Why, Yotam, Why?

So many people piss me off, I should probably live in solitary confinement.

This time around, it’s Yotam Ottolenghi, celebrity chef, culinary thought leader, and Jewish guy from Jerusalem and London. For a while in the first and second year of COVID, everyone I knew was cooking from his recipes. Bored and fretful, we bought all the books, beautiful affairs stuffed with words and pictures that made it seem like life was still worth living. I remember thinking a lot about the covers, weirdly padded so that they squished like pillows. Each one seemed like its own puffy taco.

I also remember putting the books down. I had eaten a great meal at one of his restaurants in London. As desperate as I was to replicate that experience, nearly every recipe was long and complicated, more Julia Child than Ina Garten. More Escoffier than Guy Fieri. I’ve got lots of patience for practically everything, but Yotam Ottolenghi wanted too much of me. I actually know what caster sugar is (halfway between granulated and powdered), but I didn’t know if you could get it in an American supermarket or if it was enough to put regular sugar in the Cuisinart. Even with the leisure that came with COVID, it was all a culinary bridge too far. Twenty ingredients is fifteen too many.

But that didn’t mean that I stopped reading his work. There is a trio of his cookbooks still on our shelves. Very occasionally I take one down, if for no other reason than to look at the pictures. It’s been a long time since food has been photographed in the old way: no crumbs, no smears, no uneven edges. But Ottolenghi took things to an entirely new level. His sheet pans are a mess. There are crumbles everywhere. It gives you the sense that cooking is three-dimensional, that it is not immaculate, that there will be slop.

And I loved the intimacy and cosmopolitanism of his writing. It seemed to reflect a whole human being: a gay British immigrant married to an Anglo Saxon Englishman. Ottolenghi has roots in Israel and Western Europe, fellow feeling with Palestinians, and an informed Jewish sensibility. The ethnocentrist in me loved that part. I’m also enough of a chauvinist to take pleasure and pride in Jews who operates at a high level of achievement and bother to identify as members of the tribe.

Lately, however, not so much. I just read a piece in the New York Times about eggs and bread and the feasts of spring. It was a literate piece authored by Yotam Ottolenghi, with a nuanced understanding of food and culture. Nothing could possibly be more Jew-ish than bread and eggs and the festivals of spring. There’s always a roasted egg on the seder plate, and Passover is entirely focused on bread, namely the lean, flat bread of the Exodus story. But you wouldn’t know any of this from the article. Ottolenghi wrote as someone eager to pass about his celebration of Easter, the symbol of the egg in Christianity, and bread in the Christian communities of Europe. It’s as if the Jewishness of his history had been rinsed away.

I can already hear what some of you are muttering. What exactly is this guy saying about Ottolenghi, that someone who writes about Easter has betrayed the Jews? Au contraire: he seems to have betrayed himself, at least in the way this article was written. It turns out I love a certain kind of Jew: worldly, sophisticated, engaged with modernity, educated, multilingual, and at home in society. Not for me the retrograde separatists who think that everything but Judaism is contaminated, treif.

But I like it when those Jews foreground their origins, point to their value, and fold it into their rhetoric. How much more honest and authentic would it have been if Ottolenghi had spoken about all bread and all eggs. What’s clear is that may no longer be comfortable for this chef, that self-erasure has put in its claim for his soul.

Talk among yourselves!