A tall order - Haaretz

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Thu., September 06, 2007 Elul 23, 5767

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A tall order

By Doron Halutz

Doram Gaunt hates eating in restaurants. That's somewhat strange considering the fact that food is his profession. Gaunt writes a food and recipe column that is published in Gallery, the Haaretz culture and style section, and is this year publishing a debut cookbook, but he has already lined up his explanations about eating out.

"Rarely do I enjoy myself in restaurants or think it was worth the time, the money and the trip," he explains. "As the level of my cooking improves, it becomes more difficult for me to enjoy myself outside. It can happen that something specific entices me to take a taste, but usually the restaurants in question are terribly expensive and I have better things to do with my money, time and energy."

Accordingly, in terms of food, the Gaunt household is run almost like an autarchic economy. The beer is homemade. Spices grow in a flowerpot on the windowsill above the kitchen sink. He bakes bread, prepares mayonnaise and pickles cucumbers himself; only the coffee is produced by an espresso machine. But even then, he buys the beans still green and roasts them himself, and inside the sugar jar is a stick of vanilla for enriching the taste.

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Gaunt's reluctance to visit restaurants is not only for culinary reasons. In recent years, since he became the father of three young children, he refuses on principle to leave them with caregivers and babysitters. His lifestyle is determined accordingly: He gives up childless entertainment, and does only night work (at present as night editor on the Haaretz English news desk). His wife, Ruti, an assistant professor of social psychology at Bar-Ilan University, is with the children during the nights Doram works.

"It isn't easy to get rid of the children and to take a babysitter in order to go out and wait for someone else to cook," says Gaunt. "I made sure to stay at home with each of the children until the age of two. I think it's good for them. All my children have already been with me at newspaper staff meetings. They have never been with a caregiver or a babysitter. This arrangement is very convenient for us, from an ideological point of view as well."

Ruti speaks of realistic male-female roles from her armchair in the living room: "We have to do what suits us and not what gender norms dictate."

Gaunt's attention to gender issues begins with the most basic details - for example, his name. "My name attracts attention," he says. "It's a name that people remember and that arouses curiosity. Some people think it's a woman's name. That's a type of compliment, that you can't tell from my text in the newspaper whether it's a man or a woman. In food forums they discuss whether or not it's a pseudonym. They're used to the idea that men who deal with food are celebrities, and I'm not. For that you need a personality and a drive that I'm not sure I have."

Even if he's not a celebrity, discussion of his name has even reached as far as the program of Tal Berman and Aviad Kisos on Radio Tel Aviv: They contacted him to ascertain whether there really is a man with a rolling pin behind the name "Doram Gaunt." The little uncertainty that still exists will be resolved by the new cookbook he wrote, for which he also did the photography. Gaunt's picture appears on the cover, and the name of the book, "Ish gavoha mevashel" ("A Tall Man Cooks") leaves no room for gender uncertainty.

Where does this name, Doram Gaunt, come from?

"'Gaunt' is the surname my grandfather chose in England. Gaunt is someone with a long, thin face. They were three brothers who wanted to study at the university, and there was less chance of being accepted with a Jewish name; theirs was Goldman. So they changed it. One brother became Gilmore, the other Graham. And 'Doram' - that's even more bizarre, because in spite of the connotation of a settler or a kibbutznik [the word in Hebrew translates loosely as "generation of a nation"], my mother thought it was a name that would work well in both languages, Hebrew and English, like the names of my older sisters, Judy and Sandra."

Apropos gaunt, how does someone who cooks and eats so much remain so skinny?

"It's thanks to my genes, but actually from Mother's side."

'Dad's kitchen'

Gaunt, 38, 1.90 meters plus, grew up in Savion. He winces when asked about his childhood in the wealthy Tel Aviv suburb. "I never felt comfortable with the powerful image of wealth; it wasn't a wealthy place in the past. My parents bought [property] there in the 1960s, and the image developed later on. I wasn't a spoiled child. Although I lacked nothing as a child, I had only slightly more than an ordinary Israeli."

His parents divorced when he was 11 years old - "a traumatic divorce" - and he went to live in Givatayim with his father, who bore the aristocratic name Edward Francis Gaunt. His mother was working for Israel Aircraft Industries at the time. His father earned his livelihood as a pharmacist (like Grandfather Gaunt), and at the same time "prepared shampoo and hand cream and sold them in his pharmacy. Eventually he opened a cosmetics factory."

