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The Wandering Jew

Eating In the Land of Love and Honey

Family dinners at the in-laws' house

IN

hat's the best meal you've
ever had?
Someone asked me this
while we were dining at a
gourmet restaurant in California. I paused
to consider the Halibut confit, white miso
champagne risotto arranged beautifully on
my sea-blue plate. I've been to some pretty
amazing restaurants, traveled extensively and
sampled all kinds of delicacies, from perfectly
seared foie gras to handcrafted ravioli and
homemade green tea ice cream.
Despite all of these culinary adventures,
I can honestly say my favorite meals are of
the homemade Israeli variety... Not at some
swanky restaurant in Paris or LA but at
"Chez Meir" in Zichron Yaakov.
Every Friday night we go to my in-laws
for dinner. The menu varies slightly, but a
few things are always the same: the white
tablecloth, the Shabbat prayers and the
over-abundance of unbelievable food. There
are 10 of us total, and the table is heaped
with delicious dishes, from roast chicken and
sweet potatoes to veggie-stuffed dumplings
and (you guessed it) homemade hummus. It's
a loud, raucous affair, punctuated by multiple
conversations spoken through mouths half-
full of food.
We make jokes, we argue and we taste
everything, spilling soup on the tablecloth
and mopping up the mess with challah.
Dinner starts around 7 p.m. and by 11, we're
sipping the last dregs of our mint tea or
Turkish coffee, packing up boxes of leftover
treats to last us all throughout the week.
I love it. I've had some of the best meals
of my life in Israel, the majority of them at my
in-laws' table.
I'm embarrassed to admit this, but I didn't
tell my acquaintance this, at least not flat-
out. I was being treated to a fine dining
experience, after all, and I didn't want to

A special homemade bread

confess what I was just beginning to realize:
I sort of hate gourmet food. It's one of those
things that — like the collected works of
D.H. Lawrence or avant-garde performance
art — I've tried very hard to
appreciate out of a stubborn
belief that it will make me more
sophisticated and cultured.
It's the pretense that bothers
me. I feel as though the entire
gourmet dining experience is
designed to impress, so my
expectations are unnaturally
high. My first problem is with
the menu — I usually don't
understand a word on it. I can
ask my knowledgeable waiter
who has a BA in culinary science,
but it's likely I'll be even more
confused. It's not a mushroom
sauce, I'm informed; it's Chantelle Reduction,
made from a rare type of French fungi
cultivated by blind orphans from Myanmar.
Their sharp sense of smell allows them to
pick the choicest mushrooms, which are then
flown in by helicopter directly to the kitchen.
I come to understand that the "cardamom
soil, pea tendril mojo" took hours to prepare,
and it does look pretty, painted in artful
strokes across the plate. But what the hell is
it? And I hate to sound ignorant, but what
is soil doing on my chicken? That is chicken,

right?
Compare this to a scene at my in-laws.
Whether it's moussaka, Moroccan fish or
Iamb-filled dumplings, my mother-in-law
has the same answer when I
ask about a dish. She shrugs her
shoulders and tells me, "It's good.
Try it."
"Tasty, tasty" everyone
murmurs in agreement. My
mother in-law shrugs again, half-
smiling. "It was nothing. So easy
to make. Chik-chak!"
She watches us eat, her face
filling with pleasure. "La Breut,"
she says (meaning, "for your
health)." And we do, we eat for
our health ... and then some.
Back at the gourmet
restaurant, dishes are passed
around and tasted, and we are all expected
to make intelligent comments about the
integration of flavors. People say things
like, "Texturally, the saffron cream in the
consomme is reminiscent of the garlic aioli
often served with boulibase." Every dish
is a showcase of inscrutable ingredients
assembled in the most unusual way possible.
Bean chimichurri with mushroom hay and
sorrel, for example. Mushroom hay? Did
these mushrooms grow up on a farm? Are
the blind orphans aware of this?

Admittedly, these forays into fine dining
always end up making me feel both
empty and disappointed. The emptiness is
probably hunger. I have never left a gourmet
restaurant feeling satisfied; the portions are
tiny, yet the plates are almost as huge as the
bill.
Maybe that's why gourmet food hasn't
really taken off in Israel. Ask an Israeli to
pay an exorbitant amount of money for
a thimble's-worth of "milk-fed veal on
dehydrated tomato confit" and they will
likely walk out before the consommé has
been served. In Israel, food is about
substance.
Which brings me back to these Israeli
family dinners. It's not just the food that's
amazing — it's the atmosphere. This is going
to sound schmaltzy, but I really think that
food tastes the best when it's made with
love. And my mother in-law puts her heart
and soul into the meals she makes. Not every
dish comes out looking like art. But you can
bet your sweet shekels that it tastes like a
masterpiece.
Is it experience, the right blend of
ingredients and a flare for culinary creativity?
Sure. But the poet in me maintains it's
something more, something contingent upon
the symbolic act of breaking (homemade)
bread with some of the best people on the
planet.
To me, that's a truly gourmet experience.
The icing on the cake? I always have
leftovers to take home, tasty remnants of
those beautiful meals. Yet another reason
for me to feel so much more at home in
this land of chocolate poppyseed, date and
honey-pie paradise. El

Lauren Meir is a former Metro Detroiter now

living and writing in Israel.

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