Harry Kashdan

JERUSALEM IN LONDON: YOTAM OTTOLENGHI AND SAMI TAMIMI’S DIASPORIC WORLD

Abstract
Prompted by the publishing phenomenon of Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi’s Jerusalem cookbook, this paper considers the discourse(s) of place elaborated by an emergent network of Middle Eastern chefs-in-diaspora. Focusing on Ottolenghi and Tamimi’s Jerusalem and Ottolenghi cookbooks, I argue that cookbooks can be productively analyzed as literary objects with an actor-network methodology. The particular story presented by Ottolenghi and Tamimi’s work is one in which distinctions are repeatedly raised and then dismissed in order to find common ground between Israel and Palestine. Ottolenghi may be an Israeli Sephardi Jew and Tamimi a Palestinian Muslim, but both men are London expatriates and restaurateurs. The literary dimensions of their cookbooks attempt to harmonize personal narratives with the commercial forces at play in cookbook publishing: peace sells better than conflict, and diasporic nostalgia never goes out of style.

The first Ottolenghi deli opened in a narrow space in London’s Notting Hill neighborhood in 2002. Over the past decade and a half, the chain has grown to include two additional delis and a flagship restaurant, as well as NOPI, a more formal restaurant, all in central London. In addition to supervising these establishments, Yotam Ottolenghi, the enterprise’s founder, has written and cowritten several best-selling cookbooks: Ottolenghi (2008), Plenty (2010), Jerusalem: A Cookbook (2012), Plenty More (2014), NOPI (2015) and, most recently, Sweet (2017).¹ At the delis and on the Ottolenghi website one can also purchase a wide range of Ottolenghi-branded dry goods including herbs, spices, dried fruits, nuts, and lentils, signature Ottolenghi-prepared foods including cookies and granola, DVD recordings of Yotam Ottolenghi’s Mediterranean Feast, Mediterranean Island Feast, and Jerusalem on a Plate (all produced by Channel 4), and even a fetching Ottolenghi apron decorated with graphics from the Plenty More cookbook. Although the company now includes a number of partners, the major creative forces behind this furious activity remain Yotam Ottolenghi, who dreamed up the original deli, and Sami Tamimi, who has been head chef of the three delis and the flagship restaurant since the opening of the original Notting Hill location. Ottolenghi and Tamimi were born in the same city in the same year—Jerusalem, 1968—but they did not meet until a chance encounter at a London bakery in 1999. From their partnership has emerged a particular way with ingredients which emphasizes the fresh, sharp, and colorful with a flexible elegance that befits occasions ranging from a takeout dinner for the family to a catered brunch, and even Queen Elizabeth II’s jubilee.

In contrast to the mainly literary production of other Middle Eastern food writers in diaspora—figures such as Claudia Roden and Greg Malouf, to mention two of the field’s best-known and most prolific authors—Ottolenghi and Tamimi’s cookbooks, restaurants, and products imbricate a literary diasporic network with one that is physically planted across London.² I argue that this meeting of the literary and the physical allows for the creation of a reimagined version of the Jerusalem whence they departed, a diasporic Jerusalem that is indelibly marked by the affective contradictions of Ottolenghi and Tamimi’s relationships with their natal city. The Jerusalem they make available for London’s—and, via cookbooks and online sales, the world’s—consumption is the object of their nostalgic affection as well as an ambivalence that borders on resentment. This latter affect unsettles the commercial impulse of the Ottolenghi brand vis-à-vis the city of Ottolenghi and Tamimi’s birth.

Ottolenghi and Tamimi’s diasporic world is created by the intermingling of their coauthored cookbooks, the Ottolenghi delis and product lines, and the literary and social networks which link Ottolenghi and Tamimi to other diasporic subjects. It manifests as a function of its simultaneous, conflicted expression across physical, literary, and social planes. In this paper I explore Ottolenghi and Tamimi’s diasporic world via close readings of their two coauthored cookbooks, Ottolenghi and Jerusalem. The modern cookbook is often a hybrid object, mixing bloated narrative prefaces, anecdotal introductions to individual recipes, cooking instructions, glossaries, photographs, and graphic design in a complicated form that resists categorization. In these volumes, paratext often outweighs text to such a degree that the reader must question whether the narratives or the recipes should be understood as the central component.³ Main authors are credited, but attendant upon cookbooks’ hybridity is a diffusion of authorship among creators who may or may not be named on covers, title pages, copyright pages, or within acknowledgements. The proper method of engaging with these cookbooks is similarly uncertain. Is a book like Jerusalem meant to be read closely or merely skimmed? Perhaps it is meant to be looked at more than read, or perhaps it should be approached from a utilitarian perspective, rather than experienced as art or literature. The methodology behind a scholarly approach to these books can be as complex as their forms. In my close readings I attempt to hold narrative, image, and recipe equally in mind while considering any single component. Meaning thus emerges from individual elements as well as the juxtaposition of media and genera within a single volume, or even on a single page. In describing these juxtapositions I borrow from codicology the term mise-en-page, which describes these arrangements especially in cases of joint, complex, and uncertain authorship.⁴ Mise-en-page demands attention to written, visual, and design features in concert. In codicology, this often entails considering scribal intervention, reader annotation, images, ornamentation, and the physical construction of the codex alongside the text proper. In close reading a cookbook, I suggest that such an approach helps us consider what aspects or features of the cookbook constitute its “text” to begin with. That is, given the photographic, narrative, and design content of many contemporary cookbooks, a reading that only considered the recipes around which these cookbooks are ostensibly organized would overlook the meanings cooperatively constructed by the various other elements at play. At times these elements work in concert with one another; other times, however, they present readers with paradoxes and oppositions that suggest new readings and interpretations.⁵ How the text is presented deeply affects the meaning(s) it makes.

The assemblage of elements making up this type of cookbook involves a distribution of authorship which invites the toolkit of actor-network theory. In Bruno Latour’s formulation, actor-network theory is less a theoretical perspective than a methodology for tracing associations as they travel through shifting frames of reference, such as those of the Ottolenghi delis and cookbooks, the world of the Middle Eastern diaspora, the network of Middle Eastern diasporic food writers, and the London food scene.⁶ Both human and nonhuman actors are at work in these chains. An instructive example of a nonhuman actor is provided by olive oil, a major ingredient in the Ottolenghi pantry. Where a semiotic reading would be attentive to olive oil’s importance as a symbol of Middle Eastern food and even identity, an actor-network approach requires that we also consider the profusion of human labor invested in olive oil production, the choices of an individual recipe writer in adding olive oil to a dish, the predictable and unpredictable interactions of olive oil with other ingredients, and the choices of those who, using a cookbook, do or do not include the oil as a recipe directs. As Latour puts it, “any thing that does modify a state of affairs by making a difference is an actor.”⁷ Olive oil thus remains an avatar of the Middle East, but also acts as a mediator building and changing the discourse of Middle Eastern food through its every use. The oil is never only a static intermediary transmitting, unchanged, some pure idea of place or culture.⁸ In the case of a cookbook, authors, ingredients, and the physical book itself are all complex mediators.

In a recent essay, Rita Felski proposes a method for adapting Latour’s sociological method to literary study. “Reading,” Felski suggests, can become a process in which “we do not probe below the surface of a text to retrieve disavowed or repressed meanings, nor do we stand back from a text to ‘denaturalize’ it and expose its social constructedness.” Instead, we might take a middle perspective, in which we interpret objects and texts as well as the networks between them, and “conceive of interpretation as a form of mutual making.”⁹ Returning to the question of what we do with a cookbook, this strange, quasi-literary object, we must position ourselves not as dispassionate analysts, but as mediators on equal footing with all others involved. “Attachment is thus an indispensable term in the Latourian lexicon,” Felski maintains. “We become attached to art objects in a literal sense: the dog-eared paperback that rides around town in a jacket pocket,” or, I add, the stained and annotated pages of a cookbook.¹⁰ If, as Felski has it, “To interpret something is to add one’s voice to that of the text,” then cooking from a recipe is sublime interpretation, and critically analyzing a cookbook is, too, an act of mediation.¹¹

The mediation undertaken in this paper suggests a reciprocity between the consumption of food and that of text, and thereby offers a new lens for the study of both cookbooks and diasporic food traditions. The stories in Ottolenghi and Jerusalem are equally, reciprocally, and inextricably present in both the dishes and the narratives found in the pages of these cookbooks. An exclusively literary method would ignore the materiality of the food itself; a culinary history perspective would neglect the stories suggested by close reading these volumes. By situating this intervention as a mediation on the same footing as the myriad others involved in a cookbook, I open space for an analysis attentive to the interactions between chef and recipe, recipe and reader, critic and storyteller, ingredient and image, and more. This method illuminates the tensions and paradoxes which structure Ottolenghi and Tamimi’s foods and stories, and encourages us not to flatten such productive contradictions.

