Since the austere years of the state, when sitting down to a top-tier meal could entail confronting a plate of chicken and rice with a very blasé attitude, Israeli cuisine has undergone a revolution.
During the early days of the Jewish state, food had only one purpose. “People ate only to survive,” said chef Michael Katz, who founded the cooking school Attilio in Or Yehuda in 2021, and who serves as its managing director and leading culinary lecturer.
Chef and food anthropologist Hemdat Goldberg, a researcher at FOODISH, the culinary wing of ANU – Museum of the Jewish People, which explores Jewish cuisine, explained, “Foodwise, long before 1948, there was just nothing here to work with.”
Several factors were involved in terms of what immigrants ate, and why, during the 19th century and through the first three decades of the budding State of Israel; one of them being necessity.
“Take the Jerusalem kugel, which was probably the only authentic dish to be developed by Jews in Jerusalem,” Goldberg detailed. “When the Perushim, the disciples of Rabbi Eliyahu ben Shlomo Zalman, left Lithuania and settled in the Land of Israel in the 19th century, they craved [kugel] the European dish that they were so accustomed to.”
“But eggs were hard to come by, not to mention flour,” she said, “and they were not familiar with the regional fruits either. Inspired by the local Arab population and out of sheer necessity, the disciples invented a hard noodle and added black pepper to it, transforming a once sweet dish into a spicy one.”
Ironically, an Ashkenazi food became spicy.
Similarly, when the first wave of olim from Arab and North African states immigrated to Israel toward the end of the 1940s and in the early 1950s, they missed the food from their homeland.
“They adapted to the circumstances by using what could be found in the land. Traditional kubbeh is made with bulgur wheat, which was nowhere to be found. So, Moroccan Jews reinvented the dish by substituting bulgur with semolina.”
War, and thus, the army, was another predominant element to play a key role in shaping Israeli food in its first three decades.
“When the War of Independence (1948-1949) began, there just wasn’t time to conceptualize the idea of a military kitchen. So, women joined the war effort by cooking for the soldiers,” Goldberg elaborated.
In the 1950s, military kitchens were introduced and kitted with Ashkenazi ingredients since Mapai (the Workers’ Party of the Land of Israel) – run by a series of Ashkenazi Jews: David Ben-Gurion, Moshe Sharett, and Levi Eshkol – was leading the state.
“The IDF was Israel’s melting pot. Some say that if we want to pinpoint the moment where Israeli cuisine begins, it’s at this stage because this was when the army started publishing cookbooks for the general public,” Goldberg noted.
She added that this was also when Israeli breakfasts – gigantic meals with an assortment of salads, bread, eggs, and cheeses – became widespread. The military popularized the dining room spreads at the kibbutzim. Their breakfasts were so large because field and farm workers, who woke at 4 a.m., were starving by the time the sun had risen.
“Beyond publishing cookbooks, the army offered what was called a ‘Type One’ cooking course. If one wanted to receive white-collar vocational training, one could go to the military to learn how to cook. These courses were hotel oriented. Meaning, soldiers were taught to prepare large quantities of food for the army, hospitals, and hotels,” Katz said.
The meals were simplistic, he continued. Until the 1970s, if one strolled about one would mainly encounter street food or eateries such as Manfred Katz’s Rimini Pizza, Israel’s first pizza chain. “The pizza consisted of a thick dough and crust, tomato paste, and yellow cheese,” he recalled.
“Yotvata also opened coffee houses to market its milk products. Lots of Chinese restaurants were opened by Asians on their way to America in the 1960s and 1970s. You’d also find smaller restaurants, like Romanian ones that served blintzes, or others that served stews,” he added. “These were mainly places that catered to the labor force.”
Per Goldberg, women cooked in these ethnic restaurants, preparing food for homesick communities.
The iconic Sami Bourekas franchise emerged in the ’70s as well. It began when Sami Alcolombry, who made aliyah in 1948, started selling his mother’s bourekas on the streets of Jaffa. His endeavor grew into an empire by the mid-1970s. “However, by the 1990s, this successful business dissipated, mainly due to poor management,” Goldberg said.
Fear and embarrassment were the other earlier defining factors that forged what was introduced to the Israeli public’s palettes, both Katz and Goldberg said. Fear because until the 1970s, people felt the strain of the existential threat that they faced, Katz elaborated. Uncertainty regarding the State of Israel’s chances of survival saw Israelis operating with chronic stress, too fearful to pursue luxuries such as culinary escapades.
With regard to the element of embarrassment, as people made aliyah in the first (1882-1903), second (1904-1914), and third (1919-1923) waves, more and more of them wanted to resembling existing residents who worked the land and create an image of the new Jew, the Sabra, which eventuated in traditional Jewish foods being abandoned out of shame.
In particular, the children of the new olim wanted to distance themselves from bearing the signs of their parents’ culture in exile. For example, Russian children, embarrassed about their parents speaking Russian, asked them not to speak it in public.
“The same goes for food. People wanted to obscure the fact that they had arrived from elsewhere; they just wanted to blend in. That translated to denying one’s traditional food,” Goldberg said.
From pressure to leisure
When does this atmosphere change?
“Although it is difficult to pinpoint the exact moment, experts estimate that Israel’s culinary golden age began sometime when either the Yom Kippur War (1973) or the First Lebanon War (1982) ended,” Katz said.
Both were major wars in Israeli history, after which the inside gnawing regarding the fear that the state would not survive ceased.