Gaunt studied in the theater track at the Thelma Yellin High School of the Arts, "without any talent for it at all." He did his military service as a reporter for the army magazine Bamahane, and afterward developed a kind of journalistic career: He wrote in the satiric column "Davar Aher," during the period when it was still published in the now-defunct daily Davar, edited the IOL Web site owned by the Schocken network, and thus came to work for Haaretz. In between he managed to get a law degree from Tel Aviv University, but left less than a year after completing his internship, "because I immediately understood that it wasn't for me. It was terrible."

Gaunt spent three years abroad in the previous decade, because of his wife's post-doctoral studies. They spent a year in Boston at Harvard, and two more years in the Belgian student town of Louvain la Neuve, where their eldest son was born seven and a half years ago. Now he, his wife and his children live in Ramat Ilan, a quiet neighborhood in Givat Shmuel, opposite Bar-Ilan University. The children have dubbed the kitchen in the house "Dad's kitchen." Ruti doesn't like to cook, and her job in the kitchen is limited to tasting.

So the children are growing up on burgul in vinegar?

"I try to give them everything I prepare and they eat only what they want. The eldest tastes everything, eats sushi, and it looks as though the little one will be like the eldest. In the morning and evening he eats Materna [baby formula], the rest of the time he likes everything. The middle daughter - petitim [short-cut pasta] and pita with chocolate, 365 days a year."

Is it difficult to invent a new recipe?

"That's a philosophical question, because you don't invent the wheel. If you take dough and fill it with something - people before you already filled dough with things, and maybe even with the same ingredients. And there are also infinite ways to prepare dough."

So how is a recipe born? Do you need a muse for that?

"You need something, I don't know if it's a muse. I have an inventory of associations and things I've eaten and tasted and tried, and I play around with it, experiment until I like the result. Or I open cupboards or the refrigerator when I feel like eating something, and record it. I write down how many teaspoons, cups and time, and I taste. But there are labor pains, because I don't want to end up with any old 'something' - I want it to be tasty and interesting, I want it to be worth the investment. You have to maintain a proportion between the result and the difficulty of the recipe or the cost of the raw materials."

Do you need a talent for writing in order to write recipes?

"Yes. You need an ability to convey what you do in a manner that will be clear to someone else, and will flow, be fun, tempting, not off-putting. I'm not looking to philosophize; I want to know exactly what has to be done. If I ask myself whether I have to cook with the lid or without it, whether the weight is before or after peeling - that's not a good recipe. And that happens sometimes with recipes published in Israel. It's part of the tendency to do shoddy work.

"I have a friend who studied cooking at the California Culinary Academy in San Francisco, and after four years went on to do an internship at a newspaper there. He said that before a recipe is published in the paper, they try it out in the newspaper's kitchen with different types of wheat and a number of ovens. That's how it is when you have 200 million readers. In Israel, you see that there are recipes that haven't been tried out in any kitchen. People take a recipe from a foreign Web site, and want to camouflage that fact, so they change the quantities a little and nobody tries it out before publication. There are things that I read and say that it's not possible that they were tried out before publication. I remember some recipe that was impossibly salty. You could see that there couldn't be such a large amount of salt in this quantity of food."

Or maybe there was an editing mistake. Hasn't it happened to you?

"That's possible. Once I published a pizza recipe in the paper, and in the ingredients for the dough I forgot the flour. That was my greatest embarrassment, but it's a mistake that is clearly an editing mistake. They told me that [the comedy team] Shai and Dror also laughed about it afterward on the radio."

Ironically, Gaunt, the creator of the recipes, gets nervous when he has to cook according to written instructions. As the husband of a psychologist, it's not surprising that he blames this on tendencies he inherited from his father. In the first place, Gaunt believes, he inherited his love for cooking from watching his father concocting cosmetics. "He would look for new ingredients and try to mix them and create new things from them. He would do that in the kitchen at home. Even when he cooked, he never knew beforehand what he was going to prepare. There were things that would come together during the course of preparation. That's also more or less what I do. When you have to plan in advance, it's kind of stressful."

Do you also cook according to the recipes of others?

"No, it's not in my nature. A recipe is a very finite thing. When you enter unfamiliar territory, you want precise instructions But when the territory is familiar you want something more general. Because, what if I feel like doing it differently? If I want to change some of the raw materials?"

