lots of his entries on an enormous
range of different topics - from Aardvark to
Zucchini. I can assure you that my grandfather
really knows an awful lot about foods from all
over the world and throughout human history.
He writes in a really amusing and interesting
way. I recommend this book to you, not only as
a reference work, but as a source of endless
amusement and surprise. It may interest you
to know that whenever I am in a restaurant
with him and my grandmother, he always
seems to order the best dishes (putting his
knowledge to good use, I see).
Amen to every word.
Shipworm Lyrodus (formerly Teredo) siamensis,
sometimes called teredo worm, is a strange MOLLUSC which starts life as a BIVALVE, in a double shell,
but then, having established itself in a suitable
piece of wood—often a floating log or the trunk of
a “sam” tree in a mangrove swamp—becomes
long and wormlike, with the original two shells
transformed into mere appendages at each end.
All that one normally sees of the shipworm is the
snail-like head peeping out of the bark.
As its name implies, the shipworm can do
considerable damage to the timbers of boats,
and it is usually thought of in this connection
rather than as a foodstuff. Yet it is edible,
although not often marketed, and may even
have been the subject of some of the earliest
experiments in “sea farming.” Coastal dwellers
in Thailand and elsewhere in SE Asia have for
long cultivated the shipworm in logs anchored
in the sea. They may be pickled in vinegar or
nam pla (Thai FISH SAUCE), or fried and eaten with
eggs. However, there is no need to cook them.
Doreen Fernandez (1994)
CONTINUED ➡ ●
Simple Cooking 69
The Literary Feast:
Coffee with the Bedouin
Bertha Spafford Vester, in OUR JERUSALEM, her
memoir of her almost seventy years as a resident of that city, describes a visit by horseback
in May 1914 to a Bedouin tribe with whom her
family had become friends. Here is an excerpt:
S
DIAB MET US CORDIALLY, looking very
proud, tall, and handsome in his rich
flowing robe. A reception had been arranged in a tent one hundred and fifty feet
long, furnished with carpets and low lounges.
It was gay with its brightly colored carpets and
mattresses covered with crimson and yellow
silk, green velvet, and silk brocade of many
hues. The women were busy cooking the “fatted calf,” in this case a lamb, on the other side
of the partition that separated the women’s
part from the men’s. We were first served with
lemonade, and [the shiek’s servant] Mutlag’s
face beamed as he carried in a tray with three
glasses. Contrary to their custom, but having
learned it in their frequent visits to our home,
it was passed to the ladies first. We drank, and
without the glasses being washed, they were
refilled and passed again, until all were served.
Immediately after the lemonade was served
faithful Mutlag brought in the muhbagh which
they use instead of a coffee mill. It is made of a
section of a walnut tree hollowed out and
roughly carved on the outside. A long handle
cut to fit the cavity is ornamented with carvings and brass tacks. The coffee is put into the
muhbagh, and in the presence of the visitors
the coffee is pounded into a powder. Each
stroke is in perfect rhythm to a song in praise
of their honored guests. It is an art to be able to
do this, and a special servant performs this
duty. The coffeepot was brought and placed
upon the ever-ready campfire, and soon our
musical coffee was made.
The serving of coffee is an important item
in the entertainment of guests. Those who
understand the etiquette of the coffee language
get many significant hints regarding their friendship and as to the mood their host is in. A few
drops of the coffee were poured into a little
round cup without any handle, and from that
HEIK
May/June 2000
TABLE TALK
into another, and after rinsing that cup out,
were poured into another, and so on, until all
had been rinsed, which Mutlag then drank,
showing that there was no poison in the cups.
One often hears the expression, “he died
from a cup of coffee,” and although it is not
practiced as of old, the tradition still continues.
All sipped bitter coffee, fragrant with orangeblossom water. In about half an hour the same
performance was repeated, and at regular intervals, until the midday meal was ready. Fortunately for us the cups were not filled to the top,
for it shows very bad taste to refuse any.
