Salad Days

Nothing says summer like potato salad. When the weather turns reliably hot I find myself craving its creamy and crunchy pleasures. It’s only a matter of time before I boil and chop enough for a great big bowlful.

Of course, they do make potato salad in the kibbutz. But just between us, it’s pretty awful. No onions, no celery. Instead, they add canned peas and carrots. Ghastly. In fact, there are a number of classic dishes they get horribly wrong: artichokes with mayonnaise instead of garlic butter, potato soup made with chicken soup powder instead of leeks and cream, roast beef that has been boiled until you can mash it with a fork.

You get the picture. I find myself wondering how kibbutz cuisine took this left turn into dreadful. The pioneering generation came from countries with rich culinary traditions – Germany, Hungary, Russia to name a few. So what happened? Did the Old Countries forbid cooks to emigrate? Did you only go to the kibbutz movement if you lacked the cooking gene?

I have a feeling this will remain a mystery. If you try to ask people they get all defensive – “What’s wrong with the food? It’s wonderful food! Be grateful you have something to eat!” – so I‘m not going there. Tonight I will be welcoming summer with my traditional steak and potato salad feast, convinced it will be delicious. The rest of my comrades don’t know what they’re missing.

Mad Dogs and Englishmen

I guess this qualifies as old-home week. My ulpan roommate has been visiting from England. Last night as we sat in the lounge after Shabbat dinner, who breezes over but Bernard, an unforgettable Scot who had also been in the ulpan with us a hundred years ago and had not been seen since. You could have knocked me over with a feather. I mean, what are the odds?

Merle has, I think, often regretted that she didn’t stay in Israel and so she arranged this little trip to investigate the possibility of rectifying the mistake. It’s impossible not to like her. She’s mad, outgoing and says exactly what’s on her mind. The precise opposite of me. So I did what I could to help her with her mission. I got her into the kibbutz guest room – I think there’s only one or two of them, so this took a bit of luck – and tried to be encouraging about the prospects of finding work and a place to live. But the whole project quickly tanked: Merle cannot take the heat.

I suppose if you live in a perpetually chilly place like Liverpool you can forget the sultry challenges of an Israeli summer. Still, in true British fashion she spends her time walking all over central Israel in the heat of the day. There is something splendid about the British can-do attitude and refusal to surrender to tropical torpor. All of which brings me to Noel Coward.

I’ve been humming his song all week. “Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun.” Associating Merle with this immortal send-up of British colonial behavior is not quite fair to her (Sorry, sweetie!) because the poor woman is melting and will soon make her escape to cool, green England. But I couldn’t resist. Anyone who has two and a half minutes to spare can catch the great man himself singing his song on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdEnxNog56E

A Pretty Picture

Isn't this a pretty painting? More about this later. Building a house anywhere is a monumental undertaking. But when you build in a kibbutz, or to be more precise, on a kibbutznik’s budget, the task is awesomely overwhelming. So when my turn came four years ago I put every shekel I could scrape together into the structure – windows, floors, cabinetry – those things that could not be easily changed and put off buying furniture until I had amassed some more money.

I like wood, solid wood. But because I am a humble kibbutznik there is no way I could afford the solid oak furniture of my dreams. Instead I had to settle for mahogany and rosewood. Yes, that’s right, in this upside down world the luxury woods of the past are now imported cheaply from the Far East, which is how I could buy a French-style solid mahogany sleigh bed last year. This completed the bedroom except for one galling thing: the great, big empty space over the bed.

This brings me to the painting. It’s a reproduction of a screen by the Japanese artist, Ogata Korin, offered by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It’s beautifully serene, perfect for the lilac bedroom. Last month I finally pried open my wallet and ordered it, only to be disappointed when I got a message from Customer Service saying because the piece is so large – about a meter long – there would be an extra $174 shipping charge and offering the option to cancel. I did. However, when I got my credit card statement this month I found I had been charged for the painting at the original amount.

My very polite question to the Customer Service lady resulted in a very apologetic reply, saying that the cancellation had been duly sent to the warehouse who shipped the painting anyway and cancelled the extra shipping charge. She said if I don’t want it I can refuse to accept it and they will credit my account when they get it back. But I do want it. And now I have a dilemma. I don’t want to stiff the museum for the extra charges, but the mistake was not mine, I have behaved quite properly, and I can’t afford the extra money. If I return it they’ll have to pay the extra charges twice. So assuming it doesn’t come postage-due, it looks like I’ll be getting the painting after all. And I can kiss the great, big empty space good-bye.

Cheesy

We have just celebrated Shavuot, the cheese holiday. I find this Holy Day to be something of an enigma. My step-daughter says it’s beautiful, just think of the whole of Israel walking to Jerusalem to pay their tithes to the Temple, celebrating receiving the Torah. All well and good, but what’s the connection with cheese?

Were the tithes paid in cheese, two wheels of cheddar and a ball of mozzarella per family? Did they eat cheese on the way?
“We’re walking to the Temple please
Will you pass the mac and cheese?”
I don’t know how this was excluded from the Psalms. Maybe cheese was all they had left after they paid what they owed.