So why do we need another cookbook?

"We don't. But many people have asked me how long they'll have to collect newspaper clippings, there's no more room for them. The book also has a lot of reading material. Most of it has already been published in the newspaper. There's Syrian food from Ruti's Grandma Batya, and there's food from my grandmother, who is Egyptian, and some European cuisine from my home and from my stay in Western Europe and in the United States, and from my experiments with Asian and South American food, Israeli and Arab food.

"Some of the recipes here are definitely in the spirit of the times: fusion, sprouts, quinoa, Japanese, cranberries, a lot of vegetables, doughs from whole-wheat flour. Ingredients that are relatively new in Israel. The spirit of the times is also evident in the photos - in them the food looks like something you can prepare at home, less neat and stylized. I myself prepared and photographed all the food in the book, something that didn't happen in books from 10 years ago. Then they would photograph cornflakes in plastic glue instead of milk, because then they wouldn't sink and would remain stable under the hot lights without getting tired, and looked better in the pictures."

Where exactly in Israel can you find the ingredients of Belgian cuisine, for example, which stars in the book?

"It's true, in Belgium you can eat endive in salad every day, and here they may have two heads of it in the supermarket and they cost NIS 10. There it's simple food, and here it's really hard to find. I'm not in favor of paying a lot of money in a restaurant because they fly in lobsters from the ends of the earth. Do I have to pay for the lobster's airline ticket? If you have enough money to eat something that has been flown in from the ends of the earth, you probably also have enough money to travel a little by yourself - so eat it when you're there."

Is it a burden to be a cook?

"Wherever I go they expect me to prepare something, and I don't like that. If you bring something it's already taken for granted, and if you don't feel like it - people are disappointed. If I bring food to work for myself it's sandwiches; I don't bring chicken in strawberries to work."

Why don't you open a restaurant? Doesn't the analogy apply here that just as porno stars are actually Shakespearean actors who are waiting to be discovered, recipe writers are wannabe restaurateurs?

"Maybe others, not me. I'm not opening a restaurant because it doesn't suit my nature, my ambitions and my interests. It's a different kind of work to cook the same thing for many people over and over again, than to prepare a small quantity for myself. I've already been offered an opportunity to begin a catering company, but I'm not even considering it."

Many people involved in cooking and food say, after they've finished describing their recipe for crabs in whipped sea sand sauce, that actually the tastiest food in the world is bread with butter and salt.

"I definitely often feel like having something simple. But it depends which bread - for example, bread that I've prepared by myself and that has just come out of the oven, especially if it's with tomatoes that I dried myself, and a little rocket (arugula) and chili, which I like to put in everything. A while ago I came home from work very hungry with a few fresh pitas that I had just bought, and I cut some chili myself, and the refrigerator was empty because we're going to Belgium for a few weeks, so I took some leftover chicken and cucumbers that I found in the refrigerator, and I added the chili and some other spice, and slowly but surely it became tasty."

That's already not exactly simple, not everyone makes a sandwich that way.

"Look, it's more complicated than preparing 'soup in a cup.' But preparing mayonnaise at home takes 30 seconds. So I appeal to you, if you eat mayonnaise: There are things we've become accustomed to buying for no reason, we pay 20 times as much and get an inferior product, while you can prepare it at home in the simplest way that upgrades the food with no work."

Even salt is not just salt for Gaunt. "I have simple salt and I have salt that a friend brought as a gift from Belgium, which his daughter gathered by hand from the island Ile de Re on the coast of France," he explains. "She goes there once a year in order to gather salt, and it's really different."

A bit pretentious, some will say.

"The pretension lies in saying 'It has to be exactly like this,' and I don't want to scare people and say you have to do it only like this and any other way is impossible. To say 'prepare the steak only from fresh meat'? If you want to prepare it from frozen meat, then do so. But tartare from frozen salmon - it's inedible and will also damage your health, so I'll say that it's forbidden. I won't say that it's forbidden to prepare an omelet with salt from the supermarket. That's pretentious. That's why I write 'salt,' and anyone who wants to can use simple salt from the supermarket. But there's an explanation in the book of how to upgrade the salt experience."

In short, you like to complicate even what's simple?

Doram: "No."

Ruti: "Yes." W

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