SOURCES AND AUTHORSHIP

Cookbook authors generally fall into two major categories: recipe creators and recipe collectors. The former group consists mainly of professional chefs, while the latter is made up of quasi-anthropologists whose recipe collections emerge from interviews and research trips. This is not to suggest that collectors must be simple intermediaries, relaying a static image of others’ foods, but to note that the origins of their recipes, at least, lie in others’ kitchens. In her landmark Book of Middle Eastern Food, Claudia Roden describes the exercise of soliciting recipes from “some relative passing through London, a well-known ex-restaurateur from Alexandria, or somebody’s aunt in Buenos Aires.”¹² Roden continues to occupy an ethnographic position in her later works, which begin with research trips throughout the Mediterranean and carefully describe Roden’s contacts with local experts. Greg Malouf and Lucy Malouf portray a similar process in Saha: A Chef’s Journey through Lebanon and Syria, writing,

Greg’s earliest memories are of his grandmother teta Adèle’s chicken and rice dish, roz a djejh; of his aunt Larisse’s kahke bread; and of his mum’s kibbeh nayeh, the famous Lebanese version of steak tartare. . . . For Greg, as a chef, the pull toward the Middle East was a profound yearning to explore his earliest culinary influences in greater depth.¹³

Although Greg Malouf is a well-regarded restaurant chef—someone whom we might expect to be positioned as a recipe creator (and who does take that role in some of his cookbooks)—Saha is explicit in situating him as the repository of an intimate, familial cooking tradition rooted in diasporic nostalgia, made available to readers through the medium of the cookbook. We are invited to explore Malouf’s heritage with him on a trip to Syria and Lebanon, where yet more recipes are gathered and incorporated into an emergent diasporic culinary canon.

The other kind of cookbook is the work of a cook or chef acting as such. Most of the recipes in this type of text originate with a single creator. Restaurant cookbooks fall into this group, as do many cookbooks produced by television chef personalities.¹⁴ Any single cookbook tends to lie solidly in one of these two molds, but the arc of a writer’s career may, as in Malouf’s case, embrace both. In Ottolenghi and Jerusalem, Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi play unusual dual roles as authors of some recipes and as intermediaries relaying dishes that originate with other chefs and cooks. In the former book, the balance is heavily weighted toward Ottolenghi and Tamimi as chef-creators, while in Jerusalem the collecting impulse is primary. Analyzing how various recipes are attributed illuminates the relationship between these two texts, which contain, despite their differing framing and methods, very similar dishes.

The first edition of Ottolenghi was published in 2008, followed by Jerusalem in 2012. In a second edition of Ottolenghi issued in 2013, after the major success of Jerusalem, Ottolenghi and Tamimi reflect in a new introduction on what drove them to write their first cookbook: “This was THE book, our one and only chance to properly show our food to the world. . . . Quite honestly, we never thought there would be another book for us. We were chefs engaged in cooking for people, who just happened to take a little break from our day job and write a one-off cookbook.” In this new introduction, Ottolenghi is retroactively positioned as a presentation of “the food we had been serving for a few years in our restaurants,” in implicit opposition to Jerusalem’s more nostalgic impulse toward the collection of others’ recipes.¹⁵ Already in the first edition of Ottolenghi, though, Ottolenghi and Tamimi frame the food at their London delis in terms of their Jerusalem childhoods. The cookbook’s original, 2008, introductory matter includes one-page autobiographies of each author. Ottolenghi recalls childhood excursions to Sea Dolphin, a restaurant in Arab Jerusalem specializing in non-kosher seafood, and relates memories of eating pomegranates with his brother. He dwells on his German grandmother’s boiled cauliflower recipe and his Italian grandparents’ coffee, cookies, and gnocchi alla romana.¹⁶ Tamimi, for his part, describes inheriting “both my father’s love of food and my mother’s love of feeding people.” He reminisces about his father’s special coffee blend and his mother’s cauliflower fritters and carefully rolled grape leaves, and then explicitly relates the food he makes at Ottolenghi to what he ate in his childhood: “Recently I was in the kitchen looking at a box of cauliflower when my mother’s cauliflower fritters came to mind, so that was what I cooked. Only then did I realize how much of my cooking is about recreating the dishes of my childhood.”¹⁷ Nostalgic passages like this underline Ottolenghi and Tamimi’s contention early in Ottolenghi that when characterizing the delis’ offerings, “Regional descriptions just don’t seem to work; there are too many influences and our food histories are long and diverse.”¹⁸ It is clear that although Jerusalem food makes up the foundation of the Ottolenghi kitchens, that foundation is itself a composite product, made of Jerusalem’s many cultures as they manifest in Ottolenghi and Tamimi’s personal histories.

The recipes in Ottolenghi are mostly uncredited, so we may assume they originate with Ottolenghi and Tamimi themselves. A few exceptions, however, sketch the borders of a network that will dramatically expand in the pages of Jerusalem. Tamimi’s mother’s burnt eggplant salad and cauliflower fritters make appearances, as does Ottolenghi’s mother’s mayonnaise.¹⁹ Alongside these intimate, familial sources are recipes originating with close friends, like “Tamara’s Stuffed Grape Leaves,” and several recipes that come from other chefs at the Ottolenghi restaurants (especially Helen Goh and Ramael Scully) and beyond—one is even credited to epicurious.com.²⁰ Claudia Roden, grande dame of Middle Eastern cookbooks, is cited as an inspiration twice, first for “Baked Artichokes and Fava Beans,” and later for “Roast Chicken with Saffron, Hazelnuts, and Honey.” Ottolenghi and Tamimi’s position as active mediators comes to the fore in their descriptions of her recipes. Of the artichokes and fava beans, they write, “Claudia Roden, the godmother of Middle Eastern cookery and a venerable inspiration for us, has a similar recipe. She suggests using frozen artichoke bottoms and fava beans as alternatives to fresh. If she can do it, so can you.”²¹ The roast chicken, similarly, “is inspired by a recipe from Claudia Roden’s classic book, Tamarind and Saffron.”²² These brief sentences allude to the complexity of Ottolenghi and Tamimi’s place in the culinary world of the Middle Eastern diaspora. Descriptions of Roden as a “godmother” and a “venerable inspiration” pay homage to her, yet also subtly attempt to usurp her place, asserting Ottolenghi and Tamimi as Roden’s heirs apparent, and positioning their food as a contemporary update of her older Middle Eastern recipes.²³

Roden shows up twice in Jerusalem, too, first in a recipe for polpettone, and then in one for salmon steaks.²⁴ The polpettone recipe is an excellent example of the complex attribution dynamics—and the consequently complex authorship—that characterize Jerusalem. The narrative segment introducing the recipe consists of three paragraphs. The first offers a description of Ottolenghi’s grandmother’s meatloaf, which was made with pistachios and gherkins and served alongside Italian Jewish dishes including the famous fried artichokes of Rome. The second paragraph makes a historicizing move. “Polpettone,” we learn,

is a very old dish of Italian Jews. Claudia Roden gives a much more complicated version than [Ottolenghi’s grandmother’s] in The Book of Jewish Food, originating from Piedmont. Hers is also cooked for Passover and it involves wrapping ground veal and turkey mixed with pistachios, egg, nutmeg, and garlic in turkey skin, and poaching this in turkey stock made out of the carcass.

