Last update - 00:00 30/08/2007
3 old-fashioned bakeries
Most of the high-quality bakeries in Israel today are inspired by the tradition of the French patisserie. But at one time, old-fashioned Eastern European-style bakeries predominated, selling fancy cream cakes, fresh yeast cakes and tall kugelhopf.
By Ronit Vered
Most of the high-quality bakeries in Israel today are inspired by the tradition of the French patisserie. But at one time, old-fashioned Eastern European-style bakeries predominated, selling fancy cream cakes, fresh yeast cakes and tall kugelhopf. In those days there was a small guild of local baking artists, and all the bakers, who came from Hungary, Austria and Czechoslovakia, knew one another and were close friends. Very few of these bakeries remain today, but in the few that have survived, mixers and heavy kneading machines built in Germany in the mid-1950s continue to creak and groan in the back rooms. In the wee hours of the morning, the Sisyphean work of beating the eggs and baking the yeast cakes begins. Behind the counters are old-fashioned wooden and stainless steel shelves laden with baked goods that are prepared exactly as they have been for decades. Here are three veteran bakeries with a tradition rarely seen today, which testify to the power of taste to trick the memory and bring back the past.
Next to Leibel's bakery, a tailor's sign offers his best merchandise - a real modern marvel - pants and a jacket for a suit from the same fine gabardine. Nearby, there are salons for underwear and ladies' hats, frequently visited by the ultra-Orthodox residents of the Hadar neighborhood, with its lovely Arab stone houses. Every morning, Yehuda Leibel dons his white baker's toque and apron and begins the hard day's work at 6 A.M. The toque is not just an external symbol, it's an expression of profound seriousness and of a generation that treated cake-baking, and in fact every trade, as sacred work.
Yehuda Leibel studied the art of baking and the original recipes with one of the founding fathers of the local Austro-Hungarian baking tradition, in a bakery that died along with the man who founded it. He is also the scion of a family of bakers: His grandfather arrived in Haifa from Transylvania in 1933 and founded the Achdut bakery. His father was a member of the bakers' cooperative, and in 1957 he began to work with Koestler, the legendary Hungarian pastry chef from the Carmel. Afterward he interned for two years in Switzerland, worked as a pastry chef on the Zim line's "Shalom" passenger ship, and in February 1970 opened this pastry shop in the Hadar neighborhood.
Since then he has continued to bake the same cakes from the old-fashioned recipes of long ago, making sure to use real fresh yeast and fine Dutch cocoa and to stay away from concentrates and preservatives. He works alone, creates the pastries carefully by hand and struggles to remove huge trays from the old-fashioned, burning hot oven. Today they no longer manufacture baking pans this size. In them you will find a wonderful crunchy dough dotted with the purplish-orange flesh of juicy summer plums or a light golden cheese cake, whose beautiful slanted diamond pattern no machine could create.
The regular customers who sit at formica tables indoors, or, when the weather is fine, in the small garden, know how to appreciate this little time machine with tastes that have almost disappeared from the world. They are also loyal to the wonderful burekas filled with potatoes or cheese; to the Pressburger crescents filled with nuts; to the cream puffs coated with powdered sugar; and especially to the unparalleled yeast cakes - the chocolate, cocoa and poppy seed cakes topped with streusel, with a moist but airy dough and a divine taste.
Leibel Bakery, 8-A Arlosoroff Street, Haifa, 04-8674002
"I was sitting in the Wilheim cafe in Ramatayim/ in the morning on the broad sidewalk/ The folding chairs and the folding tables/ attested to a life without permanency/ And the heavy trucks that passed on the road/ caused former memories to tremble once again/ ... I'm sitting in a cafe next to the road/ eating filled cakes, cakes for the soul/ Oh, you the wonderful baker before the mouth of the oven/ You are a person more advanced than the scientists/ because you know that the body and soul are one/ and that a vessel and its contents are one/ and a cake and its filling are one/ just as a man and his death are one ("The Wonderful Baker," "She'at Hesed," Yehuda Amichai, Schocken Books).
Yehuda Amichai was almost certainly tasting a fresh hot cheese pocket when he scribbled these lines on a piece of paper while sitting in Wilheim, the baker's pastry shop. Because this cheese pocket, like all simple and wonderful baked goods, has the power even today to arouse the body and the soul to meditations about the way of the world.
