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A Jew Cooks Palestinian: Sage Tea

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I first learned to make sage tea from a Jew who called himself Palestinian.

Mr. Yadeni was born in pre-state Palestine in the early 1900s. By the time I met him, he was old. He had made some money creating Israel’s first lock company in 1947, the still-going Yardeni Locks, and he lived on plot of land in Ein Kerem, in the hills of Jerusalem. He was in love with the land. As a boy he had hiked every inch of it, and in his retirement he spent hours tending to his garden and foraging. I think for him the land came before politics. It was there before the first Arab or Jew ever set foot on it, or bled on to it, and it will, God willing, be there long after we are all long gone. Yardeni showed me how to make wine from the pomegranates, zaatar spice from the wild oregano, and tea from the mint and sage.  Mint, he explained, was for summer and spring, sage for fall and winter. To this day, in LA, that’s what I do.

Not surprisingly, as I started cooking fro Palestinian cookbooks, I came across sage tea.  A recipe for int tea appears in Joudie Kalla’s Palestine on a Plate, and in The Palestinian Table, Reem Kassis features a recipe for sage tea . The key to making it is to use black tea (caffeinated or decaf) and plenty of sugar. You steep it all together a few minutes, and enjoy. Yardeni used wild sage that he picked himself. I use the stuff from my garden or, you know, the supermarket.

Even the supermarket stuff evokes for me the flavor of the Jerusalem or Galilee hills. I can’t pour myself a cup without thinking of Yardeni, sipping from his glass between puffs of his pipe (he smoked an old Shalom briar, another pre-state product). I had many glasses of sage tea with Yardeni, and even more when I’d sit the cafes of East Jerusalem in winter. On the street leading into the Old City from Damascus Gate, Palestinian women in heavy embroidered black dresses still sit beside piles of sage, selling it for just that purpose.

The Israelis and Palestinians I love most are like Yardeni,  the ones who love and appreciate the land they live on. The more distance I get from covering the day to day craziness of Israeli politics and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the more I focus just on the land and the foods, the simpler the solution seems to me: Just share it.

Its easy to get caught up in the weeds of the conflict. Try focusing on the herbs.

See my video on Instagram @foodaism.

A Jew Cooks Palestinian, Potato Edition

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For dinner last Sabbath, I cooked mostly Palestinian.

I made potatoes roasted with lemon, dill and scallions, green beans stewed with olive oil, tomato and onions, and meatballs in a tamarind tomato sauce, all from cookbooks by Joudie Kalla.   (I also served a smoke-roasted chicken with lemon, fresh bay leaves and garlic, arugula salad, and store-bought babka, because babka goes with everything.)

Potatoes with Lemon, Scallion and Dill

The potato dish is from Baladi, Kalla’s second cookbook.   I used large yellow potatoes without peeling them. The genius of the recipe is that you roast the potatoes with half the herbs, lemon juice and a little flour until they are shiny and crisp. Then, just before serving, you toss them with the other half of the herbs. The flavors of the cooked and raw herbs hit you in alternating bites. There’s a lot going on in this dish, for potatoes.

The green beans, from Kalla’s first cookbook, Palestine on a Plate, are cooked until tender, then added to a mixture of tomato, garlic, chili and onions, which are sautéed in many glugs of olive oil. The recipe calls for two heads of garlic, chopped. I checked and rechecked to make sure Kalla didn’t mean two cloves. She didn’t. The acid in the tomato sauce stops the beans from overcooking, and all that oil, garlic, stewed onions and chili gives them a meaty depth and richness. It’s pure vegan porn.

Green Beans with Olive Oil, Tomato and Onion

For the meatballs, from the Baladi cookbook, I substituted ground turkey and beef for lamb. (As a recovering goat owner, I still get queasy eating their close cousins. That of course is a big problem when you’re cooking your way through a Palestinian cookbook. So sue me.) The real flavor here comes from the six caramelized onions and the tamarind-tomato sauce, which after a short simmer completely suffuses the meat and turns the whole dish into something rich and exotic. Never mind lamb: you could make this with eggplant and it would still be thrilling.

Meatballs with Tamarind-Tomato Sauce

I’ve been trying to describe to friends the power of these cookbooks. Then, this past weekend, I came across this quote from Edward Said, which accompanied an exhibit on refugees by the Chinese dissident artist Ai Wei Wei.

“The pathos of exile is the loss of contact with the solidity and satisfaction of earth,” Said wrote.

Immediately I thought of Baladi. Recipe after recipe connects me with the “solidity and satisfaction” of the land. From the unholy mess of politics and violence in Israel and Palestine, Kalla zeros in on what is pure, beloved and enduringly beautiful to most of the people who live there, as well as to those who have left.

Wouldn’t it be nice if one day the Jews and Arabs fighting over that bit of earth figure out a way to share its many satisfactions? Here’s the truth, and it’s a truth beyond words, beyond history, beyond argument: If they all really wanted to find a way to share, they could.

 

 

 

 

 

A Jew Cooks Palestinian, Egg Edition

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Baba’s soft-boiled eggs with yogurt, chili and lemon

I started cooking from Joudie Kalla’s Baladi cookbook by making a more complicated dish—meat stuffed grape leaves with tomatoes and potatoes—then I moved on to a simpler cabbage salad. This dish is even easier than that—eggs with yogurt, chili, olive oil and lemon. Joudie writes that it is her father’s favorite breakfast, and I can see why. The hot, soft boiled eggs melt into the yogurt, and the resulting fondue-like blend gets a jolt from fresh lemon and chili. That’s a lot of flavor before 9 am.