The third paragraph attempts to situate Ottolenghi’s personal memory of one example of this kind of Italian Jewish meatloaf within the context of the contemporary Jerusalem food scene. “In Jerusalem, Jews from Aleppo cook koisat, a meat loaf simpler than Luciana’s polpettone but also stuffed with pistachios. . . . Ashkenazic Jews cook klops, which is a baked meat loaf, typically a simple—some would even say bland—dish, yet somehow it is highly popular.”²⁵ Which of these varied dishes, though, is the basis of the recipe included in Jerusalem? The gherkins in the list of ingredients printed next to the published recipe point to Ottolenghi’s grandmother, but the pistachios Ottolenghi and Tamimi use seem to be present in many iterations of the recipe. I imagine that the addition of beef tongue to the mix is Ottolenghi and Tamimi’s own invention, to say nothing of their suggested substitute for beef tongue, ham, which is hardly a Jewish ingredient (nor, for that matter, a Muslim one), especially on a Passover table. The switch to ham may be sensible enough if shopping in London, but ham is far from widely available in Jerusalem.

The three elements of this recipe introduction are repeated in various combinations before almost every recipe in Jerusalem. The anecdote about Ottolenghi’s grandmother gestures toward the personal, while the reference to Roden touches on a professional network, appeals to historical context, and explains some of how the recipe was sourced. The final piece explores what I call “similarity within difference,” describing a range of variations on what Ottolenghi and Tamimi have pinpointed as a signature dish of the Jerusalem table. Vagueness about which ingredients and methods came from which sources in composing the final recipe is also typical.²⁶ Jerusalem’s recipes are presented to the reader as the gestalt of these various influences, which we can label as the text’s personal, professional, and scholarly dimensions.

The attribution of other recipes is a more direct affair. Remaining faithful to Latour’s injunction to follow such chains of association wherever they lead, I here describe each of these acts of mediation, organized into four groups. The first consists of recipes from family and friends. Tamimi’s mother’s fattoush, a childhood friend’s parsley and barley salad, Anat Teitelbaum’s wheat berries with Swiss chard, and Ottolenghi’s mother’s tomato and sourdough soup and stuffed peppers all make appearances.²⁷ Jerusalem also includes a leek meatball recipe from Tamara Meitlis, the same person behind Ottolenghi’s “Stuffed Grape Leaves.”

The net effect of this first group of recipes is to emphasize the homey qualities of Ottolenghi and Tamimi’s Jerusalem food. References to Ottolenghi and Tamimi’s families and friends de-exotify the unfamiliar by making the encounter with foreign food personal. The first mention of Ottolenghi’s mother explicitly traces the route by which a Westerner—like, presumably, many of Ottolenghi and Tamimi’s readers—might become familiar with Middle Eastern cooking. “Ruth,” they write, “was born to a Yekke family, German Jews who settled in the city just before the Second World War. Growing up, she spoke German at home and ate sweet-spiced red cabbage, potatoes, and sausages.” Outside the home, Ruth encountered “thoroughly exotic” Arab food, and the beginnings of Israeli national cuisine as it was born on the kibbutzim—“the famous chopped cucumber and tomato salad, tahini sauce, and olives.” Ottolenghi’s father is Italian, and through Ruth’s marriage to him “a whole new culinary world was opened up for her.”²⁸ In spite of all this apparent variety, during Ottolenghi’s childhood, “What you could hardly find in [Ruth’s] kitchen were many local Palestinian ingredients. Yotam can’t remember ever seeing a tub of tahini in the house or a bag of bulgur.” Ruth’s eventual acquaintance with Palestinian food is presented as the result of major cultural changes in Israel, rather than a personal yen to explore the local:

Over the years, Arab food gained respectability in Israeli culture and people started daring to go beyond the obligatory visit to a Palestinian joint for a kebab skewer and a plate of hummus when visiting the Old City. Ruth, like many other Israeli cooks, began to get to know what was happening in her neighbors’ kitchens and what was laid on their tables. . . . Today, like many other Jewish cooks, Ruth is comfortable with her European culinary heritage, but her style has changed and the ingredients she uses are much more local. In her larder you can now find freekeh and tahini sitting next to fusilli and a jar of rollmops. On her spice shelf are sumac, cumin, and organic Swiss bouillon powder.²⁹

Today’s Israeli cuisine—or, at least, Israeli Jewish cuisine—is described here as the outcome of a dialectical process through which Ashkenazi food met Sephardi and Arab food, and all these were synthesized into modern Israeli cooking.³⁰ Readers are implicitly encouraged to inscribe themselves in the same process through their purchase and use of Jerusalem, and to expand their own pantries accordingly. At the same time, this encounter with the Other, or the Other’s food, is rendered intimate by the familial dimension of the story.³¹ If Ottolenghi’s German mother can learn her way around freekeh and tahini, so can Ottolenghi and Tamimi’s Anglophone readers.

Recipes in the second major group are credited to various chefs and restaurants both within and outside the Ottolenghi corporate family. In a long discussion of marzipan, Ottolenghi and Tamimi quote Daniela Lerrer, owner of the well-known Barood restaurant just outside Jerusalem’s Old City, while a stuffed eggplant with lamb and pine nuts comes from Elran Shrefler’s Kurdish restaurant Azura in Jerusalem’s Mahane Yehuda market.³² Elran Shrefler is a member of the Slow Food movement, as is Rafram Hadad, who is credited for three Tunisian Jewish recipes in the book: a pan-fried sea bass, fried brick pastries ( “brick” here, but often rendered brik in English), and filo cigars.³³ Slightly further afield, but still in Israel, a root vegetable slaw is “inspired by a dish from Manta Ray, a great restaurant on the beach in Tel Aviv,” while a serving suggestion for lamb shawarma comes from Bino Gabso’s Dr. Shakshuka restaurant in Jaffa.³⁴ Moving to London, a chickpea and vegetable salad “didn’t come directly from Jerusalem, but rather from Morito, a wonderful London tapas bar owned and run by Samantha and Samuel Clark.”³⁵ Finally, Jerusalem returns home to the Ottolenghi kitchens, with a latke recipe from Ottolenghi chef Helen Goh, a chicken and herb salad credited, loosely, to “the chefs at Ottolenghi in Belgravia,” and a cardamom rice pudding that is the creation of “John Meechan, a Glaswegian (!), who developed it for the menu of our London restaurant, NOPI.”³⁶ The parenthetical exclamation point indicates Ottolenghi and Tamimi’s own surprise at finding the flavors of Jerusalem so deeply embedded in their local expatriate space.

This long list of citations illuminates the multidirectional reach of Ottolenghi and Tamimi’s web of connections. Moving from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv and Jaffa, and thence to London, these references replicate Ottolenghi and Tamimi’s own westward itineraries: from their Jerusalem childhoods to the more liberal atmosphere of Tel Aviv as young adults before making their careers in London. The marking of two contributors’ affiliation with Carlo Petrini’s Slow Food movement points outside Middle Eastern diasporic networks as well as Ottolenghi and Tamimi’s London expatriate cooking scene to an international network of chefs linked by a culinary philosophy that transcends the cooking style of any one place or diaspora. It is, in this light, not incidental that Carlo Petrini himself provides a foreword for Barbara Abdeni Massaad’s recent fundraising cookbook for Syrian refugees, Soup for Syria, in which, alongside recipes from Ottolenghi and Tamimi, one finds contributions from Claudia Roden, Greg Malouf, Paula Wolfert, and Nur Ilkin, as well as Alice Waters, Mark Bittman, and Anthony Bourdain.³⁷ Abdeni Massaad’s collection indicates the breadth and reciprocity of the literary networks linking chefs in the Middle Eastern diaspora to one another and to the international culinary world. Ottolenghi and Tamimi, operating as both recipe creators and recipe collectors, are deeply embedded in both of these networks, and have come to represent a major node of intersection between the two.

