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Hanukkah, the Jewish festival of food & lights
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Saturday, 22 December, 2007, 08 : 00 AM [IST]
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Ronita Torcato
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ed on eight successive days beginning December 4 this year is also known as the Festival of Lights, Feast of Dedication, and Feast of the Maccabees. Celebrated with food and the lighting of beautiful menorahs (special Hanukkah candelabras) filled with brightly coloured candles, the festival custom of eating foods fried in oil, is because the original Hanukkah involved the discovery of a small flask of oil by the Jewish High Priest, the Kohen Gadol. This small batch of olive oil was only supposed to last one day, instead it lasted eight. Which is why every Jewish chef (and mama) fries edible reminders of the miracle of survival in the shape of soofganiot (a fruit-filled doughnut) and latke (a pancake with a potato at its heart).
Eating dairy foods, especially cheese, at Hanukkah is another custom that has its roots in the story of the beautiful widow Judith who beheaded the wicked Assyrian general, Holofernes, after plying him with wine and cheese.
Buying food for modern Israelis today is, on occasion, a political act. Some Jews will drive all the way to the Arab town of Ramallah to buy vegetables (which are far pricier in Jerusalem). In the West Bank (or Judea-Samaria, the Biblical name for the area) Arab families grow lemons, oranges, avocadoes and a profusion of herbs like mint.
It was a good land, the Bible tells us, a "land of milk and honey" that the Israelites entered after 40 years of desert wanderings. It was a land lush with wheat, barley, olives, honey and grapes for wine. Figs served as both food and medicine. Pomegranates yielded a beverage, provided colour for dyeing fabric and inspiration for decorations ranging from priestly vestments to ceramic crafts. These basic foods, the staples of the ancient Hebrew's existence, are referred to as the Seven Species.
"Israel is a melting pot of Jews from all over the world and our cuisine reflects our composition," consul general Daniel Zohar Zonshine told guests including the Consul Generals of the US ( Michael Owen ) Germany ( Walter Stechel ) China expert, Karl Dantas and his beautiful wife, Amala and Kiran Shantaram, president of the Mumbai Academy of Moving Images, at a fund-raising banquet at Joss on the sixth day of Hanukkah. Proceeds from the sit down dinner will go towards Naya Jivan House, a hospice in Shahapur, in the Thane district of Maharastra where 40 children living with HIV/AIDS are being cared for by a congregation of Catholic nuns, the Helpers of Mary. For the past two years a small group of women expatriates have been supporting the Sisters in their efforts to care for this special group of children.
At Hanukkah, the pots and pans in Israeli kitchens will bubble with dishes like chicken curry, meat cholent, grilled herring with fennel, chocolate babke cake, salt herring with apples, Yemenite soup stew, Jerusalem noodle kugel, challah (Sabbath Eggbread) and St Peter's fish with parsley sauce.
There were none of these hearty dishes at the sit-down dinner (and I ain't complaining) What then?
Nouvelle cuisine (French for "new cuisine") featuring light, delicate Mediterranean dishes with an emphasis on presentation. "Because it's elegant and should be eaten in small portions if you want to enjoy the food " said the chef doing the honours, 26-year-old Avi Biton, who has been successfully running his own restaurant, Adora, for the past two-and-a-half years, teaching at a catering college in Tel Aviv and now dreams of opening a chain round the world and his very own school of Israeli cooking.
The Barkan reserve red caught the writer Ilija Trojanow's fancy while we sipped Yarden white and nibbled smoked salmon and char grilled mushrooms with goats cheese fondue, following that up with a gazpacho with grilled veggies and bread sticks. Like the soup, the entree was cold: sashmi tuna on zaaluk salad with lemon pickle or grilled eggplant with chive yoghurt. For the main course I chose rawas with konfi lemon and spinach. Names are totems in different parts of the world. When one's first name means a little lamb, how could I eat the lamb baklava with pistachio and honey? For dessert, I had chocolate ganache with tender coconut ice cream and a dry fruit cigar.
"It's exciting to be here," said Biton who worked for several years as a sous-chef in Jaffa before opening his restaurant. Today, he has a television show called "World View", where he prepares gourmet meals using ingredients that derive from French, Moroccan and Far East cuisine, fused to create new flavours. He also works as a consultant with restaurants in Israel and abroad.
"I feel like the consul of Israeli cuisine" smiled this lean youth of Moroccan provenance, a place where folks like yeasty puffs, rounds or fritters dipped in sugar syrup scented with rose or orange-flower water or drizzled with honey, very similar to the sweetmeats sold in the Muslim quarter of Mumbai, akin to the Greek loukomades, the Persian and Iraqi coiled zelib, the little Libyan sfenz and the Moroccan beignets.
All chefs know (or should), the test of a good menu is the returnability factor - are the dishes so tasty the diner wants to have more? I was ready for a second helping of that spinach and feta cigar with tomato vinaigrette. Itsy bitsy but scrumptious, truly scrumptious!
New Nabard chief
NABARD's new chairman Umeshchandra Sarangi will hopefully be successful in getting concrete measures sanctioned by the Centre to alleviate the sorry situation arising from farmers' suicides and loan lending. A former Chief Minister, the late Shankarrao Chavan had also appreciated Sarangi's work as Collector of Latur. At a function to felicitate Sarangi, current bossman of Maharashtra, ViIasrao Deshmukh lauded NABARD's new head for his efforts to do justice to farmers and the co-operative sector. But then, the expert in agriculture, co-operation and disaster management had limited powers. Now, with his appointment to NABARD, he will, hopefully, give an impetus to the aforementioned sectors. It may be mentioned, four IAS officers have been appointed as chairman of NABARD and Sarangi is the first from Maharashtra.
No water
The BMC announced a 25 % water cut (ONLY) while attending to a check up, fix up or whatever it is that hydraulic engineers do when they're attending to the water mains, pipes or whatever. Only? The taps in buildings in our part of town (a hop, skip and a jump from the new CST) ran dry for the entire day.
Which reminds me: In 2001, Kofi Annan, who was Secretary-General of the United Nations at the time, said that in the new century we may see wars over water, rather than over oil. Subsequently, the Soviet Union's former President Mikhail Gorbachev had warned that " the probable site for military conflicts could be basins of major rivers that are shared by several countries, such as the Ganges, Mekong, Zambesi, Orange River, Okavango, Senegal and others (like) the Husbani River, which begins in southern Lebanon, a country currently experiencing a water shortage, and runs into Israel."
Currently, some 900mn people live in river basins where humans consume more than 75% of the water, leaving barely enough to keep rivers flowing and lakes filled. Another 700mn live in basins rapidly approaching this state; one billion more live within reach of adequate water supplies, but cannot afford to gain access to them. The water table is falling fast in the densely populated and poor regions of countries like China, Mexico and India.
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