Milk and honey land

Immigrant influences have lent Israeli food a rich and nuanced character, making its cuisine almost a delectable, edible pastiche of sorts

By Raul Dias

There is no such thing as Israeli cuisine!” says my friend and de facto guide to all things Israeli, Gabi Landau, wearing an exasperated ‘there-we-go-again’ expression that’s probably the same I plaster on my face every time I’m asked about ‘Indian cuisine’ — another misnomer, as it were — on my travels. We’re sitting at a modest little mom-n-pop style restaurant in Jerusalem, tucking into a bowl of magenta-coloured marak kubbeh adom soup, a doppelgänger of the Russian beetroot and sour cream-anointed borscht, as a plate of Hungarian beef goulash waits to be mopped up with the spongy, egg-enriched challah bread, an edible vestige of sorts brought to Israel by the Ashkenazi Jews from Central and Eastern Europe.
And just like our rickety, formica-topped table groaning under the weight of our lunch, tables across Israel can be found laden with a multitude of dishes that do well to reference the relatively young nation’s richly-layered, immigrant-influenced cuisine. A cuisine that is as varied and dynamic as it is surprising and often confounding. A cuisine that literally shudders at the thought of being compartmentalised into one single constricting genre.
Take, for example, the holy trinity of Israel’s most favourite fast foods aka falafel, chicken schnitzel and shakshuka that are all immigrant-cuisine-based iterations of the original versions.
A Syrian and Egyptian invention, falafel today is the most popular snack in all of Israel brought in by the Mizrahi Jews, while the chicken schnitzel was a perfect stand-in for the traditional Austrian veal and beef versions due to the lack of grazing space needed for large ruminants in the new state. On the other hand, the spicy egg, tomato and bell pepper-redolent breakfast staple of shakshuka which means ‘a mixture’ in Libyan Arabic owes its genesis to the Tunisian Jews and other Maghrebi Jews, thousands of whom immigrated to Israel during the 1950s from North Africa.
My journey up north to Daliyat el-Carmel, a village located in the Carmel region, just south of the beautiful city of Haifa, introduced me to the wonders of Druze hospitality. A unique religious minority of Arab descent, ethnic Druzes have a cuisine that is famous for its pita bread wraps, pickles and baklava pastries that are now Israel’s favourite dessert, best teamed with potent shots of black coffee.
Nevatim in southern Israel offers up more proof of this culinary cross-pollination, with a decidedly desi twist! Today, this moshav (a type of cooperative agricultural community) is famous for its fluffy dosha and chamandi, a chutney-like sour and spicy sauce made of ground almonds, coconut milk, curry leaves, and mustard seeds, thanks to the influx of the Cochin Jews who had emigrated from Kochi to Israel, again in the 1950s. In fact, Matamey Cochin or ‘Cochin delicacies’ is one such business that is run by a group of eight local Nevatim women of Indian origin who host Cochin-style meals in their homes for those desirous of a taste of other specialities like hubba which are semolina dumplings filled with minced chicken, onions, cabbage, celery, and coriander and Cochin papadams that are generally eaten before the Tisha B’Av fast.
But although a major chunk of Israeli food influences is relatively new, to discount its ancient and Biblical underpinnings would be sacrilegious on many levels. Most of all, its religious significance, in keeping with the rather strict principles of Kosher, which, among other restrictive practices, prohibits the mixing of dairy and meat. And this means one thing: seafood is king! Reigning supreme is one dish that I encountered almost everywhere in Israel — St. Peter’s fish that’s known by its more common name of musht. This dish of Nile tilapia, marinated in lemon juice, olive oil and garlic then grilled and served with roasted potatoes and a parsley sauce, owes its existence to the Bible, in Matthew 17:24-27, where Jesus had Peter go to the Sea of Galilee, cast a fish hook, take the first fish coming up, and pay the temple tax with the coin found in its mouth.
Speaking of the temple, the jam-filled, deep-fried Chanukah doughnut or sufganiyah is eaten at Hanukkah in honour of the miracle of the temple oil wherein a one-day supply of oil miraculously lasted for eight days lighting up the nine-branched menorah. And one of the spring festival of Passover’s most significant dishes is the matzo, an unleavened flatbread made from flour and water. But one needn’t wait for Passover to try a version of it.
The Yiddish dish of matzo ball soup — Israel’s very own comfort food — that I tried at a hole-in-the-wall in Tel Aviv’s bustling Carmel Market that abounds with cheese, baklava and olive stalls, was a symphony of plump matzo balls, root vegetables and toothsome bits of chicken simmering in a restorative broth that worked its magic on my blocked nose, affording me all the olfactory pleasures that a food market brings on!

(This article first appeared in the 22nd January 2017 issue of The Hindu newspaper, India. http://www.thehindu.com/life-and-style/food/Milk-and-honey-land/article17073511.ece)

The White City

Housing the world’s single largest cache of Bauhaus style buildings, Tel Aviv puts on a spectacular show for the architectural philistines amongst us!