Recipes in Jerusalem’s third group are derived from a literary culinary network which sporadically intersects with the chef and restaurant network traced above. After quoting Daniela Lerrer on marzipan, Ottolenghi and Tamimi cite an account of making marzipan in Meir Shalev’s 1991 Israeli novel about a multigenerational family of bakers, Esau.³⁸ A roasted cauliflower and hazelnut salad comes from the Australian chef Karen Martini; a spicy carrot salad is sourced from Pascale Perez-Rubin, an expert on the food of Tripoli; a spice cookie recipe is “adapted from the excellent The International Cookie Cookbook by Nancy Baggett”; a recipe for date and walnut ma’amul, comes from Anissa Helou.³⁹ Discussing possible variations to Elran Shrefler’s stuffed eggplant, Ottolenghi and Tamimi make one of several references in Jerusalem to Joan Nathan and Judy Stacey Goldman’s The Flavor of Jerusalem from 1975, Nathan’s very first cookbook and a major source for Ottolenghi and Tamimi while researching their own volume.⁴⁰ The disparateness of these sources underlines the messy borders of the networks in which Ottolenghi and Tamimi act. Like Ottolenghi and Tamimi, Helou, a cookbook author and cooking teacher, is a Middle Eastern expatriate residing in London. With the exception of Helou’s ma‘amul, though, the references in this group appear to have been collected from Ottolenghi and Tamimi’s own reading, rather than from personal contacts. Ottolenghi and Tamimi may, in fact, know Shalev, Martini, Perez-Rubin, Baggett, and Nathan and Goldman but, as far as Jerusalem informs us, their access appears instead to be much like our own, a function of relatively haphazard encounters between readers and texts.

Joan Nathan actually provides one of the blurbs on Jerusalem’s back cover, though it is impossible for us to tell whether Ottolenghi and Tamimi or their publisher solicited it. Her praise for Jerusalem is juxtaposed with a blurb by Jonathan Safran Foer, who is credited as the author of Eating Animals rather than for his work as a novelist. Foer’s blurb suggests a blurring of the lines between the literary, literary-culinary, and culinary spheres. This blurring operates much like the story of Ottolenghi’s mother gradually becoming conversant with Palestinian cooking: the reader, too, is encouraged to explore pathways of association in a process of ever-increasing familiarity with the foreign.⁴¹

In Jerusalem’s unattributed recipes, which make up the fourth and final group, the phrases “inspired by,” “characteristic of,” and “adapted from” appear repeatedly as a way of dodging those purists who might be appalled by Ottolenghi and Tamimi’s unorthodox takes on Tunisian dishes like seafood soup and shakshuka, Georgian beet salad, and Sephardi and Iranian Jewish rice dishes.⁴² The same move is used to justify Ottolenghi and Tamimi’s couscous made with a crust in the style of an Iranian rice dish, stuffed potatoes “inspired by” both Tripolitan and Aleppan versions, a beet and orange salsa “inspired by a Moroccan orange and olive salad,” a “deconstruction of Tunisian fricassee,” and an herb pie “inspired by all kinds of Sephardic pastries.”⁴³ These distancing phrases authorize the reader’s own improvisation, encouraging his or her increasing ownership of Jerusalem food as it moves from the cookbook into the domestic kitchen. At the same time, given the careful sourcing of many of Jerusalem’s recipes, it is unclear how we are to receive the hazy provenance of these unattributed dishes. Jerusalem has no bibliography, so we can only guess at the sources Ottolenghi and Tamimi consulted in devising these recipes. The result is a certain tension between a push toward culinary creativity and the obfuscation which gives adaptation license. One does not know where to look to find the “Moroccan orange and olive salad” which somehow became a beet and orange salsa, nor what the difference might be between Tripolitan and Aleppan stuffed potatoes. We are granted only so much access, in a surprisingly unscholarly move for a book that is, at base, as much a research project as a testament to personal memory. This is in marked contrast to Claudia Roden’s work, which is always firmly that of a recipe collector: even her first book, A Book of Middle Eastern Food, includes a bibliography of twenty sources, inviting the reader to pursue their own research in Roden’s footsteps.⁴⁴ Many of Greg Malouf and Lucy Malouf’s titles are similarly transparent in their bibliographies. Ottolenghi and Tamimi’s work restricts the reader to the role of cook. We are not invited to join their scholarship, though one might also conjecture that this is because scholarly references are simply not available. While Jerusalem presents itself as the result of a research project, any individual dish within the text could have easily been inspired as much by something tasted or heard of on a single occasion as by research into culinary history. The result, however, remains the same: the cookbook does not make the answers to these questions about sourcing available to the reader.

Stepping back from the recipes themselves, we can see their networked origins as only a piece of the complicated system of authorship behind these cookbooks. The biggest, most beautiful (and, often, most commercially successful) modern cookbooks are inevitably polyvocal, incorporating the work of authors, photographers, food stylists, test cooks, graphic designers, editors, and publishers, who are credited to varying degrees in different texts. Jerusalem and Ottolenghi, though, exhibit an unusually extreme diffusion of authorship even within this genre. As in the case of recipe attribution, relatively simple dynamics in Ottolenghi become substantially more complex in Jerusalem. On the inside back cover of Ottolenghi, Yotam Ottolenghi is described as the “owner of an eponymous restaurant group in London,” while Sami Tamimi is “a partner and head chef at Ottolenghi.” Photography is credited to Richard Learoyd on the title page, though the copyright page specifies that the cover photograph for the American edition is by Jonathan Lovekin.⁴⁵ The “Thank-yous” near the end of Ottolenghi mention debts to “Alex Meitlis and Tirza Florentin, not-so-silent partners, whom, in two opposite departments, had a huge part in molding Ottolenghi” (the deli, not the cookbook). Alex Meitlis is Tamara Meitlis’s (of the stuffed grape leaves and leek meatballs) son: what appears to be a personal connection in the context of the recipe’s introduction is here revealed as intertwined with Ottolenghi and Tamimi’s professional world. Other thanks go to the providers of the ceramics used to stage the dishes for photography, recipe testers, family, suppliers, and Ottolenghi’s customers.⁴⁶

In Jerusalem, the list expands. The page immediately following the title page lists four additional author figures: food photography is the domain of Jonathan Lovekin, but location photography is credited to Adam Hinton, a documentary photographer. Underneath these credits, we read, “Additional text by Nomi Abeliovich and Noam Bar.”⁴⁷ Abeliovich is an Israeli designer and food writer; Bar is a partner in the Ottolenghi enterprise (and a former romantic partner of Yotam Ottolenghi). What is remarkable here is the vagueness of Abeliovich and Bar’s shared credit for “additional text.” Their names do not appear again in Jerusalem; we cannot know what text in the cookbook originates with them and what is Ottolenghi’s and/or Tamimi’s own composition. This is significant insofar as Jerusalem’s introduction includes, in addition to a rationale for the book, several subsections titled “Jerusalem food,” “The passion in the air,” “The recipes,” “A comment about ownership,” and “History,” which contain baldly political writing. In these sections, Ottolenghi and Tamimi—or Abeliovich, or Bar, or some combination of the four—indulge in lambent nostalgia for the “excitement, joy, [and] serene bliss” of Jerusalem’s food, platitudes about the possibility “that hummus will . . . bring Jerusalemites together, if nothing else will,” a denial that the origins and ownership of the dishes in the book truly matter, and, in odd contradiction with the foregoing, bitter acknowledgment that “intolerance and trampling over other people’s basic rights are routine in this city.”⁴⁸ While I will devote space to close readings of these passages in the final section of this paper, for the moment I comment on the fractured political stance these quotations allude to by way of highlighting the inchoate authorship of this text. Who wrote these words? The reader can only guess. Consequently, we cannot speak definitively of Ottolenghi and Tamimi’s attitudes toward their home. Instead, we can only, with an odd circularity, speak of Jerusalem’s Jerusalem.⁴⁹

The acknowledgements at the end of the cookbook do not clarify matters. “The idea for [Jerusalem],” we learn, was “our friend and business partner’s, Noam Bar, who was also instrumental in every stage of its making.” The text continues, “Nomi Abeliovich spent eighteen months doing much of the legwork for us—interviewing, collecting recipes, meticulously collating materials.”⁵⁰ In what ways are these activities not the work of a named author? How can we square Abeliovich’s major role in collecting Jerusalem’s recipes with a passage from near the very beginning of Jerusalem, which informs us, in Ottolenghi and Tamimi’s voice, “In all honesty, this is also a self-indulgent, nostalgic trip into our pasts. We go back, first and foremost, to experience again those magnificent flavors of our childhood”?⁵¹ To say “Jerusalem, by Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi” elides a rich set of relationships and associations which, when revealed, refigure Jerusalem as an extraordinarily networked object. Careful attention to paratextual credits reveals production dynamics as complicated as the literary and culinary networks which are implicated in the short recipe introductions.

