CHAPTER 2

Eating as an Israeli

On a warm day in April, Hava offers me a sweetened iced coffee and some
sugar biscuits; immediately after, she warns me: “I hope you are ready; I
have a lot to say so if it’s too much you just stop me”. Hava then, tells
me the story of her life; she was born in Israel in the fourties; her parents
were from Hungary and arrived to Israel after the Holocaust. She grew
up in a kibbutz, and when she turned 18, she moved to Tel Aviv to study
engineering. While living in the city she realised she was a “country girl”
and moved to a small town where she still lives with her husband. Her
husband comes from an Iraqi family that arrived at Israel in the fifties.
During his childhood he moved constantly from town to town, and it
was not until he meet Hava that he settled down. She speaks to me for
4 hours, she does not stop much, but when she talks about her father
her voice trembles and must take a few minutes. She mixes English and
Hebrew “Do you understand me? I do not know how to say that more
simply, is that fine?” Her family story is full of sadness and magic, smells,
lost recipes and nostalgia “I think we are cursed you know? It might had
started with my grandparents; they shouldn’t have married.

As it was the only way to explain a family history full of scarcity, hunger,
and separation, Hava recounted the story of how she and her family
became Israeli in a way that resonated with fairy tales. Curses, forbidden
love stories, and family secrets were behind the difficult migration history
she had to tell. Her narrative was filled with smells and tastes; she could

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 23

Switzerland AG 2021
C. Prieto Piastro, Eating in Israel,
Food and Identity in a Globalising World,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87254-0_2
24 C. PRIETO PIASTRO

describe in detail full meals from decades ago. The goulash her father
cooked when he finally saw his brother again, the Iraqi feast her daugh-
ters and sons cooked in honour of their grandparents, the kibbutz food
she ate for decades. A few Levantine dishes such as chopped salad as
well as many classic Ashkenazi dishes including chicken soup, kreplach,
and kugel, meatballs that had little meat and finally Iraqi dishes such as
kubbeh, became the tools through which she articulated and made sense
of her Israeliness.
Hava’s diet changed drastically from her childhood in the kibbutz to
her adult life. She and her Mizrahi husband have adopted a diet that she
describes as simple, straightforward, and Israeli in essence: chopped salads,
chicken schnitzels, and labneh for the everyday. Iraqi and Hungarian
dishes for holidays and family gatherings. They are comfortable with
their diet, but they weren’t always: “it is ok now to eat Mizrahi food,
to eat imported food. You are still an Israeli. In the beginning, we had
to eat grey Polish food or poorly cooked kibbutz food. Now, things are
different”.
Hava’s food narrative illustrates the story of Israel’s food culture and
the attempt to construct a homogenous Israeli diet that was part of the
identity of the “New Hebrew Man”. The Jewish communities that arrived
to Mandate Palestine in the last decades of the nineteenth century from
Europe, Russia, Ethiopia, India, and the Middle East, brought with them
their traditions, lifestyles, and food. For a European political leadership
that aimed to create a heterogeneous population, the diversity among the
newcomers represented a challenge to overcome; not to celebrate.
Therefore, and with the aim of melting together the cultures of the
immigrants arriving, including their food cultures, the Jewish leadership
lounged several unification campaigns, which also included the publica-
tions of cookbooks. These books were written for a female audience, and
the government gave women the task of building a new national identity
from within the home, all with the aim of changing the diasporic diets of
the past. Women, the guardians of Jewish traditions, were now expected
to also be agents of change. They were to provide their services to the
nation, by shopping and cooking only what the national establishment
approved.
In this chapter, I argue that the Zionist authorities, constituted mainly
by European Jews, tried to impose a hegemonic collective identity in
which the differences between the immigrants were less visible, at least
at the table. Thus, the imposed food policies were intended to encourage
 2 EATING AS AN ISRAELI 25

people to not only peacefully “blend together” but also to modify their
culinary traditions. The first step towards this “melting” of traditions
was to eliminate national differences among communities arriving and to
simplify the divisions into two simpler categories: European and Mizrahi
Jews (Khazzoom, 2003, 582). The food and even health practices of the
European Jews were perceived as “civilised” while the Mizrahi1 (Oriental)
Jews foodways were labelled as “backwards”. As a result, the Israeli
melting pot became a painful process in which Mizrahi Jews’ identities
were questioned and silenced by the European establishments. Mean-
while, their food traditions were only enjoyed in the privacy of the home
or as street foods.
In the following pages I illustrate the culinary panorama of the first
decades of Israeli culinary history by diving into the childhood and youth
memories of several of my participants. I analyse how women accommo-
dated and/or resisted the attempts of the Israeli Ashkenazi establishment
to build a unified Israeli diet, and how they negotiated their imposed role
as builders of a new national diet and identity. I claim that this process of
unification was ultimately an unsuccessful attempt to impose a European
lifestyle upon the Jewish immigrants. As Orzit Rozin affirms, food is so
basic that it is easier for immigrants to give up their language than their
food (Rozin, 2006, 83); and Israel´s immigrants were not the exception.
With the aim of completing the narratives of my participants, and to
show what the government campaigns looked like at the time, I will
examine a series of cookbooks that illustrate the official food discourse
and culinary desires of the authorities. The narratives of my participants
will demonstrate how this discourse was lived by women, accepted, or
contested as part of their everyday lives.
The sample I present allows us to better understand the political
context of Israel. It also informs on family structures, food policies,
stereotypes, societal conflicts, and ethnic differences. Although, as Ken
Albala sustains, cookbooks rarely reveal what people actually eat they
“reflect the kind of technical and cultural elaboration we grace with the
term cuisine, they are likely to be representations not only of structures
of production and distribution and of social and cosmological schemes,
but class and hierarchy” (Albala, 2012, 231). The books I analyse in the
following sections were selected according to date of publication, level of

1 The term Mizrahi Jews is used to refer to those Jewish immigrants to Israel with
origins in the Middle East. The history of this label will be discussed further in Chapter 7.
26 C. PRIETO PIASTRO

popularity, and how strongly they were remembered by my informants.