✑POT ON THE FIRE is the title of our new book,
to be published by North Point Press this
October. As usual, for the most part it will
contain a gathering of essays that originally
appeared in this publication, ranging back as
far as “Caponata Siciliana,” which appeared in
SC•32, and embracing all our recent favorites.
At the same time, SERIOUS PIG will make its first
appearance in a paperback edition, with a nifty
brand-new cover.
This issue is dedicated in loving memory to
Norman Mommens
“He joined first and last things, fear and joy, mutually tempered by wonder, finding the essence of things and seeking
above all, not “The Truth,” but truthfulness.”
ELECTRONIC EDITION
Simple Cooking 69 © 2000 John Thorne and Matt Lewis
Thorne. All rights reserved. ❍ SC is published every other
month. A subscription to the electronic edition is $24 for six
issues, worldwide. ❍ Unless stated otherwise, we assume
letters to us are meant for publication and can be edited
accordingly. ❍ P.O. Box 778, Northampton MA 01061.
E-MAIL: MATT&[email protected].
WEBSITE: HTTP://WWW.OUTLAWCOOK.COM.
SUBSCRIBE AT: HTTP://OUTLAWCOOK.SAFESHOPPER.COM/
ISSN 0749-176X
page thirteen
Reading Notes
❀ Cookbooks that specialize in Israeli cuisine
And in the army camps a new ritual has begun:
instant coffee is put in cups and water is added,
drop by drop; all the while a spoon is beaten
against the side of the cup, until the drink is total
froth and creamy. You can almost locate an army
camp in the dark by the sound of the rhythmic
beating of spoons against cups, like some ancient drummed message echoing from hill to hill.
Finally, a quick word about Chef Aldo
Nahoum’s THE ART OF ISRAELI COOKING (NY: Holt
Rinehart Winston, 1970), which, despite the New
York publisher, was actually printed in Tel Aviv.
Approach it with caution. Nahoum presents the
recipes without explanation or introduction and,
while some are truly interesting, most need more
context than he provides to be confidently prepared—at least by a non-Israeli.
❀The other books consulted while writing this
essay can be divided into two groups. The first
were consulted for a general CONTINUED ➡ ●
Simple Cooking 69
E LECTRONIC E DITION
are harder to track down, perhaps because of the
general perception that there is no such thing.
This may have been an accurate assessment
during the early years of independence when the
country was at war with many of its neighbors, a
time when money was tight and all but the most
basic of foods relatively scarce. But things have
changed considerably since then, and Israelis in
general have become much more interested in
their evolving national cuisine.
Indeed, Israeli cooking has much in common with American cooking—since it, too, is
the product of an amalgamation of several
immigrant cuisines and of the gradual adaptation of specific dishes to a new climate and
different foodstuffs. A sense of the resulting
ferment can be found in three Israeli cookbooks written by—and to some extent for—
American Jews who had migrated to Israel as
part of the Aliyah Movement and brought with
them our own peculiar let’s-gather-that-intoa-cookbook sensibility. All of these books are
out of print but are usually easy to find.
Sybil Zimmerman’s ISRAELI COOKING ON A
BUDGET (Jerusalem Post, 1978) is the one most
specifically directed at Jewish-American cooks
who found themselves at sea in a world without
supermarkets. ( Zimmerman had already written a fat tome entitled COMING HOME: A PRACTICAL
PLANNING GUIDE FOR LIVING IN ISRAEL.) However,
because of its rigorous practicality—including
an enthusiastic endorsement of a patent fuelefficient cooking unit—her cookbook is mainly
of historical (and, to those who lived in Israel
then, of great nostalgic) interest.
Lilian Cornfeld’s ISRAELI COOKERY (Westport: Avi, 1962) is quite another story. Although it looks, walks, and quacks like a home
economics textbook—which is no surprise, since
Cornfeld was a professional nutritionist—her
genuine curiosity about the culinary life unfolding around her is apparent in the first
recipes of the book, which were collected from
the Yemenite Jews and include one for zhug, “a
paste sharp enough to raise the roof of your
mouth, but certainly appetizing and disinfecting [!] in a hot climate.” The nutritionist bent is
never quite put aside—many of her recipes
were collected in institutional kitchens (especially old age homes—the elderly being very
fussy about authenticity)—but the book propage fourteen
vides a kaleidoscopic view of the early years of
Israeli cooking (with plenty of photographs)
and some quite interesting recipes.
