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From Roots to Soup: A Night with Chef Moshe Basson

April 14, 2016 by Kristin Winet Leave a Comment

DSC_4259For those who know Moshe Basson, they’ve probably heard how his story begins. They might know, for instance, that the man now called “Israel’s Biblical Chef” arrived in Jerusalem as a nine-month-old Iraqi refugee and that his first memories of Israeli are of living huddled in a tiny aluminum shed with his family in the outskirts of Jerusalem. They might know that he planted a very sacred eucalyptus tree in his front yard when he was only six years old, and that, 25 years later, after growing up in his father’s bakery, his mother’s kitchen, and the fragrant Jerusalem hillsides, he would christen his first restaurant and call it Eucalyptus.

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These key facts about one of the most innovative, praised, and renowned chefs in Jerusalem are well-known and documented.

But what those who know Moshe Basson might not know is that he credits his unique cooking method, one grounded in ancient cooking techniques and centering dishes around what is known to some as simply “the accoutrements,” to the women in his young life—and, perhaps even more surprisingly—to a couple of humdrum weeds and roots.

Moshe Basson is not a shy man, either: ask him about his weed-foraging days in the glowing Jerusalem afternoons and he will regale you for hours (he did with us!). When he talks about the ingredients he’s rescued from nearly being forgotten, he seems to glow–it’s clearly his most favorite thing in the entire world.

His menu is full of wild-growing herbs, “sidewalk weeds,” and herbaceous plants and shrubs with names I’ve never heard of, like malva and purslane and hyssop.

Malva
Malva
Purslane
Purslane
hyssop
Hyssop

If you ask him, Basson will gladly pull up a chair at his elegant al fresco restaurant in the Artist’s Colony near Old Jerusalem—which, though it’s gone through many iterations and locations over the years, still faithfully sticks to the name Eucalyptus—and will tell you all about the Arabic, Iraqi, and Syrian women in his neighborhood who taught him about the beauty of the earth’s overlooked horticulture. As a little boy, he followed these women, fellow refugees from war-torn countries themselves, around the hillsides and abandoned gardens between Jerusalem and Bethlehem, and he helped them forage, sort, and cook with the new foods of his new land.

Because his family was nearly penniless when they arrived in Israel, they experimented—a lot—with the foods they could find in the wild. In the kitchen, Basson watched his Iraqi mother play with foods completely out of her cultural repertoire, foods like the herbaceous plants he was bringing home and homemade olive oil, neither of which were popular at all in the Iraqi kitchen. His mother, he says, only knew of hyssop as being a medicine and preferred oils made from sesame seeds. While his dad faithfully whipped up the same menu of Middle Eastern pastries and cakes at the bakery each morning, every meal at home was an experiment.

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Though he is often called Israel’s Biblical Chef for his devotion to using local ingredients and excavating old cooking techniques and recipes, Basson will confess that it was never his intention to be connected with Biblical cooking. “So I was just cooking the food of my mom and her mom and others from the region,” he says, gesturing widely at the tables and tables of patrons around him, and, though he has always known that “a big part of the food [at Eucalyptus] is poor people’s food,” he didn’t know that he and his mother were making nearly identical recipes to what was described in the Bible and other ancient texts until years after he opened his first restaurant.

Basson knows, though, that there are certain and unavoidable difficulties with popularizing food that has complicated histories, foods such as the Jerusalem artichoke, a root vegetable (with no relation to the green globe-like artichoke that shares its name) that he uses to make one of his celebrated soups. He tells the story of a time when a French family came to dine and he horrified the grandma at the table when he told them their next course would be a soup made of something many Westerners call a sunchoke. “She shouted and said, ‘No!’ and everybody—I mean, this is a small restaurant under a tree—looked up and she said, ‘No! This was the food in the war. I cannot eat it.’ So everybody was saying OK, they don’t want it, they don’t want it. She said “No, no, no, no, you eat it. It’s wonderful. I cannot.” Then, he laughs. “And then she ate it.” He did not know, he confesses, that Jerusalem artichoke soup—the topinambour in French—was many peoples’ daily rationed food when the Nazis occupied France in World War I. Now, he tells all his French patrons what they’ve eaten only after they’ve eaten it.