For a profile of Ottolenghi (the man and the enterprise) in the New Yorker, Tamimi was asked if he felt that the Ottolenghi business should bear his name in addition to Ottolenghi’s. He responded,

It was Yotam’s vision and his dream. The work was his. The stake was his. I didn’t have money to invest. He risked everything he had. A few years later, I became a partner, but regardless of the cookbooks we do, regardless of our friendship, I’m still working for Yotam. He’s my boss.⁵²

The name “Ottolenghi” is, already, shorthand for a complex enterprise. Perhaps it follows that the Ottolenghi and Jerusalem cookbooks operate similarly, with the named authors, Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi, standing in for unwieldy chains of association and diffused author functions. The cookbooks themselves are, like Ottolenghi and Tamimi, active mediators shaping the contributions of a wide array of writers, chefs, researchers, and artists.

INGREDIENTS AND DISHES

The shared goal of Ottolenghi and Jerusalem, the presentation of a coherent culinary perspective, works against the fragmentation suggested by these dense authorial webs and recipe networks. Both texts are self-conscious and deliberate in this endeavor, devoting space in their respective introductions to explicit definitions of the kinds of food one will encounter over the following pages. In Ottolenghi, we read,

Our feast is, literally, a feast of bold colors and generous gestures. It is driven by an unapologetic desire to celebrate food and its virtues, to display abundance in the same way that a market smallholder does: show everything you’ve got and shout its praise wholeheartedly.⁵³

Ottolenghi’s food sets out to overwhelm, but only within the context of simplicity, freshness, and the maintenance of close proximity to the land and its produce. “We love real food,” Ottolenghi and Tamimi write, “unadulterated and unadorned.”⁵⁴ Later, they describe the typical Ottolenghi dish: “vibrant, bold, and honest.”⁵⁵ These formulations, cliché in contemporary food writing, attack a straw man. What, exactly, would “fake” food be? Is there anyone seeking to present dull, shy, and dishonest dishes?⁵⁶

In Jerusalem, the focus is on what is both “comforting and delicious.”⁵⁷ Eliding the extensive research behind the book, Ottolenghi and Tamimi describe Jerusalem’s food as the product of memory and instinct. “We just cook and eat, relying on our impulses for what feels right, looks beautiful and tastes delicious to us.”⁵⁸ Jerusalem is not meant to be a comprehensive guide to the foods of the city, but instead offers a window onto Ottolenghi and Tamimi’s personal experiences of Jerusalem’s varied cuisines. Abundance remains a guiding principle; Ottolenghi and Tamimi seem to have come by their love of extravagant portions in their natal city: “There is a spirit of warmth and generosity [in Jerusalem] that is sometimes almost overbearing. Guests are always served mountains of food. Nothing is done sparingly. Eat More is a local motto. It is unthinkable not to eat what you are served.”⁵⁹ Descriptions of culinary philosophy in both Ottolenghi and Jerusalem often rest on similar affirmations of bounty.

In search of greater specificity, I turn to the recipes themselves and their descriptions of what ingredients “do” in individual dishes. Here, as earlier, I take an actor-network approach, treating specific ingredients as active, nonhuman mediators in the creation of flavor, color, and texture. In Ottolenghi, this tracing is made easier by the inclusion of a glossary of the most important ingredients in the Ottolenghi pantry. Lemon juice “can transform boring to exciting in a squirt” and olive oil “adds moisture and a rich depth of flavor.”⁶⁰ Yogurt “adds an appealing lightness that counters the warmth of spicy or slow-cooked dishes. It balances and bridges contrasting flavors and textures.” Tahini “[imparts] sharpness and a certain richness,” while sumac “gives a sharp, acidic kick to salads and roasted meat.”⁶¹ Feta cheese “enhance[s] any vegetable, some fruits, and all savory baked products.”⁶² The verbiage in these descriptions reveals how Ottolenghi’s food departs from the idea of main ingredients seasoned with multiple, subordinate others in favor of dishes composed out of an array of mutually complementary elements. The items in the glossary are therefore described largely in terms of how they act on other parts of a dish, as if each plate is a holistic composition. Even the meat dishes decline to give the animal protein a starring role, instead assembling flavor from the interactions between multiple elements, no single one of which is primary.⁶³ One early recipe evocatively expresses the delicate balance that characterizes the cookbook’s vegetarian dishes. “Fennel and tarragon, with their echoing flavors, form a solid base on which stronger colors and flavors—pomegranate, feta, sumac—manifest themselves without overwhelming the whole salad.”⁶⁴ The passive construction here—flavors which “manifest themselves”—suggests the alchemical reactions which create Ottolenghi food. In their most heightened manifestations, these reactions near apotheosis. Several recipes rely on the concept of harmony emerging from disparate elements, as in a lentil dish which seems to contain the entire world of taste: “Sweet, sour, and musky-salty, this dish has many contrasting flavors, yet it still ends up harmoniously synchronized.”⁶⁵ The philosophy behind Ottolenghi’s food is neither one of contrast nor of harmony in its own right, but of contrasts which paradoxically, create harmony. This sense of surprising rightness is the core of the Ottolenghi flavor profile.

It being evident from the ingredient glossary that the Ottolenghi pantry is already a Middle Eastern one, it is unsurprising that Jerusalem’s food is similarly constituted by dichotomies of flavor, color, and texture. The popularity of two dishes in Jerusalem that are served at the Ottolenghi delis is attributed to their successful implementation of this kind of unexpected mixing of ingredients. Of roasted sweet potatoes and fresh figs, Ottolenghi and Tamimi write, “This unusual combination of fresh fruit and roasted vegetables is one of the most popular at Ottolenghi. . . . The balsamic reduction is very effective here, both for the look and for rounding up the flavors.”⁶⁶ A beet salad is described in similar terms: “You will be surprised how well beet works with chile and za’atar. Its sweetness takes on a seriously savory edge that makes it one of the most popular salads among Ottolenghi’s customers.”⁶⁷ Abstracting descriptions from their recipes highlights the repetition of the theme: “Sharp, salty, and mild sweet all intermingle here”; “a certain sense of lightness, balancing out any overdose of carbs and unctuous meat”; “deep sweet and sour flavors and . . . marvelous earthiness”; “a sweet-and-sour effect”; “mixture of sweet and sour”; “sweet and sharp”; “sweet and sour”; “potent and sharp”; “sweet and spicy and beautifully aromatic.”⁶⁸ Harmony is substantially less emphasized in Jerusalem than in Ottolenghi. Jerusalem food, in Ottolenghi and Tamimi’s descriptions, rests on contrasts themselves, rather than the harmony between contrasting elements.⁶⁹

Still, the similarities between the two texts’ approaches to food outweigh the differences. In the introduction to Ottolenghi, Ottolenghi and Tamimi write, “We wanted to start this book with the quip, ‘If you don’t like lemon or garlic . . . skip to the last page. . . . What makes lemon and garlic such a great metaphor for our cooking is the boldness, the zest, the strong, sometimes controversial flavors of our childhood.”⁷⁰ Metaphors aside, lemon, garlic, and fresh herbs dominate both Jerusalem, composed as an ode to the city of Ottolenghi and Tamimi’s birth, and Ottolenghi, which describes the professional London cooking of their adulthoods. A recipe for preserved lemons even appears, in identical versions, in both books.⁷¹ Most of the recipes are not, of course, repeated, but the worlds of Ottolenghi and Jerusalem frequently overlap. Given the presence of dishes served at the Ottolenghi delis in Jerusalem, and dishes from Ottolenghi and Tamimi’s childhoods in Ottolenghi, it only follows that many of the dishes in each text could easily be found in the other. On a visual level the photographs of food in the two books are sometimes indistinguishable, though the production values in Jerusalem are markedly higher. Ottolenghi food shares with Jerusalem food extraordinarily bright, contrasting colors, and dishes in both texts are generally photographed in the pan, hot, fresh, and a little messy, rather than elegantly plated for service. One finds in both books dishes that seem to be about color itself, either in the context of sharp contrasts or in the search for maximal depth within a single hue.

