Ottolenghi & Rose Harissa

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Tue, Jun 02 2020, 6:09 am

‘Jerusalem’ Has All the Right Ingredients

New York Times - July 2013

"Jerusalem" was written by chefs who grew up on opposite sides of the city.

The first symptoms of “Jerusalem” fever appeared on New Year’s Eve: a friend rushed over at a party, breathless, her eyes bright.

“We have to do an all-‘Jerusalem’ dinner!” she panted, then immediately called dibs on making the chicken with clementines and arak.

“Jerusalem: A Cookbook” was written by Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi, chefs who grew up on opposite sides of the divided city, Mr. Tamimi in the Arab East, Mr. Ottolenghi in the Jewish West. Both left Israel decades ago, live in London and are hardly celebrity chefs, although Mr. Ottolenghi’s last book, “Plenty,” was admired here among the vegetarian set.

The book’s recipes are traditional in Jerusalem, or loosely inspired by the city, gathering influences from the Christian, Muslim and Jewish cooks who live there, with flavors from almost everywhere else: Iran, Poland, Syria, Italy. Many of them have long lists of ingredients, including spices like sumac and za’atar, and are based on vegetables and grains. Chickpeas, lamb, eggplant and eggs turn up over and over again.

None of this would suggest a formula for instant success.

But soon there were other symptoms of “Jerusalem” fever. A sudden influx of e-mails regarding cardamom pods. Conversations over cubicle walls about where freekeh might be found.

“Jerusalem,” published in the United States last October by Ten Speed Press, already has 200,000 copies in print, with an additional 210,000 copies in print in Britain. More than 3,000 cookbooks are published each year, according to Bowker, the publishing industry’s tracking authority; very few of them sell more than 35,000 copies, and those that do are usually driven by authors who are chefs, celebrities or both.

Most cookbooks disappear without a trace. And as many home cooks can attest, even the copies that are sold tend to languish on the shelf. Not this one.

“I took it out from the library as many times as I was allowed to,” said the Rev. Dr. Raewynne J. Whiteley, rector of an Episcopal church in St. James, N.Y., on Long Island. “And there were still so many things I wanted to make that I was forced to buy it.”

Cooks have been throwing all-“Jerusalem” potlucks, passing around tips on where to buy fresh tahini in Minneapolis or in Manchester, England, and using the book as a spark to ignite new cookbook clubs — monthly gatherings of cooks, who may know each other only online, that are catching on in many cities.

American food lovers are not only cooking from “Jerusalem”; many of them are cooking their way through it, as cooks did with “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” in the 1960s and with “The Silver Palate Cookbook” in the 1980s. “Jerusalem” is the first book in recent memory to join that group, and the first to do it via social media, as well as old-fashioned word of mouth.

So what makes one cookbook essential and another dispensable?

First, of course, there is the food. Like those earlier books, “Jerusalem” seems like an open door to a new realm of flavor. The recipes are full of sun, accented with salt, and rife with crunchy and creamy contrasts. There are new grains, greens and spices to explore, and fistfuls of garlic, capers, feta cheese and other familiar ingredients from around the Mediterranean.

“Jerusalem’s food is idiosyncratic yet has a clear voice,” Mr. Ottolenghi wrote in an e-mail. “The fact that this voice chimed with so many who have never even been to the city was a wonderful surprise.”

But food alone can’t explain the success of a cookbook like “Jerusalem.”

“Some books just manage to fit into their time,” said Marvin Taylor, the director of the Fales Library at New York University. “Is it a coincidence that ‘The Joy of Cooking’ was a best seller in 1931, two years after the stock market crash, when suddenly thousands of American women had to cook for their families?”

Changes in how people cook can be driven by changes in technology (producing a hot title like “Microwave Gourmet” by Barbara Kafka in 1987) and by social shifts, too. “Entertaining,” the glossy book that made Martha Stewart a household name, appeared in 1982, just as the women’s movement was learning to embrace its domestic side.

For “Jerusalem” fever, social media sites have been a hot zone. Sarene Wallace and Beth Lee, friends and food writers in California, spent so much time talking about the book that they started a Facebook page devoted to it. In a modern version of home cooks swapping tips over the fence, they established #tastingjrslm as a hashtag across Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest so that lovers of chicken with caramelized onion and cardamom rice all over the world could compare photos.

The Web was once believed to spell death for cookbooks, with recipe-aggregator sites like AllRecipes and Epicurious seeming to ensure that books would soon go the way of iceberg lettuce, instant coffee and other artifacts now extinct from the kitchens of sophisticated food lovers. But new technology gave cooks the ability to form communities online, sharing photos and tips, which in turn has breathed new life into the cookbook industry. Virtual cookbook clubs sprang up on Web sites like Chow. A group blog called Tuesdays With Dorie took off in 2006, when the book “Baking: From My Home to Yours” by Dorie Greenspan gave home cooks the I-want-to-make-everything itch.

When a book as alluring and tactile as “Jerusalem” is published (the front cover is softly padded, making it particularly inviting to touch), cooks want to hold it, even though many of the recipes are available on the Web.

“I don’t think anyone realized how big it was going to be,” said Celia Sack, owner of the shop Omnivore Books in San Francisco, where the book has been a best seller every month since it was published. “The publisher seemed to think it would be a niche book, and even the local J.C.C.’s passed on doing events with the authors, because they thought it would be too controversial.”

The book does make Jerusalem look like a sun-soaked, harmonious haven of ancient foodways, although notes and essays convey the authors’ awareness that trying to contain both Arab and Jewish traditions in one book is inherently controversial. But the religious and geopolitical complications of the city’s past and present seem to have been trounced by the pull of the book.

The food of the Middle East, a vast area, has never fully found its way into mainstream American kitchens, though authorities like Paula Wolfert and Claudia Roden have written tomes on the subject. Mr. Ottolenghi was not sure that the food would appeal to a wide audience, even though he always believed that the city of Jerusalem had universal resonance. “It is a bit of an odd mix of flavors and ingredients, drawn from many parts of the world,” he said.

Because Mr. Ottolenghi and Mr. Tamimi live in London, they know how to tweak and choose recipes for Western tastes. Extra attention is lavished on chicken casseroles, roasted root vegetables and citrusy cakes that fit into meals in Toronto as well as they do in Tel Aviv.

“Lots of people who think of Middle Eastern food go immediately to hummus, but this food just looks so alive,” Ms. Wallace said, referring to the bright, messy photos that illustrate nearly every recipe.

“Jerusalem” fever has apparently not spread to Israel, where pride in the local foods and restaurants is booming. The book has not been published in Hebrew, one of the reasons it is more popular in Belfast than in Beersheba. “Israelis are very patriotic and proud,” said Naama Shefi, an Israeli food writer in New York. “I think that Israelis don’t like it when someone who left years ago is in a position to define what is Israel.”

American expatriates, however, have fallen on it with delight. “It’s such a relief to be able to go to the shuk and not feel like an idiot,” Aaron Goodman, who moved from Philadelphia to Jerusalem in 2010, said of the open-air market. “And to finally have recipes for all the delicious food I’ve seen around me. Especially the meatballs.”