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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Israeli canned gefilte fish is good, its chocolate is good, its oranges are famous, even its canned sabras (prickly pears) are fine—if you can get them. You can get them on Fifth Avenue for dollars and cents, but not in the groceries of Tel Aviv for pounds and piasters. In spite of a very considerable increase in agricultural production, Israelis are foregoing their own canned fish and sabras, chocolate, 80 per cent of their oranges and grapefruit, mulberry jam, olive oil, and pickles, in order to trade them for dollars. They are also doing without most foreign foods—meat, poultry, butter, eggs, “appetizings” (except herring), most vegetables and fruit—fresh, dried, canned, or frozen. What’s left?
Well, there is always lebeniah.
A story current in Israel says that President Truman has offered to trade the know how of the atom bomb for the secret of lebeniah. There’s no chance of the deal going through. Israel can’t afford it. An atom bomb may have lots of energy. But it lacks vitamins.
According to the Hebrew dictionary, lebeniah stems from the Arabic word leben (soured goat’s milk). That is what dictionaries know about it. Israelis think it might more appropriately be derived from the German Leben, meaning “life.” Actually, it is a tasty fermented powdered milk. Together with cottage cheese, it is the basis of the Israeli diet. Depending on the season, a menu in Israel consists of lebeniah, cottage cheese, and green peppers; lebeniah, cottage cheese, cauliflower, kussa (vegetable marrow), and cucumbers . . . lebeniah . . . lebeniah . . . together with black bread, some milk, some rice, potatoes, noodles (the last three not always available), and margarine.
There is fish, too, not very popular, for it’s either fillet (frozen fish imported from Norway or Turkey) or carp—carpionim (6to 8-inch hydrocephalic carplets) raised in the domestic hatcheries. In a home I visited, two carionim swam in the bathtub for a week before they became the main course of a Rosh Hashanah dinner. There are dried beans and peas (vegetable soup is usually bean soup). There is also a taste of fruit around—one kind at a time. The mishmish (apricot) has a brief season, plums a slightly longer one, yellow melons and watermelons a still longer one. Grapes, figs, and pomegranates came and went like a flash this last year. Last August I succeeded in buying one huge, beautiful peach in a vegetable store—not on the black market.
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Every woman and most men carry briefcases or shopping bags (mostly nets) on their way anywhere at all. Maybe they will be able to pick up a watermelon, a bit of sweets, a box of sardines, a few apples. This, after having already stood in line for their rations at the separate stores designated in their ration books. Wait for a Tel Aviv bus bound for the shopping center and fifteen yards of people dangling nets wait with you. Stand in line for the return trip and there are fifteen yards of nets with you—most of them full of green peppers. Since wrapping paper is practically nonexistent—and it’s tissue-thin when it is available—it is not uncommon to see fish in the company of the peppers and a few apples in those nets. I have even seen and sorrowed with an intelligent, well-dressed young woman in a crammed bus who brushed a few herrings wrapped in only one layer of thin newspaper against a correct German gentleman. His comments were correct for the occasion, too.
Every taxi driver is always on the lookout, especially outside the city, for something extra for the family table—a few lemons, a live chicken, a head of lettuce for a change, some watermelons. Especially last summer and fall, a handful of onions was a treat. What is the most welcome gift for a birthday or anniversary from a taxi driver or country cousin? A bunch of onions, a few grapefruit, and some eggs, besides the indispensable bouquet of flowers.
There are favored aristocrats around who don’t have to forage so much for something to eat. It is handed to them. I do not mean the black market customers who pay I£2 (equivalent to $5.60) for a kilo (2.2 lbs.) of meat and I£I ($2.80) for a kilo of sugar. I mean the soldiers, the children, the tourists, the aged, and the sick. They all get more eggs, more milk, more meat, some butter, a bar of chocolate occasionally, fresh and dried fruits. Diabetics are the luckiest—they are allowed meat every day and eggs almost as often. But they also have to return to the stores again and again, because supplies do not arrive on time and are quickly disposed of when they do arrive.
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What does all this ingathering stack up to on the table for three meals a day? Something like the following:
Breakfast: salat with lebeniah, pot cheese, tomatoes, and green peppers, coffee (you should excuse the expression), black bread, and margarine. Sometimes a cooked cereal is available instead of the salat. Some jam or some tiny olives may be thrown in.
