Pleasure hunting

Thursday morning, the Nablus casbah. This large, beautiful market, which just two years ago was neglected and semi-deserted, is coming back to life. Instead of armed militants on every corner, there is a lively stream of buyers and sellers. Bolstered by a fragile hope for normality, the market again offers marvelous sights for those entering its ancient gateways: embroidered sacks of spices brimming with dozens of different hyssop mixtures; winter turnips and radishes arranged in bountiful bouquets; meat for lamb kebab being chopped on huge slabs of butcher block; cages of fattened pigeons and live chickens; and everywhere you look, large trays of sugared orange pumpkin and the sweet kenaffa for which the city is famous.

The aroma wafting from the Al Alul factory (the brand with a rooster on the container) is almost palpable. The nutty scent of roasted sesame seeds is so warm and inviting you just want to wrap yourself in it. Inside the darkened walls of arched rooms built during the Ottoman era, they have been making tehina (tahini) for close to 100 years.

Inside the factory, one can still see the original millstones that were used to grind sesame seeds in the early 20th century. Today, the seeds are ground with a more advanced machine, a modern wonder from the 1950s, but the colossal stones are still used today to produce black tehina - a thick, dark paste of sesame and nigella seeds used in the manufacture of certain sweets. In the past, donkeys were harnessed to move the stones; today electric cables do the work. But the hypnotic beauty of the ancient mechanical principle remains. As does the delicious taste of the raw tehina, which has hardly changed over the years and is still prepared according to the knowledge and criteria set down by the founding fathers.

"This is one of the most famous chefs in Israel," says Avi Issacharoff, Haaretz Arab affairs writer, introducing chef Rafi Cohen to employees of the Nablus tehina factory. In Arabic a cook is not yet called a "chef" but nevertheless Cohen is received with admiration.

The tehina manufactured in the dozens of tiny factories in Nablus continued to be smuggled to the kitchens of Israeli restaurants and factories even during the toughest days of the conflict; all the more so these days when a glimmer of hope for normalization pervades the city. No one looks askance at the Israeli chef who has come to learn about the future of the food industry via the secrets of the past, even though Israelis are not permitted into this city.

"Food factories, just like restaurants and markets, have become an inseparable part of my culinary outings," says Cohen. "I went to Turkey to really understand what true Turkish salad is, and I came here to understand what good tehina is. There's no turning back the wheels of the industrial revolution, but I'm trying to understand how modern technology can be adapted to traditional production methods."

Raheb Alul, plant manager for the past 40 years and a descendant of the merchant family that opened it in 1918, acts as our guide. Wearing a tie and an old-fashioned blue beret, he leads Cohen over to the old machines: the large tubs in which the sesame seeds are rinsed in salt water; the drying tanks with their giant swaying arms; the wood-burning roasting ovens; and the system of cooling pipes.

In East Jerusalem and Nablus one can still find tehina presses that look like dim medieval workshops; Al Alul, with its dozens of different machines, seems more like a marvelous museum of the history of the Industrial Revolution. In a mixture of English and Arabic, opinions are exchanged on the importance of the quality of the raw ingredients, uniform roasting and the degree to which the seeds are dried.

"Real tehina, which is always dark," says Alul, mixing a little water with some fresh warm tehina that just came out of a little faucet, "doesn't need lemon or other whitening agents to change its color."

Trial and error

Tuesday afternoon at the Tzabar Salads plant in Kiryat Gat. This large factory, at least 10 times the size of the one in Nablus, is also filled with an enticing aroma. Here, it originates in the fleshy red peppers being roasted in a large stone oven. These peppers are export surplus that meets the strictest standards. The roasting technique in the special oven is just one of the changes that chef Rafi Cohen has introduced to the factory's production methods.

Once a week, Cohen comes to the factory's research and development laboratory, a small institutional-style kitchen with gray tiles and Formica cabinets. "Where is my darling?" he asks as he enters the room, and senior food technician Rita Smolensky blushes as she accepts his gift of sugared marzipan. Then the weekly work on new products begins.

Cohen takes his place behind the mixing bowls, stove and electronic scale and starts cooking. Rita and the other technicians enter the exact amounts into a computer program in an attempt to translate the chef's recipes into an industrially produced product. The challenge is to harness the chef's skill, culinary knowledge and imagination in the service of technology.

"Bring me some coriander and mix the pepper paste," Cohen orders the team of assistants. His tone is that of an authoritative and decisive chef; Cohen is known for his volatile artistic temperament. But anyone who has observed him in the kitchen of his own restaurant would have trouble believing the tranquility with which this long, slow process of trial and error has been going on for a year and a half.

"I'm happy here," he admits. "For one thing, because I'm standing in this small kitchen and cooking things that will later reach a million people, but mostly because I'm in love with the research process and with finding creative solutions to limitations. Limitations cannot be allowed to dictate content. Modern food production and preservation methods have altered flavors and textures, but I'm trying to expand the possibilities, to go back to the origins and correct mistakes, to fix things that have gone wrong along the way. Laboratory people, food technicians, are wonderful professionals, but they're caught up in the daily grind of the factory and lack the culinary vision. Whoever designed the basic products in the Israeli food industry still had the culture of the austerity years in mind."

