SWEET TIMES
With my mother in the early 1980s. She’s a really good cook and baking is her thing.
“A childhood memory: making chocolate truffles with my mom, the kitchen covered in cocoa powder.”
With my mother in the early 1980s. She’s a really good cook and baking is her thing.
My first job out of culinary school was at the Big City Tavern in Boca Raton, Florida. The restaurant was stupidly busy and full of the kind of characters I had read about in Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential. There was a sous chef named Joe Gil, but everyone called him Elvis or Big Daddy. He styled himself like a 1950s greaser, with slicked-back hair and black-rimmed sunglasses that he wore indoors and out. Joe indulged heavily in what I call “the restaurant lifestyle.” Once I was working the station next to him and reached up to grab what I thought was my water, only to discover a moment too late that it was Joe’s cup of warm vodka. Despite his destructive and self-destructive behavior, the owners of the restaurant kept Joe around. He was just such a goddamned good cook. Joe called me Rabbi, because I was Jewish and he wasn’t that creative. He had taken a liking to me because his dad, like mine, was Sephardic. “You know,” he explained, “twenty cups of coffee a day and a pastry after every meal.”
In Israel, things get done over coffee and pastries. Pastries are truly everywhere: Trays piled with mountains of brightly colored, syrup-soaked confections are part of the landscape. The simplest roadside kiosks sell surprisingly good little sweet cakes and babkas and rugelach. Even the famous Israeli breakfast spread almost always includes a dish of halva for people who need an early morning sugar rush. In the shuk (market), a vendor will try to sell you carpets only after inviting you in for some apple tea and perhaps a piece of baklava. Business and personal matters are difficult to keep separate, just as it is virtually impossible to separate hospitality from sweets.
Hospitality has been a hallmark of Middle Eastern culture since Abraham welcomed strangers into his tent five thousand years ago. The philosopher Philip Hallie said that hospitality is not the opposite of indifference; it is the opposite of cruelty. In the harsh landscape of the region, to deny a person hospitality is to potentially put him in harm’s way. And true hospitality is measured by how we treat people from whom we have no expectation of reciprocity.
“In Israel, things get done over coffee and pastries. Brightly colored syrup-soaked sweets abound.”
Hospitality is ritualized in the simplest daily routines. When you are invited into an Israeli home, there is always coffee and tea and cakes and cookies. My grandmother never drank coffee, but she always had two types to offer guests (granted, they were Nescafé and instant Turkish, but still). Every household in Israel has a kumkum (electric teakettle) at the ready should a guest materialize. At his old house, my father would run into the backyard to pick fresh lemongrass to make tea for visitors. My mother always has a full pot of American-style drip coffee and a Tupperware container full of Chinese chews on the kitchen table in her apartment in Kfar Saba. There’s absolutely nothing Chinese about these chewy coconut bar cookies, but she has been making them for as long as I can remember. They keep forever, so they’re great to have around when company drops in.
In the old city of Jerusalem, a shop owner’s snap of the fingers still brings a boy with the requisite deal-making coffee.
My mother, Evelyn Fisher, is a great cook. I love her coffee-braised brisket (you can find it here), but sweets are her specialty. One of my earliest kitchen memories is making chocolate truffles with her, every surface covered in cocoa powder. The whole family would fight over her chocolate mousse. She used to buy giant boxes of Sour Patch Kids, ostensibly to bribe my brother and me, but I know she just wanted an excuse to eat them herself. I can always tell when she is coming to visit us because my wife starts filling the cupboards with packages of mini powdered sugar donuts and black licorice.
My mom moved to Israel when she was twenty-nine. If I didn’t know better, I might think she did it for the sweets. She was born and raised in East Liverpool, Ohio, a small town west of Pittsburgh. Her family never lit a Shabbat candle in her life, but her parents were devoted to Israel. Her father, Alex Fisher, was a pediatrician and part of the volunteer sales force for Israel Bonds, which were conceived by David Ben-Gurion, the country’s first prime minister, as a way to bolster Israel’s fledgling economy. Ben-Gurion also wanted to ensure that the world Jewish community had a stake in the success of Israel. My grandfather traveled frequently to the isolated Jewish communities in small towns in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia, trying to rally support for the new Israeli state. The War of Independence in 1948 had a devastating impact on Israel, and was immediately followed by a huge influx of refugees from Europe and the Middle East. As a conduit for foreign investment, Israel Bonds were a lifeline for the struggling country, allowing Israel to resettle the refugees and invest in infrastructure projects that laid the foundation for generations to come. In times of war, sales of Israel Bonds always surged. Since its beginnings in 1951, sales of Israel Bonds have raised $40 billion for the state. Initially, most of the buyers were American Jews. My grandfather knew all the early leaders of Israel—Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir, Yitzhak Rabin. Once, during the Yom Kippur War of 1973, he was summoned to Israel to witness the mutilated bodies of Israeli soldiers on the front lines. They wanted him to understand what was at stake, not just for Israel but for Jews everywhere. It was the only time my mother ever saw her father cry.