However, if you want to add just one
volume on this subject to your cookbook collection, my hands-down choice would be The
Israeli Cook Book, by Molly Lyons Bar-David
(NY: Crown, 1964). One of the pleasures of
writing about unfamiliar cuisines is coming
across treasures such as this, written by an
intelligent and indefatigably curious food writer. Three of the four acknowledgment pages
thank hundreds of individual cooks for their
contributions, and the book itself is packed
with them, often prefaced with helpful introductions. These range from the truly odd—a
recipe for cow udder, “the only meat that Jews
eat with dairy... since it cannot possibly contravene the humane merciful law of ‘thou shalt
not cook the kid in its mother’s milk’”—to the
truly delicious—an Ethiopian recipe for potatoes deep-fried with bay leaves, a four-page
collection of herring salads (French, Russian,
Lithuanian, Italian, Dutch, German, etc.), a
recipe for roasting a chicken with its interior
coated with lemon marmalade.
In short, this is a delightful book from
the first recipe—for falafel!—to its concluding
pages, which treat at length the new-found
passion for coffee (introduced to a previously
tea-drinking nation by German Jews) and offer
this fascinating little peek into Israeli army life:
Footnotes
✽ Sometimes “felafel.” Interestingly, the English language versions of both Israeli newspapers that I consulted on the Internet while
researching this essay allow either spelling,
and both appear with approximately the same
frequency.➥
✽ Curiously, an add-on that the hot dog and the
falafel sandwich do share—in the abstract, at
least—is the French fry. In Israel, it is not
uncommon to get a serving of fries (by no means
always hot) dumped into the pita with your
falafel; the Hebrew for this variation is falafel im
cheeps. While I’ve never seen a hot dog stand
serving fries this way (hard to get them into the
bun), I find nothing wrong with the idea. This
because the French fry is, well, sort of succulent. It meets the hot dog in the doorway leading
out and the falafel in the doorway leading in,
providing a mediating presence to both.➥
✽Israeli street vendors, as it happens, have a
simple solution to salve an attack of falafelengendered meat deprivation anxiety: steak im
pita. As described in the Israel section of THE
WORLD ATLAS OF FOOD, this is made by stuffing
thin slices of charcoal-broiled steak into a pita
and then topping it up with crunchy raw vegetables, tahini sauce, and a dash of chile sauce.
In other words, Steak im pita takes the falafel
paradigm and flips it rightside up again. ➥
✽For instance, the word itself is said to come
from the Arabic phrase umm al-falafel, meaning “mother of peppers.” Huh? ➥
✽From An Arithmetic of the Soul in an Uncivil
War—Yom Kippur 1987 to Independence Day
1988 through the Intifada. HTTP://WWW.ARIGA.
COM/VISIONS/TLVTLV/110687FELFAEL.HTM. ➥
E LECTRONIC E DITION
✽Most specialty seed companies sell these BeitAlpha-type cucumbers under their own proprietary name (in italics below),
but all are a very shiny, medium green, with entirely
edible thin and tender skins
and remarkably crisp and
juicy flesh. Amira—The Cook's
Garden, PO Box 5010, Hodges
SC 29653 • 800-457-9703
•certified organic Mideast prolific cucumber— Seeds of
Change, PO Box 15700, Santa
May/June 2000
Fe NM 87506 • 888-762-7333; Tamara—Shepherd’s Garden Seeds, 30 Irene Street, Torrington CT 06790 • 860-482-3638.
