The close association between Jewishness and mama’s cooking—or, at least, grandma’s cooking—has led many American observers, especially the hungrier ones, to feel that the austerity of the Israeli cuisine, a result of serious food shortages, may constitute a threat to the very survival of the Jewish spirit: how can a Jew be expected to carry on without boiled beef flanken and chopped chicken liver? SARAH C. SCHACK and M. TSANIN here offer some reassurance; necessity, as usual, has been the mother of invention. Mrs. Schack, sustained by lebeniah, spent some time in Israel last summer without undue hunger pangs. Mr. Tsanin is Israeli correspondent for the Jewish Daily Forward, and his report on the apotheosis of tcholent originally appeared in that newspaper; it has been translated from the Yiddish by Lucy S. Davidowicz.

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It came about that the Lord, in his infinite wisdom, gave us a sovereign state, and now when we sit down to eat by ourselves, it turns out we must begin from the beginning to learn how to eat. All the knishes, latkes, blintzes, and kreplach— not to speak of kugel, chremslech, and knaidlach—are no more than chimeras of the dark galut, and we must reconsider what and how to cook and eat.

We Jews say: as the corpses eat, so they look. Or, if you prefer: he who dines well, lives well. Any housewife knows that what she feeds her husband determines his mood and zest for life. Just as this is true for an individual, so it is true for a nation. So, some weeks ago, a number of specialists and experts of our government’s Nutritional Guidance Bureau got together in Jerusalem. Among them were chemists, dietitians, public leaders, and officials of the Ministry of Supplies. They met to confer on how we should prepare our food, and from what, so people wouldn’t go around with long faces and complain they were chewing hay.

You may argue this is unnecessary; after all, anyone can put into his pot what he wants and cook it the way he wants. But you’re making a mistake. Here we cannot put into the pot what we want, but what we’re given. Furthermore, we are nowadays not molded from the same clay, but consist of about twenty tribes: Polish Jews, Bulgarian Jews, Yemenite Jews, Jews from Persia and Jews from Ethiopia, Jews from Afghanistan and Jews from Czechoslovakia, Jews from Turkey and Jews from Algeria, the Beni Israel of India and Bukharan Jews, and who knows how many other kinds from all the corners of the earth. Each tribe has its own cuisine. Suppose you say there is nothing better than a challah pudding. A Moroccan Jew will retort that eating a challah pudding is like chewing straw, but his potted beans with red pepper and cinnamon is the best dish in the world. A Yemenite will interrupt and scoff at both of you. He says that for some barley groats immersed in pepper he would give away all the hay that the Ashkenazim eat.

The Yemenite Jews do not in any case understand how one can eat the bread of the Ashkenazim. First of all, they say, it’s not bread, but a featherbed of flour. Secondly, they do not understand how you can slice bread with a knife. With a knife an Arab cuts a Jew’s throat, with a knife you slaughter a lamb. To use a knife for bread doesn’t seem to them to be a Jewish trait at all. Slaughtering bread, they say, is certainly a trait adopted from the goyim and anyway the Ashkenazim are half goyim. The Yemenites, however, consider themselves to be the truest Jews and that’s why they bake bread like the Arabs. Each one bakes his own bread. It is a kind of small flat cake with a soft crust called pitah. As soon as it is ready, you can open it like a rich man’s pocket and stuff it with whatever you like: greens cooked in oil, a tooth of garlic, a red pepper, a radish soaked in vinegar, a bit of broiled onion, a twig of parsley. A Yemenite will try to convince you that a filling composed of all of these is the delicacy reserved in heaven for the pious.

On the other hand, a Bukharan will tell you that so long as he doesn’t have a piece of lamb at the end of a skewer, and a glass of rum to go with it, he doesn’t see the poipt of living. Here a Beni Israel arrives and ridicules all of you. A Beni Israel doesn’t enjoy the taste of food unless a potato has been cooked in a pot of pepper with curry and ginger (if an Ashkenazi ate it, he would have to run to the fire department to extinguish the fire in his mouth). Then, the Ethiopian Jews—they bake some kind of cake which at first taste seems like an old wives’ remedy for constipation, then you think it some kind of medicine for whooping cough, and, finally, you feel so bad you could swear someone wanted to poison you.