They form part of the official food discourse of the time in which they
were published and are useful tools for understanding the ideology of
their times.

How to Cook in Palestine

The first task confronted by the European Zionists—in their attempt to
build a new nation in Mandate Palestine—was to construct a unique,
collective identity. This identity highlighted connections to the land and
its new inhabitants. It also emphasised similarities between the different
Jewish communities that were arriving at their Old-New Homeland. The
task was not easy. Hundreds of years in the diaspora had left little connec-
tion among the immigrants. It seemed that only religious symbols could
sustain the idea that they had once been one nation. The diet of Polish
Jews had no elements in common with the diet of Yemenite Jews. Even
among Jews from the same region cooking practices varied, and class
differences were visible. Yet again, it was only dietary-religious restric-
tions that marked some common food trends among the population.
Even those were followed in different ways.
The diets of immigrant communities were only one of the many aspects
that differentiated the population of the future state. In the eyes of the
Zionist establishment, to build a united new Hebrew nation that had no
resemblance to the diasporic Jew, these contrasts had to disappear. To
achieve this, the elites applied melting pot policies that aimed to unite
and combine all of the cultural trends of the Jewish population. From
this they could forge a new identity.
According to Yosef Gorny, in the Zionist context, the melting pot
“has been an ethical and mythical expression of creating a national society
evolving on its historical territory through the ingathering, as well as the
integration of the exiles” (Gorny, 2001, 55). This “ingathering of exiles”
became a political symbol used by the Zionist authorities to justify the
politics of Europeanisation applied to the non-European Jewish commu-
nities. The roots of this political ideal can be found in a 1908 theatre play,
written by Israel Zangwill in the United States (Gleason, 1964). The play
was based on the idea that, to build a new nation, immigrants had to
leave their old ways in the past and build a new American man.
The play suggested that the “new man” was the result of melting the
cultures of the immigrants together. Nevertheless, the American melting
 2 EATING AS AN ISRAELI 27

pot encouraged immigrants to become American not by “melting” their

cultural background together, but by assimilating to American ways and
leaving their traditions in the past (Gleason, 1964). Although the concept
and application of the melting pot was questioned by American Jews, it
was quickly adopted In Israel. It aimed to create a new, homogenised
nation in the historical territory of Israel through the “ingathering of
exiles”. However, similarly to what happened in the United States, the
melting pot in Israel mostly implied the Europeanisation of immigrants
from the Middle East and Africa. As I explain in detail in Chapter 7, the
melting pot was a process of creolisation. This process was not simple or
voluntary. Instead, it was violent and complicated. The Europeanisation
of Mizrahi Jews was not passively accepted, and identities were hidden and
forgotten. Although some aspects of European culture were adopted by
those who identified as Arab Jews, the melting pot policies were resisted
by many immigrants that lived this process as a “as a humiliating attempt
to civilize them” (Ariel, 2018, 93).
The “ingathering of exiles” meant the creation of a New Hebrew
man that aspired to be “healthy, muscular, a warrior, industrious,
hard-working, rational-modern, Western, secular, a vernacular, accent-
less Hebrew speaker, educated, obedient to authorities, not intellectual”
(Gorny, 2001, 55). This New Hebrew man had to be superior in every
way to the diasporic Jew. He was depicted frequently as a farmer, working
the Land of Israel, a true Zionist (Segev, 2002, 26). This man, although
freed from the vices of the diaspora, was a civilised Westerner, a Euro-
pean; in contrast to those Mizrahi Jews they viewed as backward. The
New Hebrew man was always imagined in masculine, an ideal borrowed
from the imagination of the Soviet Union. This was part of the Zionists’
rejection of the exile, an ideal frequently imposed on the new immigrants
by force (Segev, 2002, 25).
A fundamental part of the invention of the New Hebrew man implied
changing the health and habits of Jewish immigrants arriving to Mandate
Palestine. For this aim, cookbooks became fundamental propagandist,
educational, and transformative tools. Written by and for women, the
cookbooks show the aspirations of the Zionist institutions and the ideal
diet they wanted to achieve (Ranta & Prieto Piastro, 2019). They also
reveal how women were expected to contribute to the creation of the
nation in their everyday lives. The diet of the New Hebrew man was full
of fresh fruit and vegetables. It was an almost vegetarian diet, inspired by
Palestinian ingredients never named or recognised as Arab.
28 C. PRIETO PIASTRO

According to Arjun Appadurai, cookbooks are a humble literary genre

that “reflect shifts in the boundaries of edibility, the proprieties of the culi-
nary process, the logic of meals, the exigencies of the household budget,
the vagaries of the market, and the structure of domestic ideologies”
(Appadurai, 1988, 3). In the decades before and immediately after the
establishment of the State of Israel, cookbooks provided women with
recipes. They were also instruction manuals, part of a normative discourse
that reinforced gender roles. Some of these books were complete house-
hold manuals. They explained how to use certain domestic equipment,
keep a house in order, and adapt to the weather and conditions of
Palestine.
In the sample I present, the shifts Israeli food culture went through
in the first decades and even before the establishment of the State, and
how they mirror the social and political changes of society will be evident.
Cookbooks are historical documents, narratives that can be read and inter-
preted in thousands of ways. Although they do not necessarily reflect the
realities of society, they show how certain cultural brokers—among them
the state and its institutions—imagine the family and the home. Cook-
books reflect the aspirations of society; how people wish their families,
dinners, and homes to look, the flavours they want to taste, who they
feel they are, and who they do not want to be. They also reveal social
structures. In the case of Israel, they replicate the obsession with building
a unique identity, as well as showing how the European Jews imagined
their Middle Eastern counterparts.
Israeli cookbooks displayed the ideal way of eating and cooking of the
time, and the ways in which women were expected to feed their fami-
lies, do their shopping, and cook in their home. The first cookbooks
published during the times of Mandate Palestine were used as educa-
tional and political instruments, for teaching Hebrew for example, and
to explain to women what their nationalist duties in the home were. The
publication of cookbooks implies literacy among their target population
(Ichijo & Ranta, 2016, 98). In the case of Israel, it could not be assumed
that the women were Hebrew speakers. For this reason, some cookbooks
were written in English and German. The cookbooks target a European
and a Middle Eastern female audience. On the one hand, they aim to
instruct the Middle Eastern Jewish women in how to properly nurture
their children, as their traditional diets were perceived by European Jews
as unhealthy. On the other hand, nutritionists expected European women
 2 EATING AS AN ISRAELI 29