✽ Nor does it have any set spelling. I’ve come
across “zhoug,” “z’hug,” “schoug,” “z’chug,”
“zehoug,” and “zug.” ➥
✽ The roster of other contributors reads like a
veritible Who’s Who of food scholarship, including such notable figures as Ayla Algar,
Sophie Coe, Jane Davidson, Philip and Mary
Hyman, Tom Jaine, Rachel Laudan, Janice
Longone, Sri and Roger Owen, Charles Perry,
Gillian Riley, Alicia Rios, Rena Salaman, Barbara Santich, Regina Sexton, Raymond Sokolov,
and Barbara Wheaton.➥
Reading Notes (Concluded)
perspective on Middle Eastern cooking or
Israeli life. These include Jane Grigson’s THE
WORLD ATLAS OF FOOD (NY: Simon & Schuster,
1974); Arto der Haroutunian’s MIDDLE EASTERN
COOKERY (London: Century, 1982); Victor Malka’s ISRAEL OBSERVED (London: Kaye & Ward,
1979); Claudia Roden’s A BOOK OF MIDDLE
EASTERN FOOD (NY: Knopf, 1972); Andrew Sanger’s
FODOR’S EXPLORING ISRAEL (New York:Fodor’s Travel
Publications, 1998); and Bertha Spafford Vester’s
OUR JERUSALEM: AN AMERICAN FAMILY IN THE HOLY
CITY, 1881-1949 (Garden City: Doubleday, 1950).
The second group embraces those containing interesting falafel recipes. Look for
these in Gloria Kaufer Greene’s THE NEW JEWISH
HOLIDAY COOKBOOK (NY: Times, 1999); Howard
Hillman’s GREAT PEASANT DISHES OF THE WORLD
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1983); Aida Karaoglan’s
FOOD FOR THE VEGETARIAN: TRADITIONAL LEBANESE
RECIPES (Brooklyn: Interlink, 1988); George Lassalle’s EAST OF ORPHANIDES (London: Kyle Cathie,
1991); Joan Nathan’s JEWISH COOKING IN AMERICA
(NY: Knopf, 1994); and Claudia Roden’s MEDITERRANEAN COOKERY (NY: Knopf, 1987).
Mange-Tout
comments that the shipworm (known as tamilok)
is picked from old wood, especially driftwood, in
parts of the Philippines.
The wood is chopped up so that the worms, pink,
six to eight inches long, may be extracted, washed
a little, and deposited wriggling on one’s tongue.
The tamilok, its fans swear, has a fresh clean
taste that sends shivers of pleasure down one’s
alimentary canal.
page fifteen
No-Name
Greg, who had taken the stool next to
Waldo, said to me, “The Professor won’t sell
hot dogs while Waldo’s in business. Around
here, there are just two seasons—Saucy Dog
means the weather’s warm and Diner Dog
means it’s cold.”
Waldo said, “If that’s so, this town’s
gonna have a mighty long winter. Only I won’t
be around to see it, ‘cause me and the wife are
movin’ to Florida.”
The Professor shook his head. “You say
this every year, and the next Memorial Day
there you are again, shouting ‘Get your red
hots!’ at innocent tourists.”
Waldo snorted. “My wife said the same
thing. To prove I was serious, I wrote this out—
the one recipe I swore I’d take to the grave with
me.” He reached into his shirt pocket, removed
a folded scrap of paper, and held it over to the
Professor. “Here,” he said.
The Professor accepted the piece of paper but didn’t open it. “If this is what I believe
it to be,” he said, “I don’t think I can take it.”
“Dang straight you can’t take it,” Waldo
answered back. “You’re gonna read it and then
you’re gonna burn it right over there, while I
watch.” He pointed to the grill.
When the Professor still hesitated, Waldo said, “Come on, hurry up. I got a fishing rod
that’s strainin’ to head south, and I don’t want
it to leave without me.”
The Waldo Slaw Dog
[SERVES 1]
1 hotdog
1 hot dog bun
1 tablespoon cheddar cheese
2 or 3 tablespoons coleslaw
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page sixteen
Simple Cooking 69
E LECTRONIC E DITION
• Boil or grill the hot dog and heat the bun.
Both should be quite warm. Sprinkle the
cheese into the bun and put the hot dog
over it. Give the cheese a moment to start
melting, and then heap the coleslaw on top
of the hot dog. Mustard optional.
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