Taste of Israel Cookbook - A Mediterranean Feast

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Description:  Everywhere - Israel is no exception - people who care about food are waging war on the hamburger. Taste of Israel cookbooks is a zestful journey to the bastions of authentic regional and ethnic cuisine in modern Israel. Text, recipes and photographs challenge the senses, especially the gustatory, visual and tactile. Out of a mix of culinary heritages -- European, North African, Mediterranean, Arab -- and a relatively recent appreciation of French, Italian, American and Japanese cooking, an indigenous cuisine is emerging in Israel, pioneered by young chefs who pride themselves on making the most of local ingredients. They have a marvelous range to choose from, far more to excite their imagination than the prickly pear, the orange and the eternal avocado. Today Israel even exports top quality foie gras to France. 

Decades of determined botanizing on the part of kibbutzniks and moshavniks have produced fruits of every climatic persuasion from apples and quinces to dates and mangoes, every kind of fresh herb, cereal, root vegetable and salad vegetable, and all the vegetables one associates with the shores of the Mediterranean. There is lamb in abundance, beef, chicken, duck, goose and quail, and in the dairy line every gradation between milk and mature cheese. From fish farms fed by the chilly waters of Mount Hermon come freshwater trout, from the Mediterranean and the Gulf of Eilat come gray mullet, grouper, palamida... 

But Taste of Israel is not only culinary in its focus. It is a shrewdly observed, funny, often critical portrait of Israelis themselves. "A lot of eating is done in Israel standing up" and "Israelis are prepared for two emergencies: army reserve duty and barbecues." Is the typical Israeli sabra or "prickly pear" losing his or her prickles and revealing to the world the sweetness of the fruit inside? The answer, in this magnificently photographed book, seems to be "yes." 

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Condition: Very good condition with very slight shelf wear..