to learn how to cook with local, fresh ingredients that were better suited
to the Israeli weather (Ariel, 2018, 95).
These cookbooks also show the ideal of womanhood embedded in the
Zionist ideology, and the expectations of how women were required to
behave in their new society. To gain a place in the Zionist society, women
were expected to be loyal and devoted companions, mothers, and wives.
As the cookbooks reflect, every decision they made in the kitchen and the
market became a decision of national importance. The olive oil chosen
was not only a matter of domestic economics, but of loyalty to their
new country. Those instructional handbooks were not only written for
women, but by women who had decided that their duty in the building
of the new nation was to teach other women to perform everyday tasks
in a patriotic way. The authors were educated Western women, some of
them with Home Economics university qualifications. In some cases, they
were married to committed Zionists. Their cookbooks aimed to improve
women’s skills throughout the home, making these traditional feminine
tasks a contribution to the nationalist movement.
Cookbooks became an instrument to nationalise the domestic space, to
give another dimension to the home as a multiple site (Edensor, 2002),
and to transform women into agents of change. Therefore, analysing
cookbooks provides us with a useful insight into how Israeli food culture
was born. Mundane, repetitive everyday habits are the outcome of the
implicit negotiation between official governmental, cultural impositions
and domestic practices (Ranta & Prieto Piastro, 2019, 121).
Cookbooks were published mainly by female Zionist associations. Since
the last decades of the nineteenth century, diverse female associations
have become part of the European Zionist effort to build a new national
Hebrew identity. Jewish women’s organisations in the West—especially
in America and the United Kingdom—felt it was their responsibility to
train and help Jewish women living in Mandate Palestine to perform
their nationalist duties. Among these duties were shopping, cooking, and
feeding their families or members of the kibbutz. For that purpose, they
established cookery and agricultural schools in pioneer settlements and in
Tel Aviv (Raviv, 2015, 45). Soon, they also started to publish cookbooks,
newspaper columns, and pamphlets promoting the use of local ingredients
and certain ideas of health.
The Women’s International Zionist Organisation (WIZO) was devoted
to training women to develop the skills necessary for their new life in
the new society. It was the most prominent of these organisations and
30 C. PRIETO PIASTRO

remains active today. It was founded in London in 1920 by Rebecca Sieff

(wife of Israel Sieff, the Zionist Movement’s Political Secretary), Dr Vera
Weizmann (wife of the Zionist Movement President Chaim Weizmann),
and Edith Eder (wife of Zionist leader Dr David Eder) (WIZO, 2014).
The founders were members of a Zionist committee that visited Palestine
in 1918. They were shocked by the conditions women endured in Pales-
tine, particularly in the agricultural settlements where there was no proper
housing and climate conditions were hard. Therefore, they decided to
establish an organisation which focused their ambitions to improve the
quality of life of immigrant women in Israel (WIZO, 2014). The purpose
of the organisation was not to fight for women´s rights and equality in
the Zionist movement, but to give them the necessary tools to fulfil the
tasks that the nation expected of them. It was a Zionist organisation and
viewed the establishment of a Jewish state as its first and main goal. Mean-
while, the position and role of women in an eventual Jewish state took a
secondary place (WIZO, 2014).
WIZO became the first institution to attempt to establish a national
diet by teaching women how to cook with the technology and the ingre-
dients available in Mandate Palestine. It created schools to train women
in different aspects of the everyday life of the country. Simultaneously,
the Israeli Ministry of Welfare sent female instructors to the transition
camps in which Middle Eastern immigrants were located. They taught
them new foodways based on the nutritional Western beliefs of the time:
how to cook with available ingredients and unknown vegetables, as well
as Western table manners (Ariel, 2018, 95). Both the Ministry and WIZO
gave professional advice to women in the kitchen of kibbutzim on how
to use and cook the ingredients available, and how to prepare meals
for crowds. They also published cookbooks and newspaper columns to
educate women. As will be analysed in detail later in this chapter, WIZO
was one of the organisations that published recipe books in the first half
of the twentieth century. As aforementioned, these cookbooks had clear
educational goals and were part of the melting pot policies of the time.
Through their cookbooks, WIZO encouraged women to modify their
customs and to adopt what was constructed as a healthier diet based on
fresh vegetables and fruit such as aubergines, marrows, and citrus, as well
as other native ingredients like olive oil and fresh cheese. They pointed
out the political and national responsibility they had and how choosing
ingredients and feeding their families had an impact on the development
of the nation (WIZO, 1948).
 2 EATING AS AN ISRAELI 31

Another fundamental organisation of the time was founded in 1912 by

Henrietta Szold and known as Hadassah: The Women´s Zionist Organisa-
tion of America (Raviv, 2015, 97). Hadassah started their work by sending
pasteurised milk to infants with the aim of improving children’s nutrition
(Raviv, 2015). As well as WIZO, Hadassah visited kibbutzim with the
aim of changing food habits and teaching women how to cook and serve
food to their families “properly” as well as in the communal dining halls
of the collective farms, the kibbutzim. Hadassah also published a series
of ten booklets called “Guide for Family Nutrition” that aimed to help
urban women successfully handle their homes during the Second World
War (Tene, 2015).
These organisations, together with the Ministry of Welfare, promoted
consumption of Israeli products and shaped the Israeli diet through
health, shopping, and cooking suggestions. At this point, it is important
to consider that the goal of these organisations was not to improve the
political and social positions of female immigrants, but to give them the
tools to become more efficient in their domestic duties. Such responsi-
bilities were deemed of great importance for the nation. They were also
keen to modify those Middle Eastern foodways they considered to be
pernicious to the health of individuals, and of the community at large.
The next section will analyse examples of cookbooks and explore how the
attention given to dietary changes reflected the Zionist ideology of the
first years of the state and their willingness to modify their Jewish identity
to construct a modern Hebrew society.