For those of you who’ve been hesitant to try one of these recipes— maybe you think the whole thing is a irredentist Palestinian plot to undermine the Jewish state, or an imperialist Israeli plot to get you to appropriate Palestinian culture, or, you now, maybe you just hate cooking– this is a good dish to try. You can make it in 5 minutes. It captures the flavors of the land, and it really does go well with strong black coffee.

A few recipe notes: You can make this with labne, Greek yogurt or strained regular yogurt.  you can dust with some za’atar. I’ve also made a version adding a small scoop of warm garbanzo beans and a tomato-harissa sauce– a perfect brunch meal.

Next up: dessert. The Times of London just named Baladi as Best Cookbook of 2018. Congratulations/Mazel Tov/Mabrouk to Joudie Kalla—it’s time to celebrate!

A Jew Cooks Palestinian, Cabbage Salad Edition

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Cooking my way through Joudie Kalla’s Baladi cookbook, I found myself hooked on the least likeliest of recipes: cabbage salad.

The Arabic name is also the description: Salatet malfouf bil toum wa na’na’ , or Cabbage Salad with Cumin and Mint. There’s not much more too it, just olive oil, lemon juice, salt and pepper.  You shred the vegetables, add the other ingredients, scrunch them up to soften and blend, and that’s it.  The fragrance and flavors are powerful, transporting.  And it’s just cabbage.

Cabbage, mint and cumin salad

I brought a massive bowl to a Hanukkah potluck. The hostess texted me the next day. “I need the recipe for that Persian salad,” she wrote.

No problem, I texted back, except it’s not Persian, it’s Palestinian.

Understandable, right? “Palestinian” is just not a category in our food consciousness. Israeli food is the rage, thanks to Yotam Ottolenghi, Sami Tamimi, Alon Shaya and Michael Solomonov (and their under-sung predecessor Erez Komorovsky). And none of these chefs would deny or obscure the fact that their ingredients and inspirations often come from Palestinian kitchens. But because their dishes are filtered through an Israeli or American sensibility and nationality, the label “Israeli” sticks. They are the market makers, and the market makers get to decide on marketing.

(I could go off on a tangent here about how history and culture have led Jews to excel at marketing as a survival mechanism, and how that explains, among other things, how hummus could exist as a staple of Middle East culture for thousands of years but not until Israelis began making, promoting and marketing it did it become the peanut butter of the West, identified as “Israeli” though it long pre-exited the Jewish state. Same with Jaffa oranges, which were actually created by Arab agronomists in Ottoman-era Palestine. But those are for other posts.)

Joudie’s books correct the idea that there is an Israeli cuisine – which there is – but no Palestinian cuisine, which there is and has been as well. Baladi roots many ingredients and dishes in the land and culture before Israel came into existence. Nowhere does Joudie Kalla make the argument that Jews didn’t live in the land prior to that, or that there aren’t a myriad of influences on the cuisine – European, Ottoman, her own creativity, etc. All she is saying is this is what Palestinians have been cooking and eating, these are the foods of tradition and, for many Palestinians living outside Israel, of memory.

So the books are a celebration and reaffirmation of Palestinian culture, which can be revelatory to American Jews whose views on Palestinian culture begin and end with intifadas and Arafat.

In my case, I’ve had quite a few meals in Palestinian kitchens, shopped in Palestinian markets, and eaten in Palestinian restaurants, in Israel, the West Bank and abroad. Nope, I’m not saying some of my best friends are Palestinian. I’m saying for all my experience with Palestinian food, I still found the recipes in Baladi a revelation.

Starting with the grape leaf casserole I wrote about yesterday, and including this simple cabbage salad. I can’t wait to try more.

An American Jew (Me) Cooks Palestinian Food

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I’m cooking my way through Joudie Kalla’s Baladi cookbook. The latest recipe: meat-stuffed vine leaves with tomatoes and potatoes, or “Auntie Dunia’s kufta bil warak ma’batata.”

The fragrance—cumin, onion, tomato, grape leaves, parsley—immediately transported me to the land from which it comes—what Palestinians call Palestine and Israelis call Israel. How is it possible, you wonder, to write about that over-promised land and its people and not get lost in anger and argument? How do you celebrate your culture without negating another culture? How do you get people to see you have a culture beyond what they read in the most violent or depressing headlines? Kalla has figured out the answer: write a cookbook.

Baladi, like Kalla’s earlier book, Palestine On a Plate, shows the beauty of the land, the culture, the food and the people. She looks at the land not as a battleground, but as a blessing.

For this dish, instead of lamb, I used a combination of ground turkey and chicken. (You could easily make a vegan version, using chopped sauteed mushrooms instead of meat.) The meat is flavored with onion, parsley and cumin, then wrapped inside grape leaves that you first boil. When it cooks, the potatoes gets crisp and chip-like, the onions and tomatoes melt and form a cumin-scented sauce with the fat  and olive oil. On the side I served a thin tahini sauce. It was delicious, and beyond that it  looked delicious, something most people haven’t seen or knew little about– like, you know, Palestinian culture.

Next up: Cabbage Salad with Cumin and Mint.