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eila's review
emotional
hopeful
reflective
medium-paced
4.5
There's something very poignant about reviewing 'The Arab-Israeli Cookbook' by Robin Soans (Aurora Metro, Sep 2005) during Pesach while the news is filled with the latest conflict. And yet, it's also precisely the right time for this small, gentle book.
I haven't seen the show that this book accompanies, and wouldn't have normally opted to read something that would likely heavily reference something I hadn't watched, but adding Claudia Roden's name to the cover cinched it, and I'm glad I took the chance.
This sits somewhere between a travelogue, a cookbook, and a series of mini autobiographies. The author's writing is comfortably reined in: you can feel the moments when Soans really wants to wax poetic but doesn't, and instead allows his interviewees' words to center his prose. It strikes the right balance, I think; given a larger canvas, perhaps his prose would have become overbearing, but tightly wrapped around descriptions of people, locations, and tastes, the relative restraint works.
As a travelogue, it's very brief, but edited skillfully - each little snippet brings you into a home, or a restaurant, or a not-quite-tent, and into a place that for many feels distant and unknowable.
The interviewees are a diverse as the reality of this restive slip of earth: the observant Muslim who smokes, the gay couple who host Shabbat, the Amazigh partiarch who longs for the pastoral freedom that the current situation can't allow. And between the hurt and the worry, you get a glimpse of the reality: of the everyday people, Arab and Jewish, observant and atheist, who just do their best to coexist in an increasingly fragile peace.
As a cookbook, it's somewhat niche: these are recipes as told by the cooks, and so some feed 400, some are from a restaurant, and some are from home. A confident cook will find lots here to enjoy, and have no trouble adapting the recipes to their needs. I certainly wouldn't recommend most of the recipes for anyone new to cooking or not used to tasting, adjusting, and making a recipe their own, but those that do will find plenty of inspiration.
This is a lovely little book, and a balanced representation of society & politics, which doesn't try to reach beyond presenting the interviewees as genuine, warm, and real. Very much worth the read.
Thank you to the publisher for providing this ARC for my unbiased review.
I haven't seen the show that this book accompanies, and wouldn't have normally opted to read something that would likely heavily reference something I hadn't watched, but adding Claudia Roden's name to the cover cinched it, and I'm glad I took the chance.
This sits somewhere between a travelogue, a cookbook, and a series of mini autobiographies. The author's writing is comfortably reined in: you can feel the moments when Soans really wants to wax poetic but doesn't, and instead allows his interviewees' words to center his prose. It strikes the right balance, I think; given a larger canvas, perhaps his prose would have become overbearing, but tightly wrapped around descriptions of people, locations, and tastes, the relative restraint works.
As a travelogue, it's very brief, but edited skillfully - each little snippet brings you into a home, or a restaurant, or a not-quite-tent, and into a place that for many feels distant and unknowable.
The interviewees are a diverse as the reality of this restive slip of earth: the observant Muslim who smokes, the gay couple who host Shabbat, the Amazigh partiarch who longs for the pastoral freedom that the current situation can't allow. And between the hurt and the worry, you get a glimpse of the reality: of the everyday people, Arab and Jewish, observant and atheist, who just do their best to coexist in an increasingly fragile peace.
As a cookbook, it's somewhat niche: these are recipes as told by the cooks, and so some feed 400, some are from a restaurant, and some are from home. A confident cook will find lots here to enjoy, and have no trouble adapting the recipes to their needs. I certainly wouldn't recommend most of the recipes for anyone new to cooking or not used to tasting, adjusting, and making a recipe their own, but those that do will find plenty of inspiration.
This is a lovely little book, and a balanced representation of society & politics, which doesn't try to reach beyond presenting the interviewees as genuine, warm, and real. Very much worth the read.
Thank you to the publisher for providing this ARC for my unbiased review.
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