Jerusalem must therefore be considered a companion piece to Ottolenghi rather than a wholly separate volume. The same kinds of ingredients are used for similar culinary goals in both texts, and the two books’ narrative sections contain overlapping stories of Jerusalem childhoods and the development of a particular relationship with food. The former text anticipates the latter; the latter revises the former. Together they contribute to a unitary vision of space and place, and, especially, of Ottolenghi and Tamimi’s lives in London in relation to their Jerusalem pasts. The flavors and ingredients that unite these books form the dimensions of a culinary philosophy in which food both makes and remakes homeland.

OTTOLENGHI’S LONDON; JERUSALEM’S JERUSALEM

In the preface to the 1955 edition of her landmark A Book of Mediterranean Food, Elizabeth David remarks on the changes in Britain since the first edition was published, when World War II scarcity was still keenly felt.

So startlingly different is the food situation now as compared with only two years ago, that I think there is scarcely a single ingredient, however exotic, mentioned in this book which cannot be obtained somewhere in this country. . . . Those who make an occasional marketing expedition to Soho or to the region of Tottenham Court Road,

David tells us, can select from a glorious variety of specialty Mediterranean ingredients.⁷² There is much to remark on in David’s description of the foods available at these shops, not least the way her favorite ingredients overlap with Ottolenghi and Tamimi’s, but I will draw your attention, instead, to David’s observation that one could, in the 1950s, find all the specialized ingredients of Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cookery already in England, in shops in London’s Soho neighborhood and the area of Tottenham Court Road. The unspoken corollary is that these ingredients were very difficult to find elsewhere in the city, let alone outside of London.

In spite of David’s satisfaction with the rich variety of ingredients already available in 1950s London, when Yotam Ottolenghi began writing a recipe column for The Guardian, in 2006, readers still griped at the length of his ingredient lists and the difficult to find items which populated them. Countering these understandable complaints—Ottolenghi’s recipes are notoriously long—one might observe that the Ottolenghi enterprise itself indicates the plenitude of options for those in search of Middle Eastern foods. There are five Ottolenghi restaurants in London: three delis in Notting Hill, Spitalfields, and Belgravia, a flagship restaurant in Islington, and a formal restaurant in Soho, NOPI, driven by the same culinary philosophy. If one places pins on a map of London, the four Ottolenghi branches form an irregular polygon north of the Thames of about seven square miles, with NOPI sitting just to the southwest of the polygon’s center, in Soho, precisely where David proposes a marketing excursion.⁷³ Splitting the polygon vertically into two nearly equal pieces is Tottenham Court Road, the other shopping option David suggests to her readers. This polygon is the major physical manifestation of Ottolenghi and Tamimi’s diasporic world. It is not, to my mind, accidental that in its very center is perfectly inscribed the same region where David did her shopping more than half a century earlier. The configuration of this area has changed dramatically, but Ottolenghi and Tamimi’s empire is the heir to a particularly, and stably, located diasporic space in London, not only in literary terms, but in the physical plane as well.⁷⁴ In its earlier incarnation, this part of central London contained a number of immigrant areas, with shops and stores catering to these populations. Its current character is, to borrow Ghassan Hage’s terminology, “cosmo-multicultural.” “Cosmo-multiculturalism,” Hage explains, “has more to do with the market of foreign flavours than with the market of ‘foreigners,’” and is therefore more interested in products than people.⁷⁵ A cosmo-multiculturalist restaurant thus “aims to provide the eater with something like an international touristic adventure,” especially when dressed up in the garb of authenticity, appearing to exist only for itself.⁷⁶ The Ottolenghi delis offer a prime example of this type of establishment. Yet where the delis themselves offer a clearly transactional, commercial experience, the personal narratives in the cookbooks include elements that are clearly evocative of Hage’s formulation of nostalgia as an instrument for building home in diaspora.⁷⁷ In other words, considering the cookbooks and the restaurants at the same time requires understanding the Ottolenghi enterprise as an artifact of both a nostalgic diaspora sentiment and of cosmo-multiculturalist economies.

In this section I examine how images of place (as opposed to photographed recipe outcomes) are used in Ottolenghi and Jerusalem to visualize Ottolenghi and Tamimi’s relationships to their homelands. Keeping in mind that these photographs are explicitly credited to artists other than Ottolenghi and Tamimi, it is imperative that we understand these images as mediators involved in the same project as the recipes and narrative sections: the creation of a coherent perspective on food and place. Alongside a discussion of the photographs, I consider the narrative introductions of the cookbooks, which work in conjunction with the photographic elements to establish the dimensions of Ottolenghi and Tamimi’s London and Jerusalem. Cookbooks, as I suggested earlier, partake of a wild hybridity in which paratext often seems to outweigh text; that is, the images are more prominent than the recipes themselves. This expressly contradicts Genette’s original formulation of paratext, which, “in all its forms is a discourse that is fundamentally heteronomous, auxiliary, and dedicated to the service of something other than itself that constitutes its raison d’être. . . . The paratextual element is always subordinate to ‘its’ text.”⁷⁸ Genette admits that his study does not include a consideration of “the immense continent of illustration, or images,” which naturally precludes it from imagining the major paratext of many contemporary cookbooks, in which images, narratives, and recipes battle for prominence.⁷⁹ Lurking here is the fundamental question of how these cookbooks are meant to be engaged with: do we read it, look at it, or use it? At this juncture I depart from use, to focus on looking and reading.

The major argument of Jerusalem is that, in spite of their political and religious differences, the city’s inhabitants share a particular relationship with food and a common local pantry.

Everybody, absolutely everybody, uses chopped cucumber and tomatoes to create an Arab or an Israeli salad, depending on point of view. Stuffed vegetables with rice or rice and meat also appear on almost every dinner table, as does an array of pickled vegetables. Extensive use of olive oil, lemon juice, and olives is also commonplace.⁸⁰

A close examination of the photographs of Jerusalem that are interspersed throughout the cookbook underlines divergent points of view, rather than the optimistic “commonplace.” One’s reaction to these images must be contingent upon one’s level of familiarity with Israel and Palestine, or with Judaism, Islam, and Christianity in the Middle East. I suspect that for many of Jerusalem’s readers the sense of these pictures is generally, and generically, exotic and Orientalist in the manner of photographs in a guide book, tempting the viewer to explore. A close examination of these photos, however, reveals that what at first appears to be an invitation to immerse oneself in a romantically idealized Jerusalem is, inevitably, also a testament to the city’s less savory social realities. In short, these photographs rarely evidence mixing between Jerusalem’s many peoples. It would be impossible to firmly identify and categorize all of the people who appear in Jerusalem’s photographs. I will therefore limit my observations to visible markers of identification. Clues in dress (especially headwear), jewelry, and language make tentative descriptions possible.

