‘The idea of laying claim to a food is a ridiculous thing. Nobody owns food.’
Over burgers and beers in a kosher restaurant in Cape Town, American Israeli tourist guide and food writer Joel Haber chews the cud
Joel Haber is kosher and that can be tricky when travelling, so it’s fortuitous that he’s staying in the suburb of Sea Point on his first trip to Cape Town. There are two kosher restaurants on the main drag there, including a burger joint with an array of craft beers and an in-house bakery upstairs that delivers the buns.
Haber is in town to speak at Limmud, after which he’ll fly to Johannesburg and Durban to speak at the Limmud events in those cities too. En route to South Africa he got stuck in Istanbul, where he wandered around and bought a pastry. ‘‘I know it’s not going to have pork in it because it’s in Istanbul and there’s a bunch of religious Muslims eating there.” In general, though, he relies on the HappyCow app as a guide when he travels to locate vegan and vegetarian eateries.
Before Haber moved to Israel 14 and a half years ago, he lived in New Jersey, New York and, latterly, California, where he worked as a screenwriter in Los Angeles. Haber’s brother and his family moved to Israel 27 years ago. Haber’s parents settled there six months before he did. “I knew for a long time that I wanted to go eventually. I just didn’t know when I would.” His parents making aliyah (emigration to Israel) provided the impetus for him to start thinking that perhaps it was time. The decision to go was followed by a “ridiculously quick” move. Now when he goes back to the States it’s usually on the lecture circuit.
Some of the approximate 10 talks Haber has developed include the seasonal foods of Jewish holidays; Jews as transporters of food; the role of Jewish food in conquering antisemitism; Israeli food; and an experimental one on what is a Jewish food. Another is about chulent, the traditional Shabbat stew, and another about alcohol and Jewish involvement in that industry.
One of the individuals he mentions in My cup runneth over: the Jews and their drinking habit is Jakob von Hirsch, who in 1824 purchased an estate just outside Munich and later established the country’s first large-scale brewery there, setting the trend for German beer companies to move from the cities to the countryside where there was space to manufacture on an industrial scale.
Haber’s lectures are the result of ongoing and voracious reading and research “and then it just gestates and eventually I’ll get an idea of what I want to do and then I’ll dig down on the topic and fill in the gaps,” he says. “I’m usually taking notes on anything I read so I’ve got a wealth of materials I’ve compiled. And there are certain things that appear in more than one talk because they’ll relate to different things.”
He also had a sounding board in noted Jewish food scholar and historian Gil Marks, who authored the Encyclopaedia of Jewish Food. Marks’ mother was Haber’s brother’s next-door neighbour. “Whenever I had questions, he would answer them.”
In his day job, Haber is a licensed tourist guide and takes visitors all over. One of his earliest tours and now the most popular, of the new city of Jerusalem’s well-known, open-air Machane Yehuda Market, led to his spin-off career in food research, writing and lecturing. The shuk, as the market is called colloquially, has been around for about 140 years, having expanded and diversified over time but remaining primarily food-oriented.
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“That’s how I got started with this whole thing: doing these food tours. And when Covid hit, I started doing virtual tours. I was, like, who is going to want a virtual food tour? But everybody did, oddly enough. I used to make a joke out of it. On the bad side you don’t get to taste any of the foods. On the good side, there’s no calories and you don’t have to worry about allergies.”
Living a five-minute walk from the market and shopping there almost daily for pretty much everything he requires to cook at home certainly enhances his ability to give the tours a local flavour. “At its core it’s a fresh food market, so you have all your produce and you have your meats and your fish, your nuts and dried fruits – all of that kind of stuff is there. But one of the changes that has happened over the last twenty plus years is an increase in eateries in the market – little restaurants and street food – and then there was a wave of bars that opened up and established nightlife that wasn’t there before.
“It’s a tourist attraction but it’s also locals that are there doing their shopping,” he says, making me think of the V&A Waterfront in Cape Town, which is South Africa’s most-visited destination by tourists but also a place where locals eat and shop.
In order to better prepare for his market tours, he started to research the foods that are available there. “But as I began to study about them, that opened up this world of food history. I focus on the diversity of the cultures of Jerusalem via the foods that are available. In the shuk, and in the area immediately around it, there’s foods from about 20 different countries. So there’s a Yemenite place that I go to often and Turkish, Persian. And I’m also talking about things that we’re not tasting so I point out a Lebanese place, a Hungarian place.”
When Covid dramatically cut back his tourism work, it gave him the opportunity to dedicate more time to writing. In the summer of 2020, he started a blog and website and began pitching freelance stories to Israeli and American publications.
He’s not trained as a historian so there’s not much primary source research, he says. The National Library of Israel is where he spends a lot of time. He continually orders books and does online research too. Anya von Bremzen’s National Dish was a recent weekend read. “I try and be scholarly and rigorous but I’m not an academic and I’m not a historian and I’ll make mistakes sometimes as well.”
The restaurant has become packed and noisy. Saturday night after Shabbat is, by all accounts, the busiest night of the week. Most of the men, Haber included, are wearing yarmulkes (skullcaps).
