18Nov Hot Pot
Two plump, dark-haired women sit in the sun-splashed earth outside a large kitchen near Petah Tikva, a suburb of Tel Av iv. They are the kitchen help on a peanut farm.
Most of the morning they pick tiny black stones out of huge cotton sacks of rice, the dietary staple. The women have done this for years, chattering away in Arabic, laughing, sharing gossip in the orange-fragrant air.
When I arrive to work alongside them, it is from a fast-paced kitchen position at an Austrian B&B. Our specialties there were cordon bleu and linser torte. A lover of Mediterranean food, I was hoping to learn to make shish kebab and baklava in the Middle East. Instead, I’m invited to sit alongside a iow bench in the sunshine. I join these women in the culling of rice. Their language is beautiful, the sounds quick and bright. But although the sun is gloriously warm in January, coming halfway around the globe to pick stones out of rice disgruntles me.
In Austria I’d been hired to clean bedrooms. One drizzly afternoon, after the linens were washed, ironed, and put back on the beds, I went to the kitchen. Within an hour I’d stirred together a batch of cookies from scratch. When the chocolate-drop darlings were released from the oven, B&B staff gravitated to the kitchen from all corners of the house. Within weeks I was no longer making beds but was baking cakes, pies, and cinnamon rolls. Later I made breakfasts, lunches, and three-course dinners.
Having traveled from a gourmet kitchen in Austria to a primitive Arabic kitchen, I had no way of knowing that the most important culinary lessons had not yet begun.
