A social affair in the kitchen
Plus the quickest and easiest Flat Bread recipe we'll be dining on throughout the summer
If you ever happen to find yourself in a Jewish kitchen - whether it be a middle eastern Sephardic, or an Ashkanzi European one - you will find it to be a social Mecca, brimming full of noise and lots of helpful hands. Like many cultures, it is commonplace to find many hands making light work of an entire family feast. All kinds of hands at that.
Soft, slightly papery deep olive toned hands, peppered with dark ageing spots who if they could talk, would share with you the pain they have endured in their early transient life. Quickly followed by the joy these younger, fresh pair of cub-like hands next to them have brought. Generations of women all working together voices filling the air whilst hands simply go about their business in an unspoken manner.
It is a raucous affair.
The chopped liver sits on the side ready, leaving a deep, acrid almost metallic odour lingering in the air. The mashed egg topping is a useless disguise. Now a thousand farts gifted from small children joins that very same odour. It is one of those dishes that is an acquired taste, and don’t assume all Jewish people love it. I for one can not bring myself to eat food that tastes just as it smells.
Conversations fly about the kitchen about lives, mainly other peoples of course. Stories about the successful grandson making it as a big time lawyer working for the best law firm known to man. Others more tinged with sadness recalling Bubbeh’s last brother passing, closing the book on an entire older generation. Much unequivocal gossip about the rest of the community, like Sadie and Harry’s disastrous cruise, and Esther and Isaacs recently refitted windows - awful job, have you seen their house? Clearly important stuff. And all spoken at 100 miles an hour, linked together using loudly accented yiddish phrases.
Warm, loving and sometimes hilariously offensive - although not a drop intended to hurt or cause pain. Whatever the chatter in that kitchen, the end result is always ample, delicious, often fried and full of love.
Sitting in the audience listening to Rachel Roddy talk about food culture in Rome with
at Cooking the Books live last week took me right back to these same kitchens I remember as a child. Food culture in Rachel’s now-home city of Rome is comparable with that of a Jewish one, where generations young and old meet to prepare long, family feasting meals. Things have changed, Rachel confirmed the Roman’s are as time poor as the rest of us, however the big difference being that they still make the time to feast together. I must confess, our traditional long family Friday night suppers have long been forgotten. Now replaced by a quick shove-it-down-your-throat kind of a dinner, before heading to the local swimming pool (or two in our case) to watch kids swim back and fourth whilst we sit losing a few pounds and a little sanity in the shvitzing heat.Whilst time and hobbies place our Shabbat feast firmly on hold for now, we have found a few unorthodox ways to keep their fiery traditions alive. Flatbread pizza is our short cut to those same conversations - although generally speaking more based on the classroom, rather than the jewish community. The process of weighing the flour, bringing the flour and yogurt together to create a silky dough and kneading it until it reaches the elastic smooth consistency required for delicious flat breads. The waiting of the dough to rest and the cast iron pan to heat to the right consistency. This is all an excuse to find those gold nuggets of conversation, to converse and download after a long week. And argue over who the unlucky recipient of that first flatbread reject will be this week - just like the first pancake, the first flatbread is never the crispiest.
Flat Bread Pizza
Just like play dough, making flat bread pizza dough from scratch is a wonderful meditative process. You will have no lack of helpers in the kitchen. It draws everyone around the table, as if pollen to a bee, everyone wanting their turn to push and stretch the silky dough. Think fidgets, only of the edible kind. The best part is the cooking of the flat breads, preferably on a ridged cast iron pan to achieve those wonderful panini like black lines where once the dough touches it, a delicious wood fired smell lingers in the air and remains all night long.
Once the flatbreads are all cooked, we take them to the table and everyone builds their own. I like to switch things up with our base sauce so one week we might use a pesto, another we might channel our inner French self with a salsa verde and if feeling particularly crazy, we head to the middle east and drizzle spicy zhoug. Whatever the sauce, the topping always remains the same, torn mozzarella, rocket, spinach and a drizzle of chilli oil.
Here I use spelt flour for the dough as it is a wonderful way to increase diversity, however you can use whatever flour you have lurking at the back of the cupboard.
Well that’s a new one. Will give it a go. Xx
Loving that passage of writing about hands ... so evocative!