The First Cookbooks

The first three aliyot2 that arrived in Palestine established the foundations
of the future State of Israel. They were the builders and ideologists behind
the dream of creating a New Hebrew identity. In the following decades,
the immigrations waves continued. Little by little, Jewish communities
from the Middle East started to make their way to Israel, especially after
the establishment of the State in 1948 and due to wars with neighbouring
Arab countries. Not all new immigrants were Zionists. Most of them were
refugees, forced to leave countries due to persecution. From the Middle
Eastern Jews, it is impossible to say how many went to Israel due to their

2 Waves of Jewish immigration to Palestine beginning at the end of the nineteenth

century.
32 C. PRIETO PIASTRO

own convictions, as most of them were forced to leave their countries and
had no other option but to go to the new Jewish state (Segev, 2002, 34).
With the aim of absorbing and integrating the newcomers into the
Jewish society in Palestine, different policies were implemented including
those directed at women and concerned with diet, shopping, and cooking.
By 1927, WIZO had a cooking and agricultural school in Tel Aviv,
published cooking booklets, and was promoting a new diet that corre-
sponded to the new society among urban and rural women (WIZO).
In 1927, the Instruction Department of WIZO published two short
cookbooks: Vegetable Dishes and Potato Dishes. These were followed in
1928 by Home Economics; Broad Beans, Peas and Carrots and Cabbages
and Cauliflower; and in 1929 A Booklet on Baking and Citrus Recipes
(WIZO). From the titles of these booklets alone, it is possible to deduce
that a fundamental part of changing the diets of the immigrants consisted
of encouraging the consumption of fresh vegetables.
The campaign Totzeret ha Aretz (Made in Israel) also started during
those years. It was adopted by the Jewish Agency in 1936. The campaign
aimed to transform the diet of immigrants and promote products made
by Jewish hands. It was directed at women, who were in charge of shop-
ping and choosing the ingredients for the home (Raviv, 2015, 53). The
Zionist institutions told women that it was their national duty to buy
products, such as olive oil and oranges, grown by Jewish hands, even if
they were more expensive than the alternatives. During the first decades of
the British Mandate of Palestine, most vegetables were produced by Arab
farmers. They were cheaper than vegetables produced by Jewish farmers.
For this reason, homemakers had to be persuaded by nationalist argu-
ments and encouraged to opt out from the cheapest alternative (Tene,
2015). The aim was also to change the diasporic culture and create a
new hegemonic culture where the differences in the communities arriving
were not visible anymore, at least not on their tables. Furthermore, the
New Hebrew nation had to be economically independent. Therefore, it
was vital that their economy, diet, and consumption patterns were not
attached to the Arab local economy (Mendel & Ranta, 2014, 423). Agri-
culture was a fundamental tool; it strengthened ties to the land and
recovered the “original” diet of the Jewish people in the Land of Israel.
WIZO continued its work training women in domestic and agricultural
tasks, not only in the kibbutz but in cities and urban spaces. How to Cook
in Palestine? was published in 1937 and it was the first complete cook-
book published by WIZO (Meyer, 1937). The book is divided into three
 2 EATING AS AN ISRAELI 33

parts, each part in a different language: Hebrew, German, and English.

Each part has the same recipes as the others, although advertisements are
only included in the Hebrew section.
An interesting variation between the different parts of the book is
its title. In English, the book is called How to Cook in Palestine, yet
in German and Hebrew the word “Palestine” was substituted for Eretz
Israel. The book does not provide an explanation for this discrepancy,
but a possible justification is that the editor wanted to avoid conflicts with
the British officials in the Mandate by using the official name of the land
at the time: The British Mandate for Palestine, for the English section.
The choice of language is also relevant. Immigrants were taught to read
and write in this Hebrew, as most of the new immigrants did not know
it. For this reason, the book also includes a dictionary, making it easier
to learn new cooking vocabulary in Hebrew. German was chosen as it
was the first language of the author, but also because the audience of the
book was mainly European. English was the language of the Mandate,
providing a reason to also include it in the book.
How to Cook in Palestine was written by one of WIZO’s domestic
scientists Dr Erna Meyer. Meyer was a well-known German domestic
economist, and an active member of WIZO in Palestine. Dr Meyer’s aim
was to provide housewives with a tool that would help them to “free their
kitchens” from European foodways. Her cookbook offered alternative
cooking methods, as well as advice on how to use local ingredients. The
book begins by explaining its ideological, melting-pot purpose openly:
“The time has come that we housewives must take an attempt, with more
energy than before, to free our kitchen from its Galuth- traditions. (…)
We should wholeheartedly adjust ourselves to healthy Palestine cooking”
(Meyer, 1937, 7).
Through the book Dr Meyer continuously tries to remind the reader
of the disadvantages of the European diet in comparison with the bene-
fits offered by cooking with local ingredients such as aubergines, lentils,
marrows, olive oil, and homemade ketchup. Aware of the problems and
challenges that homemakers were facing in their “Old-New Homeland”
she tells the “intelligent thinking housewife”, “not only what to cook but
how to cook it, using the technology and resources available in Jewish
Palestinian kitchens” (Meyer, 1937). The author clearly states in the
introduction that although she considers herself—as well as her readers—
as European homemakers, “European habits are not only injurious to
the health of the family but, in addition, they burden the housewife
34 C. PRIETO PIASTRO