Dinner at Eucalyptus is a many-course event, prominently placing roots, stems, spices, and homegrown leafy greens like purslane, chubeza, olesh, and malva at the center of the table. The night begins with freshly-baked focaccia bread and five delectable spreads: aioli, pesto with hyssop, red pepper, sumac-dusted tahini, and garlic mayonnaise.

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From there, a soup trio, complete with the infamous Jerusalem artichoke soup as well as lentil and tomato-mint, comes out, and after that, his elegant signature dishes: gnocchi with fresh chubeza, a wild herb slightly reminiscent of spinach, mixed into the potato dough; figs stuffed with roasted chicken and drizzled in in a sweet tamarind sauce; maqluba, the upside-down casserole of rice, chicken, and vegetables, seasoned with fresh saffron and topped with yogurt; fire-roasted eggplant served with tehina and pomegranate seeds; grilled duck breast with mashed potatoes, carrot coulis and berry relish; and thinly-sliced steak served with a mix of ancient greens from his garden.

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Dessert is no less extraordinary and no less attentive, with dishes like semolina cake served with wine-soaked pears and jelly or pate-stuffed macaroons drizzled with sweet raspberry sauce.

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Though Eucalyptus has been in its current home—a collection of wooden tables, hanging pots, and old-fashioned lamps on the terraced steps of Hutzot Hayotzer, just west of the Old City—for six years now, Basson hasn’t forgotten his long journey to find home. In 1962, he planted a tree he hoped would bear fruit to feed his family. Twenty-five years later, in 1987, he opened the first Eucalyptus restaurant near the eponymous plant he raised as a child. Today, after three additional moves, the walls around which his restaurant now sits, made from the same stone as his home in Iraq, nurture his business, his family, and his future.

A future, he tells me, as we clean up after making maqluba together, that includes his young grandchildren, his family of chickens, and a garden made of beloved, complicated vegetables.

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Yours in travel and good eats,

Kristin

Most gracious thanks to Weill and the Israel Ministry of Tourism for hosting our stay in Israel and for introducing me to some of the world’s most incredible places. If you’re interested in visiting Israel, they are a fantastic resource!

 

Filed Under: Chef Interviews, Food, Israel, Travel Writing Tagged With: chef profiles, cooking, culture, encounters, food, good eats, history, Israel, Jerusalem, Middle East, travel

One Week in Israel

October 14, 2015 by Kristin Winet 6 Comments

I’m sitting next to an Israeli-American college student named Edan who has just told me two very different things. “There’s just this vibe in Israel,” he said first, an electric wistfulness in his deep brown eyes. Then, he hesitates and smiles in the way that someone smiles when they’re about to say something they can’t believe they’re about to say. “But, you really picked a hell of a time to come here.”

I know what he means—I’m not immune to the media headlines, the sensationalized rhetoric, the news stories from CNN and the BBC capitalizing on the mounting events that some news personalities have started calling the stirrings of The Third Intifada. I’ve been hearing it because I can’t not hear it—it’s literally everywhere, every time I open my internet browser. Palestinian-Israeli Tensions Mount in Jerusalem. Jerusalem Abandoned After Two Israelis Shot in City Center. Rocks Thrown at Innocent Bystanders in the Streets.

My friend Yolanda, who lives outside of Tel Aviv, has sent me the news articles from The Jerusalem Post—articles whose headlines are no less sensational—and has told me that, although she’s never said this to anyone before, we should avoid the Old City completely, because the situation there is just too unstable. I ask my seatmate about “the state of things,” what he thinks about these undeniable and interminable tensions that have become a daily part of life in this tortured little country, this complex, sacred space, in the heart of the Mediterranean. He shrugs and tells me this: “It’s just a part of who we are. It’s like, at some time or another, everybody is either oppressing or the oppressed.” His comment, though meant to be exasperated, tells me more about the way 20-somethings feel about Israel than anything else I’ve read.

Edan and I spend the next hour talking about what Israel is really like. As an American whose grandparents still live in Haifa, he is intimately connected to both cultures, and he decided to attend university in Israel so he could finally have the chance to see what life was really like for him, an American Jew with tangible roots to his homeland. As a budding entrepreneur, he is going to business school in Israel because he wanted to meet other young Israelis and he wanted to get a multinational education. Eventually, he wants to start a line of fashion jeans for hipsters with stores in both L.A. and Tel Aviv, the two most magnetic, sensual, misunderstood cities in the world.