“How’s your burger, by the way?” he asks.
“It’s okay,” I say. “Nothing to write home about but it’s certainly palatable.”
“That’s not a very ringing endorsement. Is it dry?”
“It’s just a bit hard. You’re really welcome to try some,” I offer.
“I’m not sure I want it. It’s just a giant falafel?”
“Ja, I guess, but a bit of a hard one. But it’s coated in hummus. You can’t go too wrong when something’s coated in hummus. I think it’s hummus. Tahina wouldn’t be so thick, would it?"
“Let’s see,” he says, taking a bite. “That’s hummus.”
Hummus is one of those foods that spans the Middle East with variations on the theme in every country in the region. Who does it belong to originally, I ask? “It’s an old food that’s all over,” he says. “I think the idea of laying claim to a food is a ridiculous thing. Nobody owns food. But that’s not to say that there isn’t such a thing as a national food.”
A national food that Haber is particularly au fait with is chulent (pronounced ‘choh-lint’), a typical and traditional Jewish stew and a dish that’s also custom designed for Shabbat (or Shabbos). Observant Jews can’t cook on the Sabbath but at the same time they want to honour the holiness of the day by having a cooked meal on Saturday at lunchtime.
According to halacha (Jewish law), food for Shabbat needs to be halfway done by the time Shabbat starts at sundown on Friday. Then it’s left on a low heat in the oven to slow cook for about fifteen hours. “One of the contemporary trends over the last 30 years or so is that it’s become popular to have on Thursday night,” he adds.
Haber’s been working on a book about chulent. Initially it was to be a chapter in a bigger book but he realised it’s a book all its own. Chulent is the Eastern European name for it but Haber’s book describes the many different versions with their corresponding names.
‘I can’t say that food has been my number one passion all of my life. I always enjoyed it but it was very much secondary. As an adult, when I started to cook more, then I started to get more into food. But the history side of it is relatively new for me.’
“What I sort of argue is that rather than being different dishes, they are different versions of the same dish. The core ingredients, while varied, are in similar categories. There’s usually a type of meat and a type of grain; often some kind of beans or legumes of some kind; some vegetables and some flavouring agents. But the meat and grain combo is the core of it. And, by region, which meat and which grain may break down differently.
“So basically what I do with the book is say, if you have all these different-looking ones but they’re all really the same thing, then I use them as a way of tracing our migrations through the diaspora: how we get from place to place, what was the situation in each place, why did these culinary changes happen in each place? That’s kind of the idea of the book.”
From Israel, there are three main directions: west across North Africa, east to Central Asia, and northwest to Europe. Generally in Asia, the stew will feature chicken and rice. In Africa, it’s lamb and wheat and, in Europe, it’s beef and barley (with many exceptions, he notes).
Eastern European chulent will typically have beef, barley, kidney beans, potatoes and onions as the core of it. In Morocco, the dish is called dafina or skhina and will have wheat berries (also possibly rice), lamb, sweet potato and dates. The Iraqi t’bit will have chicken stuffed with a flavour of rice and buried in another type of rice.
“People debate this all the time: there’s no such thing as Jewish food, which I think is ridiculous. I think it’s really just a way of attacking us because they make demands on Jews and their food that they don’t place on anybody else. Only Jewish food has to be indigenous and unique to the Jews. People say oh, there’s no such thing as Jewish food because you just eat whatever other people eat, which is such bullshit.
Haber describes his Hebrew now as ‘fluent but flawed’
“What I would say is there’s obviously a number of different categories. There are some foods that are uniquely Jewish like the Shabbat stew that we were discussing; like matzah, for example. Nobody else eats this stuff, so clearly those are Jewish foods. Then you have foods that because of kashrut, the kosher laws, there are many foods that might be foods that non-Jews eat, but that our version of is different.
“For example, Italian Jews often use goose as a replacement for ham. So they make goose prosciutto. That’s clearly a Jewish food. And there are plenty of other things dealing with milk and meat. And then, I think, you just have foods that are very much associated with Jews either by us or by others. If you travel around the world there are many, many different foods in different languages that are identified as Jewish.
“There’s the very famous dish in Rome, started in the ghetto, called carciofi alla Giudia. It’s a Jewish style of preparing artichoke: they peel off the outside and then they deep-fry it. That’s a Jewish food; it’s in the name. There’s something from Holland called Joodse boterkoek: it’s some kind of Dutch butter cake with ginger in it.”
We notice that the large group of teenagers from a neighbouring table has gone outside, leaving jackets, a lipstick and phones on the table. “You would never normally do that in a restaurant here. Your phones would be gone in an instant. This is South Africa,” I remark. “Not in a Jewish restaurant,” he says. “We’re all family.”
The Press Bar & Grill
176 Main Road, Sea PointThe Israeli R145
Mary Had a Little Lamb R175
Cape Brewing Company Amber Weiss R60
Noon Gun Brewery 18-Pounder Session IPA R55Total including tip: R485