with unnecessary work” (Meyer, 1937, 5). Meyer understood “Euro-

pean habits” as the use of tinned food, long cooking processes, the high
consumption of meat, and a lack of consumption of fresh dairy products.
The book then focuses on homemakers as a unified group, with the goal
of “freeing” the kitchen from diasporic habits and constructing a new
national diet. In the eyes of the author, women became agents of nation-
alisation, and the private space of the kitchen became a politicised site of
national construction.
Although the aim was to forge European foodways, the book does not
confront the immigrants with a radically different understanding of food.
Most recipes are not distinctive local Middle Eastern dishes. They are
European recipes cooked and adapted to the ingredients available at that
time in the Mandate. Recipes are not detailed, and measurements not
provided, probably because measurement systems varied depending on
the reader’s country of origin. European recipes, although unhealthy and
part of “irrational traditions”, are included and adapted to the climate.
The products available are “modernised” and adapted to the diet of
the ideal of the New Hebrew man. The New Hebrew man did not
cherish tradition and was willing to start a new unattached, modern life.
However, the book has a whole section on potato recipes, a staple among
Eastern European Jews. It also includes recipes for goulash and sauerkraut
(Meyer, 1937). Another section is devoted to aubergines and marrows,
now popular vegetables in Israel. At that time, they were strange and
unknown, yet cheap and always available. The book contains a consider-
able variety of recipes using aubergines but again, cooked in familiar ways.
For example, “eggplant liver” is a vegetarian version of the Ashkenazi
classic dish of chopped liver (Meyer, 1937, 112).
Along with the recipes, Israeli food products and kitchens are adver-
tised in the book. Almost every two or three pages there is an advertise-
ment promoting the use of a particular brand of oil or a more convenient
stove. All the products advertised are Jewish, and Dr Meyer—although
clearly aware of economic difficulties—always suggests buying Jewish
products, even if they are more expensive than the Arab alternative. In
fact, it is never stated which alternatives are available. She states that
“The Palestinian housewife’s duty is to support home industries” (Meyer,
1937, 32) making it evident that the publication of this cookbook was
part of the government campaign Totzeret ha Aretz. One of its aims was
to support Jewish agricultural and dairy production.
 2 EATING AS AN ISRAELI 35

As well as the obvious nationalist and propagandist goals, the book

does not make any open reference to Jewish dietary laws. It contains
no reference to kosher food, and even suggests keeping dairy products
and meat in the same fridge.3 This omission probably responds to the
Zionist ethos of the time, that tried to emphasise the nationalistic aspects
of the Hebrew identity and its secular character while downplaying reli-
gious aspects. It made no effort to recognise the ethnic diversity of Jewish
communities emigrating to Palestine and shows unwillingness to learn
traditional Middle Eastern recipes.
The book presents mainly vegetarian recipes. This is not because the
author considered times of scarcity. Rather, this reflects a trend in most
Israeli cookbooks to try to avoid a diasporic diet that was perceived
as unhealthy and meat-heavy (Hirsch, 2009, 583). This trend would
continue in the first decades of statehood, not only because it was seen as
the healthier option, but because meat, eggs, and other sources of protein
were rationed and scarce.
How to Cook in Palestine? was the WIZO’s first attempt at formalising
the knowledge their members had acquired in the years they had lived in
Palestine. It constructs the kitchen as a politicised space of change and
national construction, and women as active agents of this new identity.
Not only did the book aim to help women to cook with the ingredients
and equipment available, but it also helped them to embrace their role as
Zionists.

The Tzena: Baking Without Eggs

Times of scarcity (Tzena) and rationed food started during the British
Mandate in Palestine and continued for a decade after the establish-
ment of the State of Israel. During those years, several political changes
took place in Palestine, demonstrating that two different authorities had
control over the diet of the Jewish community: the British administration
and the Israeli government.
The mass immigration of the previous and first decade of the State of
Israel, together with the Second World War and the constant confronta-
tion between the Arab population and their neighbours, resulted in
the need to control the consumption and distribution of basic goods,

3 It is contrary to kosher laws to eat and store dairy products and meat together. This
will be explained in Chapter 4.
36 C. PRIETO PIASTRO

including food. In 1949, The Ministry of Supplies and Regulation of Israel

introduced a policy of austerity and food rationing (Rozin, 2015). The
head of the ministry, Dov Yosef “saw Tzena as applying basic egalitari-
anism, and believed that it was incumbent upon a state to care for the
welfare of its citizens and therefore be involved in economic life” (Rozin,
2015). The Israeli government conceived the Tzena not only as part of a
policy aiming to deal with the scarcity of food, but one that could help
construct an egalitarian society and to integrate immigrants.
This ideology, based on a socialist worldview, continued the vision
of the pioneers who believed the individual sacrifice of pleasures such
as good, tasty food was necessary for the well-being of the community
(Raviv, 2015, 41). Based on administrative procedures used by the British
administration during the Second World War, the new government,
supported by WIZO and Hadassah, implemented campaigns directed at
housewives.
By 1948, according to Orit Rozin, 50% of food consumed by Jews
living in the Mandate Palestine was produced by Jews while only 7% of
the production was Arab; however, 43% was imported including some
basic items like flour, sugar, wheat, margarine, meat, and oil (Rozin,
2015). Food choices had little to do with taste or personal preferences and
became a matter of national interest. The authorities gained control over
private life and domestic space. Families, and especially women had to
adapt their behaviour to fit the national goals. This affected their shopping
habits, cupboards, and kitchens.
Meat, eggs, sugar, bread, and dairy products were some of the food
items that were rationed. Meat had the biggest impact on people’s
emotions and perception of scarcity. The Tzena was an ideological move
and the effect of the increase in the number of new immigrants. It was also
a consequence of declining food imports and the result of transportation
problems caused by attacks on the road, a decline in domestic production,
and increases in military food consumption (Rozin, 2015).
The memory of the Tzena is still present: among those who lived it,
and also among new generations. For example, Esther, one of my partic-
ipants who will appear regularly in other chapters, clearly remembered
those times, and talked about them with bitterness:

Those were difficult times. I had just arrived from the United States
following my Israeli husband and was trying to establish a home and a
family. I hadn’t lived in scarcity before, and although my mother had told
 2 EATING AS AN ISRAELI 37

me about the difficult times in East Europe, I had no idea of what it meant
to drive for hours to get a tiny chicken, or the frustration you feel after
making a four-hour line to buy eggs only to find out there are no more
until the next week. People were desperate and ate anything. But I was not
going to eat pigeons like the rest, I was not going to let my dignity go, so
I did buy food on the black market. Yes, of course, I knew it was wrong,
the magazines, the radio everybody told us, but I had small children.