There are, by my count, forty-nine images in Jerusalem aside from those which depict recipe outcomes. In only three of these will you find both Arabic and Hebrew scripts; once where Arabic graffiti is visible behind a Jewish man’s vegetable stall, once on a street sign, and once when boxes that have Hebrew writing on them are used to display produce in the Arab market just inside the Damascus Gate of Jerusalem’s Old City.⁸¹ With the exception of a panorama of the city including both the Dome of the Rock and several Israeli flags, there are no images in which signs of both Judaism and Islam are clearly visible, though there is one in which a woman in hijab walks next to an Orthodox priest, and one in which a woman in hijab strolls in front of what, based on linguistic markers, is probably a Jewish-owned candy shop.⁸² Instead of images of shared space, we encounter images of repeated space, in which similar scenes are acted out in both Palestinian and Israeli Jewish contexts. Most marked of these is a page on which a photograph of mustachioed and bearded elderly Jewish men (identifiable by yarmulkes) playing backgammon is juxtaposed with a photograph of mustachioed and bearded elderly Palestinian men (identifiable by kafiyyehs) sitting on an outdoor bench.⁸³ The apposition clearly suggests commonality—“Observe! They look the same!”—but the mise-en-page acts, instead, to reinforce difference, with the white gutter between the images maintaining the separate spaces through which these populations move. A man in a skullcap buying rugelach similarly complements two women in hijab examining piles of fatayer and date bread: everyone shops at bakeries, but they are different bakeries, and they sell different breads.⁸⁴ An image of a sign outside an ultraorthodox Jewish neighborhood makes, implicitly, the same point. In both Hebrew and English, the sign begs, “Please do not pass through our neighborhood in immodest clothes.”⁸⁵ Arabic speakers, one guesses, would rarely be in this part of Jerusalem in the first place.⁸⁶

Ottolenghi and Tamimi own an explicit hope that “hummus will eventually bring Jerusalemites together, if nothing else will.”⁸⁷ This hope appears, though, to be faint. Jerusalem’s early narrative sections allude, cryptically, to Ottolenghi and Tamimi’s simmering dissatisfaction with their home city. “Jerusalem,” they write, “is our home almost against our wills,” but they decline to explain their resentment.⁸⁸ Pages later, they elaborate on Jerusalem’s character: “Intolerance and trampling over other people’s basic rights are routine in this city. Currently, the Palestinian minority bears the brunt with no sign of it regaining control over its destiny, while the secular Jews are seeing their way of life being gradually marginalized by a growing Orthodox population.” It is clear that Tamimi is part of the Palestinian minority, and Ottolenghi sees himself as a marginalized secular Jew, but the introduction declines to explicitly position them as such. Instead, the text quickly moves on to a description of the good in Jerusalem, particularly as it pertains to culinary creativity, “the other, more positive side of this coin.”⁸⁹

The stakes of this rhetoric emerge with particular clarity in light of a growing body of scholarship addressing the uses of food in nationalist claims by both Israelis and Palestinians, beginning with the “hummus wars” celebrated in the popular press and studied in detail by the scholar Dafna Hirsch.⁹⁰ The fact of Ottolenghi and Tamimi’s cross-cultural partnership—a partnership predicated on the suggestion that Israeli Jewish and Palestinian cultures are really quite close and, as Ilan Zvi Baron reminds us, a partnership that “represent[s] exactly what is not possible in Israel because of the conflict”⁹¹—enables the cookbook’s sidestepping of these fraught politics. Zeina B. Ghandour, discussing the case of Israel’s national snack, the falafel sandwich, eloquently summarizes the trauma by which this culinary closeness arose: “Falafel became an Israeli national food, and gradually identified with broader Jewish culture, as a consequence, and as an outcome, of Zionism’s colonising enterprise in Palestine.”⁹² Foods like hummus and falafel entered Israeli cuisine either as presumed elements of Mizrahi Jewish culture or under epistemological frameworks which represented Arab Palestinians as passive vessels for the preservation of biblical Jewish foodways.⁹³ Following decades of culinary appropriation, Ronald Ranta has suggested that recent narratives of “discovery” of the neighbors’ food, narratives exactly like that of Ottolenghi’s German Jewish mother, are indicative of a new process of the “re-Arabization” of an Israeli food culture which, until recently, made few references to Palestinian tradition. According to Ranta, this “re-Arabization” of Israeli food, visible in, for example, contentions that Arabs make the best hummus and the increased use of the term “Arab salad” over the previously dominant “Israeli salad,” indicates not increasing acceptance of Palestinians’ political aims but, instead,

a Jewish-Israeli society that is now secure and confident in its political, social and cultural dominance over Arab-Palestinians. This power dynamic means that Israeli society is not only capable of choosing and appropriating what it wants from Arab-Palestinian culture, but that it is doing so now in an open and transparent manner.⁹⁴

It is precisely because Palestinians do not represent a threat to Israeli Jewish hegemony that it becomes possible to acknowledge their contributions in this field.

It would be impossible, however, to sell Jerusalem, the cookbook, without selling a more easily digested idea of Jerusalem, the city. For this reason, the text largely elides the history of Israeli cuisine, as well as the personal narratives which led to the book’s creation: Ottolenghi and Tamimi’s moves from Jerusalem to London, and consequent, conflicted, nostalgia. This story is told in three short sentences:

This book and this journey into the food of Jerusalem form part of a private odyssey. We both grew up in the city, Sami in the Muslim east and Yotam in the Jewish west, but never knew each other. We lived there as children in the 1970s and 1980s and then left in the 1990s, first to Tel Aviv and then to London. Only there did we meet and discover our parallel histories. ⁹⁵

A “private odyssey,” indeed. For an autobiographical cookbook our access here is, like our access to the scholarship behind the text, extraordinarily limited. What we learn of Ottolenghi and Tamimi’s Jerusalem is confined to easily digestible fragments of nostalgia, which, in their extolling of the city’s sometimes dubious charms and always delicious flavors, raise the question of why Ottolenghi and Tamimi left a place about which they continue to rhapsodize.

In the New Yorker profile of Ottolenghi the story gains texture. Before settling in London, Ottolenghi moved to Amsterdam with his then partner, Noam Bar.

“We arrived the month of the Rabin assassination, and joined the demonstration,” he says. “The death was the end of a moment of high optimism at home. Israel became a very closed culture again, living according to its own rules. There was a desire growing in me to live somewhere else.”⁹⁶

Tamimi evinces similar sentiments, speaking of Tel Aviv, first, as a place where he could “breathe,” in contrast to Jerusalem, and then describing why he let nine years pass between his last visit to Israel and one planned for early 2014. “[Visiting] became unbearable, the hatred on both sides was too intense.”⁹⁷ Bar, now an Ottolenghi partner (and no longer Ottolenghi’s partner; their romantic relationship ended in 2000) repeats the theme. “I couldn’t express myself in Israel. It was opera seria then. Today, it takes a lot out of me just to be there.”⁹⁸ The shared impression left by these quotations is one of unbearable pressure. Israel’s politics and culture, having turned inward on themselves, left Ottolenghi, Tamimi, and Bar desperate to get out of this “closed” society so they could “breathe.” To complete the metaphor, Jerusalem itself could be understood as a pressure cooker, producing delicious flavors within and as a function of its tight and contested borders.

We must return to Ottolenghi to fill in the final biographical gaps. The temptation is to tell the story of Ottolenghi and Tamimi’s meeting in London in 1999 as one of perfect irony. They were both born in Jerusalem in 1968; they both moved to Tel Aviv at the same time, and they both arrived in London in 1999. “Our paths might have crossed plenty of times—we had had many more obvious opportunities to meet before.” In Tel Aviv, perhaps, this was so, but, as the photographs of Jerusalem’s repeated spaces in Jerusalem demonstrate, it is unlikely that they would have met in their natal city. Ottolenghi and Tamimi seem unsure, themselves, whether they “should” have encountered one another earlier. “We grew up a few kilometers away from each other in two separate societies,” they write, admitting difference, but in the next breath they return to the odd proximity of their childhoods: “Looking back now, we realize how extremely different our childhood experiences were and yet how often they converged—physically, when venturing out to the ‘other side,’ and spiritually, sharing sensations of a place and a time.” These spiritual convergences seem far more impactful than whatever physical crossing Ottolenghi and Tamimi did as youths in a divided Jerusalem, and they underlie Jerusalem’s nostalgic attempt to capture a place that may never have existed outside their imaginations. “As young gay adults,” they continue, “we both moved to Tel Aviv at the same time, looking for personal freedom and a sense of hope and normality that Jerusalem”—whatever its later nostalgic appeal—“couldn’t offer. . . . Then, in 1997, we both arrived in London with an aspiration to expand our horizons even further, possibly to escape again from a place we had grown out of.”⁹⁹ As in the New Yorker interviews, the sense of Jerusalem left by these passages is of a trap, or a prison. Tel Aviv offered a glimmer of freedom, hope, and normality, but to truly “escape” they had to leave not only the city, but the country and the continent.