My mother’s parents, Alex and Betty Fisher, lived in East Liverpool, Ohio, and were quite stylish. Above, ready for a night out in Florida.
In East Liverpool, which had maybe one hundred Jewish families, Israel represented something important—the idea of a place where your identity as a Jew did not make you “other.” To my mom, Israel represented home. When she went to boarding school, she had to fight to be able to attend synagogue on the high holidays and not to eat pork at the dinner table. Some of her classmates didn’t speak to her because she was Jewish.
She visited Israel for the first time in 1962, when she was sixteen. Her parents hired a guide, who took the whole family through the country in a rented car. Starting in 1968, she returned every summer. In 1975 she decided to stay for the year and got a job teaching English. That was the year she met my father. If they hadn’t gotten married, my mother might never have left. But by 1980, my father was fed up with Israel. My mother did not want to leave, but she did not want an unhappy husband either. They moved to Pittsburgh, an hour’s drive from her hometown.
For ten or twelve years, she couldn’t bring herself to return to Israel. She had a good job teaching English at the local Jewish day school in Pittsburgh, and her two sons were growing up in a tight-knit community. Then, in 1992, she agreed to chaperone an eighth-grade class trip to Israel (coincidentally, Steve’s wife, Shira, happened to be a student on that trip). As soon as she got off the plane, a strange sensation set in. Everything had changed. The roads were all different; she didn’t know how to get anywhere. But she felt that she was home again. She cried when she had to board the plane back to the U.S. One evening, shortly after returning from that trip, she and my father were eating dinner at Wendy’s. “You know,” my mom said, “I could really live in Israel again.” And my dad said, “Let’s go. I’m ready to go back.”
My parents divorced soon after we moved there, but my mother has lived in Israel for over twenty years now. She might have thought about returning to Pittsburgh if my brother, Dave, hadn’t died, since he probably would have enrolled in college here when he finished his army service. But Israel is her home. The country was founded during her lifetime, and now her son is buried there: There’s nothing more Israeli than that. I visit her a couple of times a year. We sit at her kitchen table and drink coffee and eat Chinese chews. Dave’s old army buddies drop by to visit. So do friends and neighbors and relatives.
“My grandfather, Alex Fisher, sold Israel bonds. He knew Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir, and Rabin.”
Probably in the late 1970s to celebrate my birth and quite possibly my bris, both sets of grandparents, the Fishers and the Solomonovs, were together in Israel.
Like most chefs, I have spent the majority of my cooking career on the savory side of the kitchen. Line cooking runs on adrenaline—it’s all about instincts, split-second timing, and, sometimes, improvisation. Pastries are a meditation—time slows down and you must submit to the process. When I got to Vetri, my first job was working the pastry station. Although I struggled, I learned a kind of patience and attention to detail that ultimately helped me become a better cook and chef. We’ve never had a pastry chef at Zahav. I believe there needs to be continuity between the savory and sweet courses of the meal, a continuity too often lost when the pastry department is an autonomous region. Every cook who has worked the pastry station at Zahav has started on the savory side. I want my line cooks to understand how these disciplines can cross-pollinate. And I want them to experience the simple satisfaction that you get from baking for others (or for yourself). I appreciated this in my first kitchen job, working in the bakery in Kfar Saba, but I understood this much, much earlier—from those hours in the kitchen with my mother.
At Zahav, we welcome guests into our home every night. Many are regulars and old friends. But many are strangers, most of whom we will never see again. We measure ourselves by their experience. We want to find out everything about them. Where are they from and what brought them to Zahav? Are they celebrating a special occasion? Are there foods that they absolutely love or simply cannot eat? Have they visited Israel? We want to know anything that can help us make them feel like they came to the right place. Like the carpet merchant in the shuk, we want to take a business transaction and make it personal. And dessert is our final chance to do this. The Israelites were promised a land flowing with milk and honey. I’m just trying to do my part.