David Wilheim, who died seven years ago, was born in Komarno, Slovakia, a town that lies on the banks of the Vah and Danube rivers, to a family originally from Austria. He lost a wife and a son in Auschwitz, and while he was still in the concentration camp he decided that if he survived he would immigrate to Palestine and continue the family tradition - creating sweetmeats that make people happy. He and Jolene, his second wife, opened the bakery in Ramatayim in 1948. At first it was only a small open stand for cakes and cookies, where they also sold cigarettes (which are still sold, as a gesture to the veteran customers who have become accustomed to satisfying their smoking needs on the spot as well), but they had yeast rolls, mandelbrot and vanilla cookies already then.
A few years ago they also gave in to the latest contemporary consensus, mainly because of the cafes belonging to the large chains that began to crop up around the small bakery. They changed the design: a restrained and modest backdrop, which still has echoes of the nostalgic enchanted kingdom - like the pullout drawers of cakes and the old pictures on the walls. But the wooden cupboard built to order in the 1950s and the folding tables have disappeared. In the baking cellar, on the other hand, everything has remained in place, including the old- fashioned machines and utensils, the scarred baking pans that have already come quite a long way and a substantial percentage of the baking staff. Avigdor Reiss, whose family came from the same town in Slovakia, has been working in the baking cellar since 1967, and the taste of the yeast cakes he bakes still remind him of home. Jolene, who used to bake them every week and still continues to work in the bakery daily with her daughter Miriam and her granddaughter Keren, greets all the usual habitues who fill the tables by 8 A.M.
Wilheim the Baker, 48 Ramatayim Street, Hod Hasharon, 09-7434350
"Shalom Bayit (Domestic Bliss) Cake" is what Yaakov Weiss calls the famous poppy-seed cake of the veteran Tel Aviv bakery. This is almost the last of the Austro-Hungarian bakeries, many of which were located on the streets of Little Tel Aviv and sold baked goods to laborers, intellectuals, the children from the Rabbeinu Tam neighborhood and to those celebrating at the masquerade balls held on the garden balconies of the city's European cafes.
The taste of this dark, concentrated chunk of poppy seed, with the butter in the dough staining its simple cardboard box, is so enticing that it has been known to make peace between quarreling lovers.
The parents of David Weiss, founder of the bakery and Yaakov's father, were the owners of a bakery that made challah and cakes in the Carpathian Mountains of Czechoslovakia before World War II.
When David's father was taken to a labor camp by the Germans, he was forced to help his mother, and that is how he learned the complex art of baking the yeast cakes. When they arrived in this country penniless after the war, he began to work in Golubov's Bakery, one of the first bakeries in Tel Aviv, which still stands in its original location.
The sooty facade of the buildings on King George Street hides the original brick chimney that was built for the bakery in the 1940s. David was the one who suggested to Mr. Golubov to bake cakes instead of bread, since bread was sold very cheap during the austerity period, and there was more profit in cakes. He was the one who continued with the bakery after the childless Russian died. That was the beginning of the good yeast cakes; the strudel; the fugaccio - crunchy butter-filled baked goods; and the burekitos, crescents with a very sweet cheese flavor.
Over the years the family split because of a fight between the brothers-in-law, and there were two bakeries with the same name on opposite sides of the street. Afterward they merged, and for many years on the west side of King George one could sip coffee from Histadrut labor federation glasses together with respectable matrons in straw hats and carefully styled hair, and elderly bakers in aprons, some of them scions of families from the same town in the Carpathian Mountains.
During the past year the large western branch closed and only the small bakery remains on the other side of the street. Because of the small size of the kitchen, the Health Ministry refuses to renew the business permit. City Hall apparently has other plans for this bloc of buildings adjacent to the Bezalel Market, and this veteran bakery, which has existed for over 65 years, is about to close. The neighborhood residents should fight not only for the lazy and sleepy atmosphere and the glasses of beer at Haminzar, the neighborhood pub, but also for the yeast cakes and the genuine tradition that has existed in this institution for decades.
Weiss Bakery (Sova), 7 King George Street, Tel Aviv, 03-5285421