By Raul Dias

If looks could kill, then Itamar Gavriel seems to be doing his darned best to slay the gum-chewing, fanny pack-toting American tourist with his icy, steel grey stare. “Looks just like Art Deco!” says aforementioned tourist for the nth time that morning, the drawing out of vowels doing very little to obfuscate traces of a New Jersey accent. Ignoring the susurrations of protest escaping her husband’s mouth, she continues making her own — highly inaccurate, as we’d soon learn —analogies.
But Itamar is used to such violent acts of desecration. As someone who has dedicated the better part of his life as a tour guide, taking architectural philistines like our motely group of 10 out-of-towners on a walkabout around Tel Aviv’s treasure trove of Bauhaus style buildings, he’s reassuringly immunized.
“To the contrary, there couldn’t be two more distinct architectural styles,” he says calmly. “While Art Deco places a hefty premium on ostentatious embellishments and chunky geometric shapes, the Bauhaus style — with its predilection for all things white — is all about primary forms and volumes that are characterised by asymmetry, which you can see in the rounded, ribbon-like balconies and thermometer windows of the building in front of you.”
He is, of course, referring to a shining white beacon of Tel Aviv’s cache of over 4,000 Bauhaus style buildings, the 1930-built Hotel Cinema. Overlooking the once-decaying, now-gleaming Dizengoff Circle and its frisky water fountains, the newly-restored building that was once the Esther Cinema, designed by architect Yehuda Magidowitz revels in all its Bauhausian minimalism from the outside. The mish-mash of styles that forms its chic interior is a sore point Itamar resolutely refuses to touch upon!
But creating something chic was probably the last thing on the minds of the early proponents of the Germanic Bauhaus school in Israel. Architects like Arieh Sharon, Shmuel Mestechkin, Munio Gitai-Weinraub and Shlomo Bernstein, who were ardent devotees of the ahead-of-its-time kind of art, design and architecture style that embraced utilitarianism and rationality, while vehemently condemning ornamentation of any kind. Thus, perfectly melding the post WWI need for austerity and the slowly growing socialist-Zionist movement in Israel after WWII. One that strove to create a new world for displaced Jews returning home to the Motherland, so to speak. In the process, making Tel Aviv Ground Zero to the largest collection of buildings built in the Bauhaus style, anywhere in the world.
Our continuing tour de Tel Aviv à pied takes us on a saunter along the arterial Rothschild Boulevard where same sex couples walk their poodles as freely as young hipsters-in-training wearing socks on their head attempt to smash Evel Knievel-esque records, riding their battered skate boards along the ridges of the undulating concrete platforms and benches at breakneck (God forbid!) speeds. It was here in the Ahuzat Bayit district, we are told, that Tel Aviv adopted its racially-benign moniker ‘The White City’. This, it borrowed from a housing estate in Stuttgart, Germany called Weissenhofsiedlung built in 1927 for a Bauhaus style exhibition. And one that was literally considered a blueprint for Utopia of sorts, thanks to its generosity of space and lightness of spirit that the early Bauhaus architects saw reflected here in this arboreal nabe of Tel Aviv.  
In a surprising departure from the almost antiseptic Bauhausian obsession with monotones, the ombre effect created by the hues of the plaster that vary at each of its stories, oxymoronically emphasises the  characteristic Bauhuasian horizontal lines of  the Rubinsky House that flow toward the window of the perpendicular stairwell. Sitting stoic on a lane off the main boulevard, this 1935-built modernist structure, designed by architects L. Kranowski and E. Marcusfeld for Eliezer Rubinsky, is also unique for its dual façades that are dotted with an array of ribbon balconies and windows.
“Due to the climatic variations between Germany and a warm Mediterranean city like Tel Aviv, many Bauhuasian architects significantly enlarged windows and placed wide awnings above them, at the same time using the wind directions to plan naturally aired buildings,” says Itamar. The great emphasis on the socio-communal underpinnings of the minimalist style is also the reason why many of Tel Aviv’s Bauhuas style cooperative workers’ apartment buildings sport erected pergolas on top of their roofs to create places for people to commune with each other and even to sleep under during the hot summer nights. Thus, making voluminous balconies a sort of de facto social statement symbol, signaling the openness of the community and the symbiosis between its members.
Seeming to hug the corner of Rothschild Boulevard and Bar-Ilan Street with all its might, the once decrepit Aharonovitch House is a shining example of what a little hope and a few licks of paint can do. It’s hard to believe that it’s the same miserable, forlorn looking building staring up at us from the dog-eared photo album that Itamar thrusts in front our eager noses. Designed in 1933 by Yizhak Rapoport, it typifies the Bauhaus-style with its glass windows, staircase and balconies that front its cubical block apartments. Built on a hill that once housed horse stables, snagging an apartment here today can earn the punter some serious bragging rights, we’re told!
Often regarded as a contemporary and dare-I-say ersatz take on the traditional Bauhaus style, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art’s Herta and Paul Amir Building was our last stop on the tour. Basking in all its Bauhaus renewal glory, this wing of the museum sits at the top end of the Sha’ul HaMelech Boulevard that lays slap bang in the center of the city’s cultural complex. Designed by American Modernist architect Preston Scott Cohen in 2011 who paid obeisance to his Bauhausian predecessors by letting ‘form follow function’, the building’s bright white countenance, small square windows and flat roof are nouvelle iterations of what we’ve been seeing all day.
But then, that exactly what the hyper-modern Bauhaus school has always stood for: buildings that grow from the sands without a past, towards a future…

(A shorter, edited version of this article appeared in the 6th August 2016 issue of the Mint Lounge newspaper, India http://www.livemint.com/Leisure/DQaUOlB7AeixJ82L4ybCYK/White-City-of-Tel-Aviv.html)