As Esther’s memories show, buying on the black market was strongly

discouraged and severely punished. That did not stop women partici-
pating in it and putting their families before the needs of the nation; many
women did not easily accept these impositions and decided to actively
resist rationing by buying products on the black market. Those who told
me stories about those times had no shame in describing the strategies
they used to survive those times. They did not need encouragement. On
the contrary, they were proud of their cleverness and the ways they had
“cheated” the system. One such story was told to me by my own rela-
tives in Israel. When my great grandfather who lived in Mexico visited his
father and brother in Israel during the 1950s, he gave them dollars and
a fridge, so they could buy food on the black market and preserve it for
longer. The story is well-known by all sides of the family; both in Mexico
and Israel, even though there is no contact among them. The story was
told to me to explain why I was being welcomed by relatives that before
my visit were not aware of my existence; and in a way that had the aim of
making me feel proud of the generosity of my ancestors.
Although my participants and family were full of stories explaining
how they were able to resist or accommodate the restrictions of this
period, the official narrative of the Tzena tells a different story. News-
papers, cookbooks, and radio shows advised and encouraged women
to make the most of what was available and reminded them of their
duty to make the most of rationed ingredients. Food choices became a
highly political matter, and the British administration appointed a Food
Controller, who oversaw imports and rations. Together with WIZO, the
Food Controller published a brochure in 1945 entitled Recipes of the
Season. With Haddasah, the Food Controller produced radio shows like
Eat More Potatoes (WIZO). But the stories of my participants and my
own family contrast with the official narrative of sacrifice for the collec-
tive. They show us how Israelis constantly negotiated what the nation
38 C. PRIETO PIASTRO

expected from them, and the behaviour that according to the author-
ities was supposed to be nationalist. Women decided to prioritise the
well-being of their families and redefined what the nation expected from
them.
As if it had happened yesterday, Esther remembers how she felt
rationing was never going to end, and how her immediate concern was
to feed the family, rather than fulfil a nationalist duty. She remembers
with detail how she cooked hummus for the first time, and the recipes
she followed to learn how to cook with little meat or with vegetables
that she had never seen before. She also recalled driving to Haifa to see
if she could get any more food coming through the port. Sometimes she
was successful, and other times not. Esther mentioned looking at WIZO
recipe books and newspaper columns and trying to make sense of the
ingredients she had to put together a meal, “They were useful” she says,
“and very American, I liked that”.
One of the cookbooks of the time was simply called The Cookbook. It
was written collectively by members of WIZO (WIZO, 1948). The book
was popular enough to be re-edited several times during the twentieth
century. It reflects the political and social situation of the time it was first
published: the need to cook with the ingredients and portions provided
by ration cards, the difficulties in finding meat and the intention of the
government to “melt” the cultures of the new immigrants together. It
reflects the constant efforts made by the government to promote the use
of rationed food and to discourage women from buying food on the black
market. Although it is evident from their writing that economising and
stretching meat portions appeared to be a constant concern, they never
explicitly mentioned rationing policies (WIZO, 1948).
The anonymous authors of this cookbook appeared to be convinced
that the austerity situation was temporal and necessary. Responding to the
ideals of the melting pot, promoted by the European Zionists, The Cook-
book (Sefer haBishul) took recipes from different contributors of various
ethnic backgrounds. However, most of its pages were dedicated to Euro-
pean ingredients and cooking techniques. It also recovered several recipes
that had previously appeared in booklets and columns distributed by
WIZO. The short introduction to the book was written by the WIZO
management; it highlights how the recipes were tested over a period
of 20 years and were adapted to the weather and conditions of Israel
(WIZO, 1948, 4).
 2 EATING AS AN ISRAELI 39

The book was written for a female audience, and its recipes clearly
correspond to the Tzena campaign of the government. Although tacitly,
it acknowledged the conditions in which the country was living. Most
recipes used dairy products. There was a whole section on eggs. Vegeta-
bles were suggested as substitutions for (scarce and expensive) meat.
In the instructions, WIZO affirms that the decision to include a large
vegetarian section separates the books from others published around the
world. It recommends Israeli homemakers continue buying local prod-
ucts and substitute meat proteins in their diet for the cheaper and easier
to find eggs (WIZO, 1948).
Although the books started introducing Middle Eastern recipes—with
the 1960 edition even having a complete section on Middle Eastern
food—the European roots of the recipes are still rather evident. There is
a whole section on potatoes and recipes using barley (a European staple
food), but no recipes suggesting alternatives for rice (a popular staple
food item in the Middle East). An important section in the book is the
one devoted to fish; it is a rather long section that includes several recipes
and suggestions to use pickled herring; a popular ingredient among the
Jewish communities of Poland and Russia (WIZO, 1948). The inclination
to adapt European recipes to local ingredients instead of embracing new
local recipes seems to be common throughout the cookbooks of the time.
The preference for European recipes made it more difficult for Mizrahi
women to adapt to the Tzena policies than for Ashkenazim. Not only did
the cookbooks devote much more space to Ashkenazi recipes, the food
products subsidised also made it easier to continue with this diet.
WIZO were not the only ones interested in publishing Tzena cook-
books. In 1949, Lilian Cornfeld, now known as the “Mother of Israeli
cuisine”, published a cookbook to help women cope with austerity poli-
cies titled Ma evashel mimanot ha tzena? Madrikh (1949) (What shall I
cook from the Tzena rations? A guide). Lilian Cornfeld was a Canadian
Jewish woman, who married an Israeli and spent over 40 years living in
Israel. She studied Nutrition at Columbia Teachers College and worked
for WIZO as Supervisor of Domestic Science. From 1941 to 1942, she
also managed the food units of the U.S. Army in Tel Aviv. From 1942
to1944, she operated the food services of the American Red Cross in
Tel Aviv, and from 1945 to 1946, she worked as Chief Dietician for
the UNNRA Refugee Camps in Palestine, and then Egypt (G. Cornfeld,
1996). In addition, she wrote food columns for the Jerusalem Post and
other Israeli newspapers, and broadcast radio programmes about food in
40 C. PRIETO PIASTRO