Dinner at noon: soup, mostly bean or noodle, sometimes fruit soup (a euphemism for dilute jello), fillet of herring (chopped, fried, or boiled) or carpionim (mostly boiled), eggplant (fried, boiled, chopped, pickled—one booklet lists thirty recipes), rice or a potato if available, tea, and a sort of blancmange, or watermelon, or—rarely—cake. (Israeli cake deserves honorable mention, for it is generally produced out of nothing more than flour, a sprinkling of
sesame seeds, a lick of jam, little sugar and less margarine, and—imagination.) Supper: salat of pot cheese, green peppers, sometimes sardines, cucumbers and tomatoes with lebeniah, tea or coffee with a speck of milk.
On Saturday, the noon meal will probably have an “enriched” meat loaf of the family’s entire weekly meat ration. On High Holidays maybe half a chicken will be allowed. What the housewife does with her two eggs a week per person I didn’t inquire into too closely. As an American tourist, I had a most generous ration book, with twenty meat portions, twenty-eight eggs, and a whole kilo of sugar per month; and so I was a welcome mitesser in many homes where I left my nekudot (ration “dots”). Otherwise, one can readily surmise, very little mealtime entertaining is done.
Outside the home one would expect .more variety. But what does one get most of the time in restaurant after restaurant, hotel after hotel? For breakfast: salat of pot cheese, etc., maybe some sardines, lebeniah, etc. And so on for dinner and supper.
With his extra ration points the tourist is of course entitled to meat and eggs almost every day. The eggs I got most of the time, but meat was served about twice a week. Several times in my eleven weeks’ stay cooked plums or quinces or grapes turned up for dessert. On Rosh Hashanah a dish of prunes was a most welcome treat—one piaster extra—along with chicken or rossbeef. Sometimes a yellow cheese made of sheep’s milk took the place of pot cheese (if you had the points for it). In the fanciest hotel one could still get orange or grapefruit juice. Another hotel served me for breakfast a tasty omelette made of powdered eggs, water, and patience.
In the street one could buy mostly plain soda water, gazoz, Alaskas or glidah (distant relatives of our Eskimo pie and ice-cream cones), naknik (would-be wurst?) sandwiches, begelach, and cheap sweets. Also falafel: sharp peppers and fried dried pea balls sandwiched in a flat roll called a pitah. Falafel is a standard meal around some urban and most interurban bus stops, where one spends a good part of one’s life.
Prices are strictly controlled by the government. Each eating place is classified from “I” to “5-extra,” in ascending categories of elegance and excellence, mostly elegance. For every different item and amount of food and drink in every category the prescribed prices must be posted prominently. One well-known café in Jerusalem has a menu with 149 separate items and prices, aside from the multifarious strong drinks. What was I actually able to get there? For breakfast: salat of pot cheese with green peppers, leheniah, etc. For dinner: soup, mostly with beans, etc. For supper: salat of pot cheese, leheniah, etc., or sardinim, etc. But the prices were fair. A “No. 5” hotel in Haifa which charged I£I.400 a day for room and breakfast charged me a cent and a half extra for two slices of white bread I ordered instead of black bread. That was strictly according to law, too, even if funny.
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Besides the aristocrats mentioned above, does any section of the population eat better? Yes, the people in most of the older kibbutzim and those who receive packages from abroad, chiefly the United States. In the last fifteen years production has increased to such an extent that some of the kihhutzim serve meals comparable to those of the average American farm. In a kvutzah fifteen years ago I remember many a breakfast, dinner, or supper of black bread, thick soup, mashed eggplant with a few olives in it, and pomegranates, or blancmange pudding. This year at the same kvutzah I had three good nourishing meals a day for nine days, with an egg and meat or fish every day, besides hard cheese, leheniah, and more vegetables, raw and fresh, than I had anywhere else. All this, after the cream, chicken, milk, and fruit had been set aside for the children, the aged, the sick, and some deserving chaverim. A number of kibbutzim have enough good food to operate convalescent homes as a source of income. Most of them nearly always have many guests, especially on Shabbat, to share their good food: open house is part of their tradition. Yet even these communes are tightening their own belts to sell more products to the Tnuva cooperative. Last Rosh Hashanah there were even notices in the papers discouraging visitors.
Were you to ask the average Israeli housewife what she wants most, I rather think that on the spur of the moment she would ask first for a refrigerator, and then for a few American relatives. She would of course go right on to name many other things, but she would be sure to come back to American relatives. Now that the situation has become even worse than it was when I was there, it is hard to imagine what a package from America containing coffee, tea, sugar, prunes, dried apricots, butter, meat, chocolate, shelled nuts, soap, toilet tissue, and other of our plentiful necessities, does to a family in Israel—Spartan and uncomplaining though it may be. A good pianist and teacher told me in all seriousness that her morale would be immensely strengthened if someone would only send her dehydrated chicken noodle soup and Frizz ice-cream powder.
Meanwhile? Well, there’s always lebeniah and fillet and. . . .
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