Any author has to deal with bad reviews, but how about the wrath of God? Dr. Eli Landau has written The White Book, touted as the first Israeli pork cookbook.Rico says a kosher butcher even touching pork is unbelievable, but you never fucking know, do you?
With eighty mainly Mediterranean recipes and Eastern European dishes, The White Book tries to reveal the secrets of the pig for cooks who have never prepared it, nor perhaps even tasted it.
Since the mid-1950s, Israel has had laws restricting the sale of pork and banning its farm production, in deference to biblical proscriptions. But, because of legal loopholes, it was possible to raise pigs for science or in areas considered Christian. Pork buyers included secular Jews, Christian Arabs, and more recently, immigrant workers and the hundreds of thousands of immigrants from the former Soviet Union who don’t keep kosher.
Now it is up to individual municipalities to determine whether pork can be sold in each neighborhood and whether shops will incur fines for selling it, much as they would for staying open on the Sabbath. Many Jews who ignore other kosher rules will not eat pork for cultural and historical reasons. Observant Muslims also abstain from it.
Even more than other non-kosher foods, pork is seen by many Israelis as an affront to Jewish nationalism. Pork sellers routinely face protesters, and in recent years, arsonists have attacked shops in cities like Netanya and Safed, where Orthodox Jews live near secular immigrant communities.
Dr. Landau, a 61-year-old retired cardiologist and food writer from Tel Aviv, likes pork and thinks there are many Israelis who shy from it not so much because it’s taboo, but because they don’t know how to prepare it. “People are reluctant to cook pork at home,” said Dr. Landau, who is not an observant Jew. “I want to make it easier for chefs and personal cooks to bring it home and to the menus. If that happens, I’ll be more than happy.”
Rabbi Shimon Felix, an Orthodox rabbi and religious educator in Jerusalem, said he thought Dr. Landau’s intent was “let’s stick it to the religious tradition. There’s something childish to being so naughty,” the rabbi said. “It’s more mature and adult to look at this as an ancient tradition.”
The book, which Dr. Landau self-published in January, has not caused much of a stir so far. Dr. Landau said that ultra-Orthodox Jews, who would be most likely to protest, haven’t heard of it because they don’t watch cable news or read the mainstream press.
Oh, it’s not that they’re unaware of it, Rabbi Felix said, it’s that they just don’t care. “It’s perceived as being from Tel Aviv,” he said of the secular city, “and what goes on in Tel Aviv, nobody cares.”
Rabbi Yuval Cherlow, the head of the Orthodox Hesder Yeshiva in Petach Tikva, said, “I’m very disappointed by this book.” He added, “I’m very sorry and it hurts me.” But fighting pork consumption is not at the top of his list of priorities for “improving Jewish identity in our society,” Rabbi Cherlow said. Asked on his Web site what Orthodox Jews should do in reaction to the book, Rabbi Cherlow answered “nothing,” explaining, “by advertising it, you are helping it.”
According to the book’s distributor, Keter Books, 2,000 copies were printed and 1,100 to 1,200 have been sold. Ami Ashkenazi, the company’s marketing and sales manager, said a best-selling cookbook in Israel sells about 6,000 copies, but for such a niche topic, 2,000 to 3,000 copies sold would be considered a success.
Pork is a sensitive subject, said Daniel Rogov, the food and wine critic for the newspaper Ha'aretz. “In Ha'aretz, we’re allowed to write about it, give recipes for it,” he said, “but I will say this much, when you do, you get dozens of emails to the editor, accusing the writer of the recipe of all sorts of treason and damning him to the eternal flames of hell.”
In Israel’s leading daily, Yediot Aharonot, the food writer Guy Rubanenko said Dr. Landau’s work could be seen as much as a provocation as a cookbook.
Mr. Rogov disagrees. “I do not think the book was written at all as a provocation,” he said. “It was written with the love and care he feels for the dishes.”
As a child, Dr. Landau said, he developed a taste for pork when his family was given some by a kosher butcher. Dr. Landau said that his mother had cared for the butcher when he was a boy in the Lodz ghetto in Poland during World War Two. She ate no pork, but she got sausages on the black market to keep him alive. Years later, when the butcher grew up and his benefactor had a boy of her own, he sent her family sausages to remember her kindness.
Dr. Landau loved eating that sausage as a child, but he couldn’t find pork in Israeli restaurants as a teenager. Then a grill man told him the secret: order “the white steak”, a common euphemism for pork in Israel, and one of the inspirations for the name of the book.
Dr. Landau, a food columnist for Ha'aretz and the author of three cookbooks with Mediterranean recipes, found the pork of his dreams in Italy, where he studied medicine near Parma and tasted his first real prosciutto. “Pork meat is to a cook like canvas to a painter,” Dr. Landau said. “You can draw on it your own tastes and the meat will accept, unlike lamb or even beef.” In one of his favorite recipes, for spaghetti with pork loin sauce, “the loin of pork is cooked together with tomatoes— my interpretation of an Italian dish. There’s a chunk of meat with the bone and it’s cooked for a long time, until the meat falls off the bone.” Dr. Landau also touts his Viennese-style pork neck schnitzel, cut very thick. “What people have in mind is chicken schnitzel,” he said, with a hint of disparagement, about most Israelis. “But they don’t really know schnitzel made of pork, especially this size and thickness, which keeps the juiciness.”
Yuval Ben-Ami, an author and former online food critic for Ha'aretz, said the recipes in the book were contemporary. “It can compete with pork cookbooks or pork recipes from countries that are not pork-deprived,” he said.
At Yoezer, a high-end restaurant in Jaffa, the chef Itzik Cohen has held dinners for as many as ninety customers exclusively with the book’s pork recipes. Dishes included frittata with bacon, prosciutto and zucchini; cabbage filled with pork and polenta; pork scaloppine with risotto; pork-cheek soup with hummus; spaghetti carbonara; pork ribs marinated in yogurt; and pork meatballs with fennel seeds. “They were good evenings,” said Mr. Cohen, who has since incorporated three of the dishes into his everyday menu. “Everyone was enjoying the food. It all came out beautiful.”
Meir Adoni, the chef at Catit in Tel Aviv, enjoys pork but won’t cook it, in consideration of his conservative parents. Younger chefs are less likely to be so deferential. “The younger generation keeps less and less of the rules,” Mr. Adoni said.
Dr. Landau said he hopes his book will resonate with young people who have become less observant Jews, and with his peers who have embraced an internationalist perspective. “It was not possible twenty years ago,” Dr. Landau said. “In twenty or thirty years, it will be a natural thing. I don’t think I will be around to see it.”
29 September 2010
The answer to a question no one was asking
Rico says that would be the new cookbook, just released in Israel, of pork recipes. Jeffrey Yoskowitz has the story in The New York Times:
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