The series of salads Cohen created for Tzabar (six are already on the market and three more are due to come out soon) is considered a success that has bolstered sales in the field as a whole. But his real dream is to effect a revolutionary change in all basic food products used by the Israeli consumer.

"There's no reason why the Israeli consumer shouldn't have tomato paste as good as what is made in Italy, or sauces and stocks like those sold in every supermarket in Europe.

"The initial presentation I made to them - and I was the one who approached the people in the industry - included not just salads, but much more. They were skeptical. They've had bad experiences with chefs who only lent their name or recipes but didn't really get seriously involved. We agreed that we'd start the revolution on a small scale, with the salads that are very dear to Israelis. But as far as I'm concerned, this is only the beginning."

In a pickle

Why do we love olives so much? The biological explanation is the simplest. Olives contain an abundance of fat, and from an evolutionary standpoint, humans prefer foods that contain large amounts of fat or sugar - vital sources of energy. But this reasoning alone is not enough to explain the frenzy of gluttony that takes hold of a person left alone with just his god and a bowl of olives.

In ancient Rome, pickled olives were a popular snack sold on street stalls. Vendors offered a variety of olives that came in an array of colors, sizes and pickling methods, and were wrapped in rolled papyrus cones. Anthropologist Margaret Visser, who sought to understand the great fondness for this pickled fruit, argued that olives were considered the essence of Roman-ness, and thus the essence of civilization. Pickled olives, despite the relatively sophisticated process required to make them, were considered the embodiment of simplicity and were thus well suited to the ethos of those who liked to think of themselves as modest folks who made do with little.

The vocabulary of the local olive picklers, participants in the fifth olive pickling festival that is due to take place today, Friday, January 29, at Kibbutz Givat Brenner, is full of emotion-laden words like "the essence of Israeliness," "romance," "nostalgia" and "authenticity."

Impassioned lovers are often given to confused mutterings, but there is no mistaking the intensity of feeling here: Preparations for the competition, which has become a tradition among serious olive fans, go on for an entire year. Most of the participants are small-scale picklers who make olives for their families. And "caustic soda" (the substance used to extract the bitterness from olives in industrial pickling) are considered dirty words among these devotees.

Yigal Furish from Gedera, an air force man with three kids and three olive trees, will bring with him to this year's competition three types of pickled olives seasoned with paprika and coriander seeds or red wine and ginger. Aji (Esther) Ronabo from Segula, one of the few women in the fairly macho world of olive pickling, will offer olives seasoned with dried fruits, coconut and blueberries. Ziv Beit-Or from Misgav Dov, a businessman who as a child fell in love with the abandoned olive groves of the Negev, is actually a disciple of the school that propounds the purity of the olive, without additives. Avri Ben-Artzi from Nahariya will bring smoked olives. And Rama, a community that can boast of an olive tradition dating back thousands of years, will be represented by Suheil Elias and Yusuf Abu-Naim, with old-fashioned Syrian olives.

While the contestants are united by their love for olives, the competition promises to be fierce. One olive pickler complained of the relative advantage enjoyed by last year's winner, a retiree who has all the time in the world for the painstaking handwork of stuffing each olive with a tiny piece of cheese - "work that panders to the populist taste of the public at large," as he said. "Not at all!" exclaims 77-year-old Ari Lusin with pride. "I have three grandchildren with small, quick hands that are ideal for stuffing olives. I sit them down to do the work." On their display table, he and his 81-year-old wife Sydney show off plump olives stuffed with hot peppers, a new version of the stuffed olive recipe to which they owe their fame, along with a framed certificate. They imposed a gag order on the exact content of the new filling. Industrial espionage and the leaking of recipes to competitors are not to be taken lightly.

"I also try to pickle olives," says Avner Shiloah, the contest organizer and manager of the Givat Brenner Nurseries. "Every year, I pour my heart and soul into it, but each year comes out worse than the one before. One time it's bitter, another time it's just inedible. I could give you some of my olives to taste, but unfortunately I have to say that they're awful.

"I've noticed that I'm not the only one with this crazy passion, and that home pickling of olives has become a popular hobby. The first tree most Israelis plant in their private garden is a lemon tree. The second is an olive tree, and bringing homemade olives as a gift to friends and family has become almost as standard as bringing a cake. Of course, this isn't unique to Israel, but something that can be found all around the Mediterranean."

Visitors to the festival will be able to taste more than 80 kinds of olives and also to decide who will be this year's champion. The Olive Council, having recognized the event's culinary and anthropological potential, has extended its sponsorship for the first time this year. Festival-goers will also be able to hear a lecture by Prof. Shimon Lavie, a premier expert on olives, president of the World Olive Council and developer of the Barnea and Maalot varieties, on olive pickling in the Mediterranean basin.