1938. Many consider her cookbooks to be the first Hebrew Cuisine cook-
books. She also dedicated her time to writing books for special diets and
providing nutritional advice (G. Cornfeld, 1996).
How to Cook with the Tzena Rations showed women how to
stretch available ingredients, how to substitute meat for vegetables,
and how to bake with almost no eggs (1949). In her book, Cornfeld
suggested following a primarily vegetarian diet, with protein obtained
from powdered eggs, milk, and other dairy products. The cover of the
book shows women from different ethnic backgrounds in military posi-
tions. This highlights the role of cooking as a nationalist duty and the
ethnic diversity in Israel. The book continues to have a melting pot
approach. However, her recipes follow the trend of promoting Ashkenazi
recipes cooked with local ingredients. Cornfeld mentions kosher practices
but does not highlight their religious significance. Instead, she outlines
the hygienic benefits of kosher practices, particularly in warmer climates
such as Israel. This is an interesting example of the author secularising
traditional religious values. Instead of asking the readers to change them,
she simply suggests a new approach that was in accordance with the
secular aspirations of the founders of the state. She explains how to make
meat kosher as well as the benefits of separating meat from dairy. She
prizes its historical and sanitary aspects and recommends it to “backward
countries”. This persists throughout her cookbooks, especially in Israeli
Cookery (published in 1962) when the Tzena times were over (Cornfeld,
1962).
Another characteristic of Cornfeld’s writing is her defence of Arab
food, or as she refers to it “the local diet”. Her cookbooks constantly
mention the benefits of the dishes prepared by the “locals”. However,
she never mentions Palestine by name and does not attribute any recipe
included in her cookbook to them.
The Tzena campaign was successful during 1949 and 1950. However,
in the second half of 1950 and in 1951 the black market became more
active, and the government introduced new policies, including inspections
of private cupboards and freezers (Rozin, 2006, 56). One of the reasons
for the failure of the Tzena was the lack of provisions made for those who
were used to a Middle Eastern diet. Ration cards privileged the European
diet subsidising European ingredients like bread but omitting pitta bread
(Raviv, 2015, 65). As the cookbooks of the time revealed, these omis-
sions were made as part of the absorption policy, as it was thought that
the immigrants from Muslim countries, especially from Yemen, had poor
 2 EATING AS AN ISRAELI 41

and “backwards” diets (Cornfeld, 1962). Again, in the case of Iraqi Jews,
fundamental ingredients for their diets like rice, pitta bread, and lamb
were not included in the subsidised ingredients. This resulted in women
exchanging large quantities of white bread for pitta and using the black
market whenever it was possible for them (Meir-Glitzenstein, 2015).
In theory, the cookbooks should have helped women cook with
unknown ingredients such as olive oil, courgettes, tomatoes, and
aubergines. Nevertheless, it is well documented that some of them still
bought traditional ingredients from the black market (Raviv, 2015). In
fact, the tools used by the government, such as cookbooks and national-
istic campaigns, were not enough to convince the Israeli women to put
the nation first rather than their children. As the government was not able
to fulfil the nutritional needs of children, or at least women perceived it
like that, they resisted the new politics not only by buying food on the
black market but by sacrificing their rations to give them to their chil-
dren. Consequently, during those years there was an increase in women’s
mortality in Israel (Rozin, 2006, 64).
It was well-known that women were breaking the rules by buying
food in the black market or exchanging products to obtain those that
were aligned with the food culture of their places of origin. In contrast,
men became a symbol of morality, as good soldiers that put the nation
first. This conceptualisation of men and women’s roles during the Tzena
constructed men as agents that were not involved or had any responsi-
bility in the household; men had nothing to be blamed of when rules
were broken. Nonetheless, men ate everyday dishes prepared by women
with black market ingredients. None of my informants recalled them
complaining about a bit of chicken on the plate that should not have
been there. Therefore, it is possible to imagine that some men encouraged
women to buy black market ingredients.

Times of Milk and Honey

The 1960s started with better prospects for Israeli households. It seemed
that the war was over, and that austerity was in the past. The food
shortages of the forties and fifties became a bitter memory; rationing
disappeared, and meat, sugar, flour, and rice became more common at
the dinner table of Israelis. Nonetheless, the Zionist aim of creating a
new society with a New Hebrew Man had not yet faded. The melting
pot ideology remained alive, and the aim of social and political changes,
42 C. PRIETO PIASTRO