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In Israel we have two national vegetables which we inherited from the Arabs. One is a kind of cucumber that can turn a Jewish stomach. The other resembles a piece of mahogany furniture, but it seems to be constituted completely of cork. This is eggplant. I have no enthusiasm for either, but here we can make of them whatever our heart desires. From each vegetable separately, an Arab bride can make about sixty different dishes.

These vegetables remind me of that famous soup with nails. You remember how to make a soup with nails. You boil a few potatoes, add a marrow bone, some barley, a carrot, parsley. After it has simmered a while, you stir in some goose fat Then, when the soup has a heavenly taste, you put in a nail and take it out again. That’s how you make a soup with nails. The same holds for our two national vegetables. If you have what to put in the kettle, the vegetables won’t spoil the soup. But the trouble is that they are used instead of what you want. Suppose you would like a goulash; you’ll get a goulash of eggplant. If you want a steak, fine, they slice off a piece of eggplant and put it on the frying pan in some vegetable oil, and you have steak. If you would like some goose livers fried in onions, they slice the cucumber which turns a Jewish stomach, mix it with some onions, and fry in a hot pan in sesame oil. If you’re going to take this for goose livers with onions, you have to have a good memory to recall how they tasted thirty years ago, in the old country.

All of these presumptions about the two vegetables are possible only if you have a wife whom you love, because if you love her, you don’t mind what she serves. But what happens in the camps for the new immigrants? How can the food there be cooked to please both the immigrants from Poland and those from Yemen or Morocco?

To solve this problem, they decided to prepare the food in two separate ways. The same foodstuffs are put into each vessel, but in one there are no spices and in the other all varieties: red pepper, cinnamon, ginger, cardamon, bay leaves, cloves, and all sorts of herbs and roots which grow at the ends of the earth. Everything is fine until you taste it. When the Polish Jew tastes the cooking, he says it’s Turkish. The Turk says it’s Ethiopian. The Ethiopian will swear it’s Chinese, and a Chinese would be completely at a loss to know how one can eat the stuff.

If white cheese is served, the Polish Jews are happy and the Yemenites spit and swear. If olives are served, the Yemenites are happy and the Polish Jews spit and swear. Well, a hungry man is an angry man and tries to find some place to put the blame. If you don’t like the food, you go around discontented with the whole world; nothing suits you and you can’t enjoy the Jewish state.

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But God in heaven watches over man and provides the cure for the disease. The Orthodox Jews stood firm as Gibraltar against cooking in the camps on the Sabbath. It’s so good to be a Jew, they said, it’s worth sacrificing a cooked meal once a week. (In our climate, how can we cook a day before for tens of thousands of people?) Then someone had an idea. In the galut, for the Sabbath, we used to make tcholent (the dish of meat, kishke, potatoes, barley, and beans all mixed together that was put into the oven on Friday afternoon and eaten Saturday afternoon), so why not here and see how the galut technique operates in Israel? It turned out the galut did have something to offer, because as soon as the tcholent was served its tremendously wonderful aroma intoxicated everyone. The Polish Jew claimed the tcholent as his achievement. The Yemenite, his ten fingers scraping the plate and his eyes fixed on heaven, said now really and truly he realized the Messiah had come, for to be in Israel, in one’s own country, and to eat a dish like tcholent— that is the coming of the millennium. After eating the tcholent, the Turkish Jew applauded with joy. The Moroccan emitted strange sounds of satisfaction as if he had just eaten marzipan. The Beni Israel, a peppery Jew, merely added a half cup of pepper and tasted the flavors of ambrosia in his tcholent.

So it came about that at the Jerusalem conference to consider how to teach the Israelis how to eat, the tcholent was lauded as a rare discovery, and it was hoped that through this rare discovery of Our grandmothers in the galut, a single taste in food might be wrought among the twenty tribes of Israel. In a word, the tcholent will unite the twenty tribes into one nation.

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