So, here we are. I’m on an airplane to Rome, sailing once again over the Atlantic Ocean, to a place I’ve only imagined in my dreams. To a place that, until recently, I only knew as a country where my dear friends Alison and Joel took their birthright trips, as a legendary place that was mentioned in my Sunday school stories, as a nativity scene on my parents’ bookshelf during the winter holidays. I also knew, somewhere in this mix, that it was also a place as inextricably tied to occupation and political tension as the word Bethlehem is to the Christmas play we used to enact at school each year with white kids wearing brown leather sandals with straps and tunics too big for their child-sized bodies.

I’m on an airplane to Rome, and then to Tel Aviv, to a place that, yes, reminds me that this chosen passion of mine, to journey, to experience, to write, to capture scenes as best I can with a lens, often comes with a price. It requires me to face trauma, to face insecurity and cultural uncertainties, to open myself up to the possibility that yes, life is not perfect, not elsewhere, and not at home; it is not without political strife; it is not without raced, gendered, and socio-economic realities. I think that this is one of the first lessons that Israel can teach me—that living with uncertainty is as undeniable a part of life as getting out of bed in the morning. It’s a way of life, it’s a reality of life, it’s a daily part of life.

But I also know that I am a better person for having had the chance to learn these things. And I’m not afraid—I’m electrified. I can’t wait. I want to understand more fully the lives the Israelis and the Palestinians live and experience every day. I hope, that even though I will be a temporary visitor in their home, that they will allow me to ask, and that they will tell me. What we see in the media is never, ever the full story, and I am so utterly grateful for this opportunity to learn what that actually means. I’ve been to places recovering from war before, places like Medellín, Ciudad Juarez, and Malta, but I’ve never been to a place that fears a new war is on the horizon.

Map of Where We’re Going

So, let’s see what our week in Israel looks like. Of course, our itinerary might—and almost certainly will—change depending on the current political situation, road traffic, and/or time and crowd constraints, but here’s what the Israeli Ministry of Tourism has planned for us.

Imagine a circle, starting at Ben Gurion International Airport (the blue airplane icon). Travel up and around in a clockwise circle from there and keep going until you get back to Ben Gurion. Because I could only figure out how to put pins on a Google map and not numbers, envisioning them as pins in a clockwise circle is about the best we’re going to get. That being said, I’ve read that flexibility and adaptability are as much a way of life as anything else around here, so in the spirit of our upcoming journey, let’s just use this as a starting point.

If anything, it’s nice to see an up-close map of Israel, a country no larger than the state of New Jersey.

israel map

Day 1 – Weds. – Haifa, Old Acre, Beit She’an

After the million hours it’s going to take us to actually get to Israel, we have to get in a bus and ride from the airport up to Haifa, where we’re spending our first night (and at the Crowne Plaza Hotel, a place I am hoping has beautiful pillows and comfortable mattresses….). When we wake up on Wednesday morning, we’re going to start our day touring Haifa, Israel’s third-largest port city (and the name of the dog who lives next door to the Winet cabin in Idaho). We’ll visit the Bahai Shrine and Gardens, which, though I know little about it, seems to be the world’s center for the Bahai faith.

Flickr/Israeltourism
Flickr/Israeltourism
Flickr/Israeltourism
Flickr/Israeltourism

From there, we’re going to drive across the Galilee to Old Acre, an Ottoman seaport designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, where we’ll get to see the fishermen at work, shop at a street bazaar, and visit an Israeli bathhouse. After our afternoon in Old Acre, it looks like we’ll head back and check in at the En Gev Holiday Resort kibbutz, where we’ll have what is rumored to be St. Peter’s fish….or descendants of the fish St. Peter used to harvest on the Sea of Galillee two thousand years ago.

Day 2 – Thurs. – Kibbutz En Gev, Caesarea, Jerusalem

We’ll be waking up early Thursday morning for a tour of the kibbutz (commune) before we drive over to Caesarea, a coastal Mediterranean resort town and former Roman capital. We’ll spend some time wandering around the ruins and the ancient theater before heading to the Israel Museum where I will get to see, with these own two blue eyes of mine, the actual Dead Sea Scrolls. For those of you who don’t know what the Dead Sea Scrolls actually are, let me say this: they are the oldest remaining biblical texts in existence. No matter what your beliefs are (or if you even have any), there is something immaculately sacred about these books.