the divisions between Ashkenazim and Mizrahim, and attitudes towards

religion are also reflected in the recipe books. In the cookbooks of this
time, religious elements appeared more frequently. Recipes were kosher,
and authors explained how to run a kosher kitchen.
Lilian Cornfeld’s popular book, Israeli Cookery (1962) embodied the
trends and social situation of Israel during the sixties. Israeli Cookery
is a completely different cookbook from the ones that have been anal-
ysed up to this point. For the first time in Israeli history, scarcity does
not play a central role in the kitchen, and cooks have more freedom
to choose recipes and dishes. Writing for a foreign—and possibly a
Jewish—female audience considering emigrating to Israel, Lilian Cornfeld
provides a detailed explanation of the new Israeli diet and characteristics
she considers fundamental to this food culture. Without question, this
might be the most popular book by Lilian Cornfeld—it was constantly
mentioned by my participants. Although it seems that the intention of
the author was to show the unique nature of Israeli cuisine, aspects of an
American cooking style remain.
Esther told me several times that she liked Cornfeld’s books because
her recipes were “really American”. On more than one occasion, Esther
said she had learned to cook from cookbooks and newspaper articles as
she did not like the way her mother cooked. From those cookbooks, she
learned typical Ashkenazi recipes that she now cooks for Shabbat and
holidays. Some of these recipes are now labelled as traditionally Israeli
like chicken schnitzel and Israeli salad (chopped vegetable salad). She
preferred cookbooks written in English as her Hebrew was not that good
at the time, but she also looked for familiar recipes using turkey, pancakes,
kosher hot dogs, and pasta. Lilian Cornfeld’s books included those dishes.
As is evident from the narratives of my participants, Lilian Cornfeld’s
use of local ingredients did not meant a complete disengagement from
Western food. Cornfeld claimed that “Sabra’ (Israeli) cooking is not
entirely Middle Eastern, nor is it European Jewish” (Cornfeld, 1962).
It is clear from Cornfeld’s writing that she believed that Israel had built a
distinctive national cuisine and that her duty was to promote this diet to
Israeli women, future immigrants, and foreigners. Although she acknowl-
edged the existence of different culinary traditions in Israel, she does
point out that she considers some of them, such as the Yemenite diet,
to be unhealthy (Cornfeld, 1962, 91). Cornfeld never judges recipes
according to their taste, but according to what she considers are their
health benefits.
 2 EATING AS AN ISRAELI 43

Nevertheless, Cornfeld does write about the difference in taste and

food preferences of different Jewish communities: “If one wants to please
all factions of the Israeli population in a common dining room, there
are two major differences in catering: rice and oil for Orientals and pota-
toes and margarine for Europeans. All communities have less appreciation
for anything other than fresh foods: thus, canned and frozen foods do
not sell well except to Westerns” (Cornfeld, 1962, 91). This quotation
reveals a willingness to accept the difference between communities and a
new acceptance of diversity. That said, it does not mean a renunciation
of the aims of creating a cohesive cuisine and country. She openly states
that there is an “urgent need to create Israeli cuisine” (Cornfeld, 1962,
91). Despite this difference, the author finds common ground between
all Israelis, for example, a preference for fresh food over processed or
preserved products. She also uses this common ground to start defining
the other: the Middle Eastern.
Another innovation of Cornfeld’s books is the inclusion of a “His-
torical Forward” where the Jewish history of persecution is highlighted,
as well as the times of the Ottoman Empire. Palestine before 1880 is
described as “a disease-ridden land, arid and misgoverned, without natural
resources and peopled by a sparse Arab population of some 300,000. But
it was home and the land of the dreams” (Cornfeld, 1962, 5). Lilian
Cornfeld gave a political tone to the book by pointing out the hardships
of the new life in the state and subscribing to the Zionist claims that
before their arrival, Israel was an uncivilised and unpopulated land.
As mentioned previously, Lilian Cornfeld emphasises the ethnic diver-
sity of Israel, but she does not spare her judgement over the culinary
traditions she mentions. She emphasises the backwardness of the “Orien-
tal” Jewish communities, especially the Yemenite community: “Yemenite
food is not very cultivated. Most Yemenites never saw sugar or flour and
use food in its natural form. They are meat eaters who eat every part of the
animal, including inner organs, whether beef or lamb” (Cornfeld, 1962,
7). In contrast, Cornfeld does not consider the Iraqi Jewish commu-
nity to be as poor as the other Mizrahi communities and qualifies it at
a high cultural level (Cornfeld, 1962, 8). She also differentiates between
Sephardic Jews and Oriental Jews recognising Sephardic Jews as being the
oldest community living in Israel. For this reason, instead of including a
section on Sephardic food, she attributes the food eaten traditionally in
Jerusalem to this community (Cornfeld, 1962, 25). The backwardness of
Yemenites and “Oriental Jews” seems to be the way in which she justifies
44 C. PRIETO PIASTRO

the prevalence of European recipes. Although the author highlights the

originality of the Israeli diet, she continues to rely on Ashkenazi traditions.

Conclusion
Israel is a country shaped by hundreds of Jewish communities that arrived
from the diaspora, carrying with them different experiences and histor-
ical trajectories. The Zionist elites tried to unify these experiences and
construct a new identity that left those differences in the past and concen-
trated on the national future of the New Hebrew. Food formed part of a
series of policies that had the aim of building a uniform understanding of
the nation, of what it meant to be Israeli. Therefore, during the previous
decades and the first years after the establishment the State of Israel, cook-
books became a didactic tool; instructional manuals that had the aim of
creating a new food culture that helped newcomers to adapt to their new
country. They explained to immigrants where to shop, which products to
buy, how to eat them, when to eat them, where to eat them, their origins,
and the reasons why some dishes were better than others.
But it seems that culinary identities cannot be imposed from the top
down. On the contrary, this chapter showed that any governmental impo-
sition, even those related to war conditions, had to be negotiated and was
reinterpreted by those who were affected by them. Clearly, the melting
pot was not a peaceful process in which a new culinary and national
identity was quietly adopted by the population. As I will explain in later
chapters, it was a violent process by which the authorities privileged the
dominant European culture and appropriated local dishes. As Appadurai
affirms, “Especially in the culinary matter, the melting pot is a myth”
(Appadurai, 1988, 22).
Where to shop, what to eat, and how to cook were seen as female
responsibilities of national importance. During times of scarcity, this deci-
sion became even more prominent. The everyday lives of families, their
tables, and their kitchens became a space under governmental control and
supervision. Women resisted the limits and guidelines given to them by
the authorities. They used all resources available to them to feed their
families according to what they thought was best for them, even though
it was not necessarily best for the nation. Women continually negotiated
the dietary changes and food policies imposed by the authorities. They
used the black market during times of rationing, they did not modify
their food practices, and they preserved their diasporic traditions.