The bakery where Ottolenghi met Tamimi in 1999, Baker & Spice, is located just outside the southwestern corner of the polygon described by the current Ottolenghi enterprises. This is more than coincidence; it marks the transformation of this part of London from a diasporic center into what Hage calls a cosmo-multicultural zone. Ottolenghi and Tamimi’s meeting indicates a surprising continuity between the old immigrant neighborhoods and today’s cosmo-multicultural district: in both configurations, the encounter between these men is more natural in this part of London than in divided Jerusalem. What is experienced as difference at home is exported as commonality. If Ottolenghi and Tamimi were ever going to meet and discover their shared love of Jerusalem’s food, it was always going to be well outside Jerusalem. Having met one another, they began the process of inscribing their perfected vision of Jerusalem on the urban space of London.

The photographs in Ottolenghi showcase some of the major features of their expatriate outpost. A handful of these images show us chefs at work.¹⁰⁰ By giving the kitchens a human face these pictures reach for intimacy and accessibility. Other photographs work toward the same goals from the customer’s point of view. In particular, several images of children and families establish a homey atmosphere within the stark, modern whiteness of Ottolenghi’s signature design.¹⁰¹ An especially affecting shot of a dog tied up outside one of the delis is all about ambience, having no relationship to food whatsoever, unless the animal’s yearning to get inside is meant to trigger our own.¹⁰² More directly in pursuit of eliciting desire are a number of photographs taken through the delis’ windows. When looking out, these pictures situate the delis in their intimate, neighborhood contexts, naturalizing them and their culinary offerings as part of London’s cityscape.¹⁰³ When looking in, they are purely about the turn-on of good food. A standout example captures an elderly gentleman glancing with visible longing through Ottolenghi’s windows as he passes, gaze caught by a mouthwatering assortment of breads and muffins.¹⁰⁴ “Come in!” the photo shouts. Buy the book, eat the food, enjoy.

Temptation is the order of the day in almost all Ottolenghi’s images. In contrast to Jerusalem’s guidebook enticements for the imagination, the photographs in Ottolenghi brook no delay. One two-page spread is dominated by the fleece-clad back and dangling braid of a woman in line at a deli. The camera places the reader directly behind her, awaiting his own turn to order.¹⁰⁵ Several photographs of meringues, which, the cookbook informs us, are a signature Ottolenghi product, continue the work of linking the delis, the recipes, the home cook, and the reader’s desire.¹⁰⁶ This is a different impulse than the nostalgia driving Jerusalem, but the overarching goal in both volumes is a kind of dual consumption of food and of text. Cookbooks can be balder than other forms of literature in their desire to be bought and enjoyed. Their sale is based on multisensory appeals to the customer as consumer, and the forms of their enticements are deeply linked to their meaning making. The story that structures both Ottolenghi and Jerusalem is one of making the foreign familiar.

Ottolenghi and Jerusalem share a fragmented autobiographical narrative, which is only completed when the two texts are read together. Although they are visually very different, on the narrative and culinary levels they operate as sequels or rewritings of one another. And while the photographs within their covers have different subjects, external graphic design elements transcend and unite the two books. This is what Genette calls “the publisher’s peritext,” the visual and textual elements of the book that are left largely or wholly to a publisher, rather than directly emanating from an author. Imagine the entire Ottolenghi library on a shelf, or, better yet, go to a bookstore and look at it. Their white spines set Ottolenghi’s many books apart from the rest of the shelf in a unified block which immediately attracts the gaze. Their shared fonts and repeated graphic design elements conspire to make of Ottolenghi’s output a world. In their unity, the books exist both physically and as avatars of an expatriate space. Their common aesthetic generates a portable, widely accessible instance of the unique diasporic zone established in central London by the Ottolenghi restaurants and delis. Anyone can bring Ottolenghi and Tamimi’s recreated Jerusalem into their own homes.

CONCLUSION: WORLD BUILDING

A research cookbook, like any research project, requires tangling with questions of definition, which are made ever more complex by the hybrid features of many contemporary cookbooks. These questions are naturally more fraught in the case of a diasporic cookbook, which must attempt to define, across many genres, a space that has been, for whatever reason, departed, lost, or renounced. In Ottolenghi and Tamimi’s case, defining Jerusalem comes to involve relocating it in London. The Ottolenghi delis, restaurants, cookbooks, television specials, and product lines establish an outpost of Jerusalem in the United Kingdom, while the rich network linking Ottolenghi and Tamimi with other chefs connects them to culinary worlds in both London and Jerusalem, as well as a global literary sphere of Middle Eastern food writers. Ottolenghi and Tamimi’s diasporic world is itself constituted by a network rather than a discrete space. Its physical existence in London is but one of its many manifestations across the physical, literary, and social planes. This multidimensionality is what sets the Ottolenghi enterprise apart and allows its facets to be understood as elements of a novel diasporic world.

Across their various forms of production—cookbooks, restaurants, and so on—Ottolenghi and Tamimi operate as chefs, anthropologists, and memoirists without drawing lines between these spheres of activity. Their food itself is more than just cuisine: it is research and memory and culinary knowledge brought together through the action of history and expertise on chefs, chefs on ingredients, ingredients on one another, and finished dishes on consumers. Ottolenghi and Tamimi’s diasporic world is a deeply personal creation, but it is also a kind of offering, made foundationally available to others through being eaten. In this sense, food and text—recipe, memoir, and image—are much alike. They are brought into existence for the purpose of being consumed.

In bringing Jerusalem’s food into London, Ottolenghi harmonizes Jerusalem’s sharp contrasts. Ottolenghi food is simultaneously nostalgic and hopeful, even if that hope is displaced onto the London food scene, away from the tight, anxiety-ridden borders of Ottolenghi and Tamimi’s home. But Ottolenghi was written years before Jerusalem. It is as if the unharmonious realities of Jerusalem reassert themselves on Ottolenghi and Tamimi’s food in the latter book, only to be smoothed over again in the new edition of Ottolenghi published a year after Jerusalem. This vacillation seems to me to be the core of Ottolenghi food: the alternating dominance of contrast and harmony in Ottolenghi and Tamimi’s recipes reflects their own ambiguous relationships with the foods and the places of their childhoods. The multidirectional reach of their networks accents the same theme, as Ottolenghi and Tamimi are simultaneously pulled back to and away from Jerusalem along complex chains of association.

Stepping back from the sources at hand, we may understand diasporic spaces in general as constituted by this type of bidirectional pull and an attendant affective ambiguity. Nostalgia often lends evocations of home in diaspora a pacific glow at odds with the difficulty of the lived experiences that lead to any kind of displacement, but it seems to me that this is not merely the result of a flattening or reductive memorial impulse. Instead, I suggest that particular manifestations of home in diasporic spaces can be understood as constructive, in that they build an alternative reality which itself becomes available for experience by members of the diasporic community and others. The recipes and images found in Ottolenghi and Jerusalem, the stories Ottolenghi and Tamimi tell in these texts, the physical foods and spaces of the delis and restaurants, and the stark unity of the white spines of the Ottolenghi cookbooks on a bookstore shelf come together to create one such diasporic space, rendered available for literal consumption as both food and text. The methodology proposed in this paper provides a framework for grappling with polyvalent manifestations of the spaces, cultures, and narratives of diasporic foodways. To be in diaspora is not, in this sense, to be out of place, but to be simultaneously here and there, in a doubly constructed homeland.

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