“The country was no longer facing an existential crisis,” Katz continued. “Local Christians, Muslims, and Jews all realized that the Jewish state was here to stay. The whole atmosphere changed. And what does one do when one feels that life has stabilized? One eases up and starts living. The Israeli mindset turned from a state of pressure to a state of leisure.”
“Also, the political Right rose to power at the end of the 1970s. Importantly, Israel shifted toward a free-market economy, that impacted its aviation policies,” Goldberg said. “Over the next decade or so, Israeli citizens began flying all over the world and were exposed to numerous foreign cuisines.”
“People were more relaxed,” he added, “ready to take on a hobby. They became comfortable with the notion that there was life after work. Once upon a time, you, as an Israeli, played piano because your mother told you that you had to. There was no fun in it,” Katz stressed. “This ‘life shouldn’t be enjoyed’ approach was slowly changing.”
Still, the idea of learning how to cook as a worthy vocation was frowned upon. Soldiers who attended the military kitchen’s special track typically came from low socioeconomic backgrounds or broken homes.
“Unfortunately, the Israeli public looked down on cooks,” Katz said. Pursuing a career as one, not to mention expressing an interest in fine dining, was, until the 1990s, still considered a child’s folly.
“But the 1990s brought about dreamers like me. The youth of my generation pushed back against being ashamed of having a blue-collar job, like being a cook.”
Katz traveled to Belgium in pursuit of his dream career, as there were no reputable culinary schools in Israel yet.
“The time I spent abroad was life-changing,” he said. “I worked in Belgium for five years under the supervision of mentors who were all awarded two to three Michelin stars. These chefs shaped me, making me who I am today.” He later taught at the Le Cordon Bleu culinary institute in London for three years.
Katz named his school after a beloved mentor, chef Attilio Basso. Beyond the joy of opening his own school in Israel, what was special about Attilio, Katz relayed, was that it was not based on learning from recipes. “Instead, we teach cooking techniques, like what happens when two ingredients interact. This encourages students to think for themselves.”
The institution, which has been recognized by reputable international orders, including the Mastercooks of Belgium, offers shorter professional courses along with a 540-hour program that results in a diploma upon successful completion.
“One major push in favor of taking this profession seriously arrived in the form of reality TV. Japanese cooking competitions like Iron Chef (1993-1999) captivated audiences worldwide,” Katz detailed.
For instance, Goldberg said, illustrious chef Raphi Cohen became the host of Israel’s first televised cooking show in 1995, Garlic, Pepper, and Olive Oil. Television shows such as Iron Chef Israel (2007), where chefs Assaf Granit and Meir Adoni were judges, took this up a notch. Chef Eyal Shani was already renowned when he became the host of MasterChef Israel (2010). Honor and, indeed, prestige were now associated with the profession.
“The late 1980s and early 1990s were the climax – the moment in history where our nation’s culinary vision rounded the corner. During this period, iconic figure Yisrael Aharoni opened [the restaurant] Tapuach Hazahav, chef Tzachi Bookshester opened the Pink Spatula, chef Ezra Kedem started the groundbreaking Arcadia, and Shani established Ocean. They were the first of their kind in the Israeli landscape, introducing upscale, elite dining to the country like never before,” Katz elaborated.
Chef Shalom Kadosh, who many have called the country’s culinary ambassador, is another noteworthy mention in this regard. Kadosh has cooked for heads of state such as president Yitzhak Rabin and former US presidents Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, George H. W. Bush, and Barack Obama.
“When these chefs staked their claim, they introduced global foods to Israelis first, like the French and Italian cuisine,” Goldberg said. “But then something else happened: The counterreaction to globalization, which is always localization.
“Expressly, this was the groundbreaking, defining moment that we have been waiting for – the dawn of Israeli cuisine.”
Chefs like Katz, who is part of this generation, did not stop there. They asked themselves: “Who are we?” and “What is Israeli cuisine, anyway?” And then they started playing with their food.
By 2009, the year that the Machneyuda Group was born, spearheaded by chefs Assaf Granit and Uri Navon, the ground was fertile for chefs such as themselves to reinvent dishes based on the fusion of traditional recipes from the countries their grandparents had left, with those developed in Israel. Whereas the first and second generations of olim were ashamed of their cultural heritage, the third generation replaced that emotion with pride. Illustrious Georgian, Turkish, Libyan, Tunisian, Moroccan, Persian, Yemenite, Bulgarian, Polish, and Italian dishes, to name a few, were refreshingly reimagined.
What does Israeli cuisine mean to you?
“Israeli cuisine is impatient, indelicate, angry,” Katz said. “The food is primarily enraged because we are. This manifests in meals drowning in lemon juice or tehina, servings that are intensely spicy, or burnt eggplants and smoked inflamed red meat.”
“A lot of this has to do with technique. We cannot afford to refine it just yet, as we still lack enough cooks. This affects the methods we use, which lack refinement and finesse,” Katz continued.
“But in the end,” he said, “It is food that successfully tells our story, registering who we are as a culture and a nation.”
“Israel’s culinary pursuits nowadays are imbued with chutzpah,” Goldberg said. “How else can we justify taking an age-old dish and disrespecting it by calling it our own? This is wonderfully blasphemous.
“Adoni can serve harira soup with a twist. There are no guarantees that what you are staring at when you gaze down at your plate is an authentic dish. We Israeli chefs give ourselves permission to be food heretics.
“But that’s just it, isn’t it? Our food, like this country, is still in its infancy. This is the time for it to unapologetically kick, bite, and scream like any infant while finding its own way.” ■
