Chef and bestselling cookbook author Yotam Ottolenghi may call the U.K. home now, but in many ways, he’ll always be tied to his birthplace of Jerusalem.
So it makes sense that the city and its vibrant and varied food culture inspired his latest cookbook, simply titled Jerusalem. Co-written with fellow chef and business partner Sami Tamimi, the book serves as both a collection of traditional and updated recipes and a snapshot of the city and its people.
The two chefs were born in Jerusalem in the same year – Ottolenghi on the Jewish west side, Tamimi on the Arab east side. They wouldn’t meet for the first time until about 30 years later – in London, where they collaborated on Ottolenghi’s eponymous group of restaurants – but that shared history made them think about returning to their roots.
“In some ways, we’ve taken a big step away from Jerusalem over the years, and our food has become much less Middle Eastern than the food in this book,” Ottolenghi says in an interview with Cityline.ca. “The idea was that we would maybe get a better understanding of how we cook [now] if we go back and revisit it. It was a good way to inspire us to unravel old recipes and create new ones.”
Ottolenghi’s 2011 cookbook, Plenty, was a New York Times bestseller and changed the way people think about vegetarian cooking. There are a host of vegetarian dishes in Jerusalem – think Barley risotto with marinated feta; Herb pie; and Red pepper and baked egg galettes – along with dozens of tempting recipes for the meat-eaters out there: Slow-cooked veal with prunes and leek; Chicken with caramelized onion and cardamom rice; and Stuffed eggplant with lamb and pine nuts.
Certain ingredients pop up time and time again: tahini (forget ketchup and mustard, this sesame-based condiment is where it’s at in Middle Eastern cuisine), lamb, tomatoes, cucumber, chickpeas, eggplant, and za’atar.
With so many communities and sub-communities in the city — Muslim, Jewish, Christian, Armenian, and Arab, for a start — Tamimi says they couldn’t possibly cover them all in the book, but their goal was to stay true to the essence of Jerusalem and to do it justice.
So what is the essence of Jerusalem? When asked to recall their most vivid food-related childhood memories, both Tamimi and Ottolenghi point to the city’s market stalls.
“Going to specialists to buy one item,” Tamimi recalls. It still exists in Jerusalem but doesn’t anywhere else. If you need a blend of spices, you go to one person. One woman used to sell this nice Armenian bread, one [type of] loaf, this is all she sold.”
Adds Ottolenghi: “Produce was always amazing. In the summer, you’d have these tomatoes that have sat in the sun for so long they’re bursting with sweetness, and same with cucumbers, figs. Also eating that takes place in the street – holding a big pita stuffed with marvelous things – salads and sauces and that kind of immediacy with food is something I completely remember from childhood.”
Tamimi relished the challenge of trying to recreate his mother’s traditional dishes from memory.
“You know how it should look and taste, but creating it is mind-blowing,” he says. “It’s research, and more research, and retrying recipes so many times until you get it right.”
While the two chefs sought to maintain the traditional feel of certain recipes in the book, others were modernized for the Western kitchen (reducing the amount of oil in some of the fattier dishes, and avoiding recipes that call for several days of preparation/cooking).
Ottolenghi and Tamimi wisely address the sensitive issue of cultural ownership over recipes, and suggest there’s little point in pinpointing where a particular dish originated from. In the case of a common cucumber and tomato salad, there are dozens of variations all over the city, and it’s impossible to say who made it first. Because the city’s residents rely on what’s grown locally, there’s a huge overlap of ingredients.
“There isn’t really one thing that unifies everybody but there are a lot of motifs you see in most cuisines. The ingredients unify,” Ottolenghi says. “In Jerusalem, stuff isn’t really imported. Things grow in the region, in Israel or in Palestine. They don’t bring in blueberries from New Zealand. Everybody cooks those things – when artichokes are in season, everyone cooks artichoke. It’s wonderful to see. There isn’t really a clear answer to, ‘What is Jerusalem cuisine?’ but once you start experiencing it, you know exactly what it is.”
Jerusalem is available in stores and online.