Cookbook Survivor: Yottam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi, Jerusalem
Sunday's Child Is Bonny and Blithe
In saying that Ottolenghi’s cookbooks somehow just don’t grab me, I feel roughly like I’m saying “I hate all those Whos down in Whoville”. Particularly his co-written cookbook Jerusalem, which aims to honestly explore the city’s cuisine with an awareness of the conflicts that divide the city. So, for example, the two authors discuss the way that Israelis and Palestinians disagree, often quite intensely, about the origins of hummus and who has the right to claim it as part of their cultural heritage, and they don’t quite do the easy thing, which is to say “oh, everybody has a point, can’t we all just get along”? (Though plainly they hope for that in the longer run, as does most of the world.)
So it’s a cookbook with laudable aims that doesn’t just settle for a completely simplistic “food unites us, politics divides us” perspective (though it teeters on that at times) and the recipes are beautiful and (judging from my past experience) very tasty. What’s not to like?
My main issue every time I grab the book and think about cooking from it is that there’s a sameness to a lot of the recipes. That’s a testament partly to the book’s objective, to snapshot the characteristic cuisine of a city, and partly to Ottolenghi’s commitment to plant-based food. It’s also Tamimi and Ottolenghi both wanting to keep the food mostly simple and affordable (which led into their next cookbook collaboration, Simple) as an honest reflection of the constraints that many Palestinians in particular operate under in purchasing and preparing food.
So that relative sameness is on purpose, and they come by it honestly. But for me it means that I’m almost rarely going to use the book to cook more than one thing, because finding several dishes that will have some substantially different flavor is a bit of a chore. (I’m also a bit handicapped here in that a few of the best recipes in the book are dishes I’ve cooked before and my local folks just don’t like the dish itself, like shakshuka. Or all the very good looking recipes with eggplant—I’m the only one hereabouts who likes eggplant.) But I do want to keep working with the book, so it’s a good candidate for this column. Today I think I will be making some swiss chard fritters, roasted cauliflower with hazelnuts, and a braised ground lamb with eggs (not shakshuka, but as close as I can get and still get away with it, I think).
I think this is the first in your Cookbook Survivor series where I actually own the cookbook in question. I haven't cooked from it much myself because I'm mostly all-in on everything Cooks Illustrated, but it sits on the in-kitchen bookshelf, instead of the back-room bookshelf, as I keep thinking that it's a book I should be cooking from. Incidentally, in the year or so after he left the ATK empire, Christopher Kimball was particularly taken with Ottolenghi's cooking, and I believe remains an enthusiast.