Boker Tov: Kosher Vegetarian Recipes and Stories

"I wondered about including this book because it’s not freely available, but you can buy it direct from the publisher online. I just love it. I went to the Jewish Cultural Centre in Warsaw for their famous Sunday brunch, which is where I saw it on sale. I like it because, format-wise, it’s very interesting: it shows what a cookbook can do. It has lovely sketches in it—which sometimes take up two pages—and recipes, obviously, and also short essays. Reading it, is a bit like being a fly on the wall of the café. You never know exactly who you are listening to. It’s quite chaotic. And as these essays are attributed to people just by name, you don’t know who they are—is it the washing up guy? the cook? the delivery guy? the owner? You’re never sure. I like that playfulness. But most importantly it shows how Jewish food culture is living on after the pogroms, after the Holocaust, after the Communist regime. It’s quite a hopeful book. All the recipes are vegetarian and kosher, which is very niche, but it includes traditional Jewish recipes like latkes and challah bread. In Kraków, I visited Kazimierz, the Jewish historical area. Some have called it a sort of Jewish Disneyland, although I didn’t think it was that at all, I thought it was quite well done. But there are a lot of, like, klezmer bands playing in Jewish restaurants. This, to me, was a contrast. Boker Tov is a very low-key café in Warsaw, where you see living Jewish culture in a more natural environment. There are communal tables, and it gets very, very busy. They’re just trying to do something different, and I like it for that. Jewish culture does not have always to be nostalgic or tragic. This showed a very modern Jewish Poland. Thank you. Well, briefly, in 2016 I published a book called Samarkand . That’s a very standard cookbook. It has essays in it, but mainly it’s recipes from Central Asia and a few from the South Caucasus. I wanted to produce that book because there was, again, this terrible misconception in the West about Central Asian food being dreadful. Or, I don’t know, if you don’t eat meat then you are going to starve there. That’s just not true. There was very little tourist infrastructure when I first visited Samarkand in 2009. I was staying in people’s homes, the food was great, and there were massive markets selling things we can only dream of: amazing dried herbs, fresh herbs, nuts from Azerbaijan, Uzbek melons, which are the best in the world… I wanted to write that book to show people that there’s another side to it. But I also got frustrated writing that book, because I was told by my publisher at the time that they wanted a cookbook, but what I was pushing for was more of a travelogue with recipes. Then I started to travel around the Black Sea, and I felt that region would suit a more narrative form of cookbook. I wanted to write a book where I would travel one straight journey from Odesa to Trabzon, and to write about the shared culinary cultures around the Black Sea, what those communities share and how they are different. That really lent itself to a narrative nonfiction-style book. Then I thought, well, I like cooking, so I would include recipes so people can taste the things that I’m writing about—taste the journey. And the photographer I worked with, Theodore Kaye, has got quite a journalistic style, which I also liked. So there are reportage-style essays in there, recipes, photos. I have a very interesting readership, from what I can gather. There are people who will read anything about Central Asia, the Caucasus and their neighbouring countries —and I’m one of those people. There are armchair travelers. There are people who will buy any cookbook about what they think is an underrepresented place. I think my books capture all of those people. So, yes, they are broad books, but they are all on the region between Eastern Europe and Central Asia, and what connects them. That’s right. My work is in the territory of ‘food and the faraway.’ I wanted this book to bring it back home, to bring people into my basement kitchen in Edinburgh. The kitchen is like a portal to me. I’m an extremely restless person, but when I moved into my flat, and got this kitchen, I knew it had something that would hold me. I’d never owned anything before. I’d had terrible experiences renting in London, and finally I found somewhere where I felt settled to some degree for the first time. I connected with the kitchen instantly. So, we’re in Edinburgh, but the book travels out to different places. I’ll be cooking a dish—for the Polish chapter for example, I’m preparing a cold soup—and we will travel to Kraków, where I talk about Jewish history and some of what I experienced there. Then we come back to Edinburgh—the book always comes back home. I see the kitchen as a kind of way to bring down the drawbridge between here and there. I don’t think you necessarily have to be peripatetic and travel the whole time. It’s about paying attention. If you just hold a lime in your hand and actually think about where it’s come from, the journey it’s taken from the tree, from the village it came from—or, a peppercorn, maybe, from Cambodia—or mint that then might remind you of a cup of tea once poured in the Atlas Mountains. When I come home and unload the Georgian sunflower oil, or the dried herbs and spices, or the Ukrainian chocolates, that is both a way of sealing-off that trip but then also starting again, remembering and recording. I like that the kitchen is underground; and how Edinburgh comes in through the one solitary window. I can look up and see people’s legs going by, hear all the voices. In August, when people are drunk and smoking spliffs during the festival—you have all that coming in. All the noises. The sound of wheelie suitcases on cobbles. So yes, I love this kitchen, and I worry I’m never going to be able to leave. Now that I’ve written this book, I’m even more attached to it. It’s a book about curiosity, about feeling at home in the world—and the importance of having a home to come home to, somewhere safe and stable."