Caesarea1

Flickr/Neta Bartal
Flickr/Neta Bartal
Flickr/bachmont
Flickr/bachmont

Thursday night, we’ll check in to the Dan Panorama Hotel in Jerusalem and get to meet Chef Moshe Bason, a local farm-to-table phenom in Jerusalem whose entire repertoire of recipes is based off of references to foods and cooking techniques mentioned in the Bible. This, too, sounds extraordinary….I’m hoping to steal him away for an interview!

Day 3 – Fri. – City of David, Western Wall, Mt. Zion (Jerusalem)

If everything goes as planned, Friday will be the kind of day that I know I will remember for the rest of my life. It will be that kind of day, the one and only chance I might ever have to walk through, on my own two feet, the world I only know from my Methodist Sunday school classes as a child, the world I know only through books, and stories, and the sermons of my childhood ministers. I will get to see the City of David. I will get to touch the Western Wall, Judaism’s most sacred place on Earth and I will get to walk through the Western Wall Tunnels. I will get to stroll down the cobblestoned alleys of the Cardo, the Roman-Byzantine streets that were once trod by people thousands of years older than me.

Flickr/Andrew Kalat
Flickr/Andrew Kalat
Flickr/momo
Flickr/momo

I will visit Mt. Zion, and I will see the room of Jesus’ Last Supper. I will dine in the old city center, and I will see the streets light up with life. Or so I’ve heard.

I hope, hope, hope with all of my heart that the Old City is reopened to the public and is safe by Friday. A precarious time, but in Israel, always a precarious time.

Day 4 – Sat. – Dead Sea, Judean Desert

Flickr/Israeltourism
Flickr/Israeltourism

And today, I will float on water. And we will visit the absolute lowest point on the planet. I think we’re also supposed to take a Jeep safari to Mout Sedom, a place comprised entirely of salt.

We will bathe in the sea and, according to my itinerary, put on the black mud. I have no idea what this black mud of which they speak actually is, but I guess we’ll find out together.

Tonight, we’ll spend our last night at the Leonardo Plaza Hotel in Jerusalem.

Day 5 – Sun. – Tel Aviv

In the morning, we’ll hit the road again and head to the National Musem of the Holocaust in Yad Vashem. From there, we’ll drive to the city of Tel Aviv, Israel’s cultural, financial, commercial, and entertainment center. We’ll walk through Neve Tzekek, Tel Aviv’s oldest neighborhood from the 1800s, and we’ll get to stop in some art galleries, cafes, and boutiques.

Flickr/Israeltourism
Flickr/Israeltourism
Flickr/Israeltourism
Flickr/Israeltourism
Flickr/Israeltourism
Flickr/Israeltourism

From the city center, we head to Old Jaffa, an ancient seaport on the coast that has (so I’ve heard) been transformed into a vibrant vacation spot for Israelis and international visitors. We’ll visit some museums, walk around, have dinner at Wilhemina, a restaurant in a former German colony, and hit the Tel Aviv nightlife, a nightlife I’ve heard is like nowhere else on earth.

Day 6 – Mon. – Tel Aviv

And then, just like that, our last day. Our plan, as of now, is to visit the Carmel open-air market, to travel to the White City, designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site for its unique whitewashed, modern architecture, and to take a swim in the Mediterranean and reflect on our voyage.

We will have a special bon voyage dinner with the Ministry of Tourism at a local restaurant called, interestingly, Dr. Shakshuka. We will sleep a few hours, check out of our hotel at 1:30 in the morning, and leave for the airport.

I will be home, in the insanity of flights, time changes, and the weirdness of the Circadian rhythm, by 11:45 a.m.

So, without further ado, shalom Israel!

Yours in travel,

Kristin

—

All photographs from Flickr’s Creative Commons. I thank them for their generosity and I hope my photos turn out just as beautifully!

I’m excited to be traveling to Israel and exploring this magnificent holy land with the Israel Ministry of Tourism.

Filed Under: Israel, Middle East, Travel, Travel Writing Tagged With: Biblical landscapes, culture, encounters, food, history, Israel, Israel Ministry of Tourism, Jerusalem, place-based writing, travel writing

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