The connection between cheese and religion is not an obvious one but apparently it exists. I heard on the news recently that someone found a Cheeto shaped like Jesus Christ. Someone dubbed it “Cheesus”. Be that as it may, on Shavuot we are commanded to eat cheese and I happily comply. My only reservation is the blandness of the local product. Producers considerately grace the market with a few different varieties at this time, but none of them are sharp or tangy.

This strikes me as odd. Israelis won’t eat anything unless it’s heavily seasoned. They say olives are tasteless unless they’re loaded with garlic and lemon. And yet the whole nation prefers low-taste cheese. Like I said, this holiday is an enigma.

Give Me an Extra Scoop of Vanilla

I just heard a remarkable piece of information on Fox News: thanks to tasty dressings, salads can have many more calories than a pint of ice cream. I feel vindicated. I have always thought that people in general need more ice cream in their lives and that vegetables are over-rated.

This tidbit takes on new significance thanks to the budget our benighted government has passed putting a 16.5% tax on fruits and vegetables. Aside from the obvious point about what kind of idiots raise taxes in the middle of a recession is the deliberate cruelty of levying a big tax on the staple of the Israeli diet. Have you ever known an Israeli who could get through a morning without the salad of tomatoes and cucumbers chopped into teeny, tiny little pieces?

So I propose that we the beleaguered citizenry eat 16.5 % less vegetables and 16.5 % more ice cream. I apologize to any farmers out there, but these are hard times and stern measures are required. When our government announces its intention to keep spending like drunken sailors, it is our responsibility to take away their cash cards.

Ice cream is key. By eating this we can deny the government its ill-gotten gains while we actually consume fewer calories and I contend, improve the national mood. I mean, who can be glum while chowing down on a big bowl of chocolate chocolate chip?

Serafine, In Memorium

She was the smartest cat I ever knew. She was the first to figure out how to use the cat flap and she would burst through it, mewing and trotting over to wherever the action was. Serafine was smaller than most cats, but was nevertheless an accomplished hunter. In the first few months in the new house she brought me presents of a dead rat, a live mouse and she killed a snake before my eyes.

Serafine was about 4 months old when I first met her. She was sitting in the basket of my late husband’s bicycle. I didn’t want any more cats so I didn’t let her in. But she persisted in her determination to get adopted, and of course I relented pretty quickly because she was such a sweetie. That was 14 years ago. This past Wednesday I found her dead in the parking lot next to the house. She didn’t show obvious signs of having been run over, but I can’t think what else could have happened to her. I buried her, shrouded in a dark blue towel, in the garden next to the lavender.

I am heart-broken. Her favorite place in the house was, naturally, the kitchen. She would weave around my legs, meowing the whole time, whenever I wanted to cook even though I assured her it wasn’t for her. It drove me mad. Now I miss it and wish she would do it again just once more. She meowed a lot. I used to tell her that there were too many meows and that someday she would run out of them. I guess she has.

Kicking Out the British Day

We have just celebrated Independence Day in recognition of the day the British finally packed up and went home for tea. The festivities on the kibbutz are always the same – fireworks then barbecue then public sing-along in the dining hall. It’s all predictably nice. In America we also celebrated the official Kicking Out the Brits Day with fireworks and barbecue, but the actual events had not happened in living memory so no one remembered what it was like to live under their iron thumb.

The British as a whole are polite, civilized people in their own country. As rulers, however, they can be very different. This is the story of what happened when they came here to Kibbutz Maabarot on June 30th. It was told to me by my late husband who fought in the Jewish Brigade of the British Army during WWII. He held the rank of captain and was home on demobilization leave. The year was 1946 and the Brits came looking for members of the Hagana, an organization which was officially illegal, but essential if you were Jewish and interested in survival.

All the men were rounded up and held under guard for questioning. When they asked my husband if he was in the Hagana, he said of course, it was under their orders that he had enlisted in the British Army to fight the Nazis. While the men were being questioned the women were in the kitchen putting together little packets of pepper which they then threw into the eyes of the soldiers. In those days, nobody had pepper spray. Skirmishes were breaking out and the lieutenant in charge came to my husband to ask his help in calming the situation, saying he didn’t know how much longer he could control his men and he was afraid of a massacre. (Why my husband? Because he was still a British Army officer and he was also the most affable man in the world so he was naturally the one to be approached.)

Calm was restored and tragedy averted, but the Hagana men were arrested and held for several days. Before the Brits left the kibbutz, the soldiers ransacked the living quarters, taking whatever struck their fancy, like blankets. This was cruel. The kibbutzniks were poor. Some were living in shacks but many were in tents. They had close to nothing and the British wouldn’t even leave them that. From my husband they took a book and the only good overcoat he had. When he was released he filed a formal complaint with the Army but the answer came back that there was no evidence of theft.

This is the story as I remember hearing it. Whether from Israel or America, the British are thankfully gone. The fireworks are beautiful and the steak from the grill is comforting. And this year I raise my beer in tribute to the heroes who brought us to this point. Salute!