Israeli Kitchen

Cool kebabs up there, eh? All skewered with their slices of vegetables, ready for the grill. There might be sleeker, fancier places to shop for kosher food in Brooklyn. But when I told my son I wanted to visit a typical kosher supermarket, he took me to Landau’s, on 4510-18th Avenue.

My son asked the owner, a taciturn older man, for permission to take photographs. He explained that I’m from Israel and write a food blog. They spent long minutes talking: my son may have had to explain what a blog is.  I offered my business card. Mr. Landau inspected me mistrustfully but finally decided that I looked legitimate and nodded yes, summoning his own son to show us around.

I was dazzled by the display of gefulte fish.

Now how about this smoked cholent meat? I’d never even heard of smoked cholent meat. My ignorant Israeli eyes were being opened to the true meaning of kosher gourmandaise.

It’s a fairly large place. Lots and lots of products, and lots of different people, too.

A tall blond dressed in a black suit and stiletto heels stood out from the Jewish housewives and kids in strollers. She pushed her shopping cart around in a hurry, probably hungry for dinner after a long day in a high-powered office. A man dressed in an extremely clean striped T-shirt and shorts, dreadlocks bobbing around his face, stopped dead in front of her cart. He started talking in a language that wasn’t English, and may not have been anybody’s language but his own. The blond’s face froze. He gestured and babbled and wouldn’t budge, and the blond was trapped in the back of the shop with him.

My son and I exchanged glances. We’ll help her, we communicated silently. He walked over and put himself between the man and the blond’s shopping cart,  saying, “Excuse me, can I just get this…?” and reached up for something on a shelf. That freed the blond, who freed, fled. The man with the dreads switched to English, mumbling, “Why are you all Jewish? Stop being Jewish.” And went his disoriented way.

In Israel, someone would have led him out of the store. In Brooklyn, nobody even said anything to him. Other people had noticed, but nobody was going to get involved. In Israel, everybody gets involved, all the time. I suppose that in our small society, you can size people up more or less, and know how they’re going to react. In big New York, strangers are unpredictable and may become dangerous.

Talk about culture shock.

Any fresh food

or packaged food

is available at Landau’s, or so it seemed to me. And all kosher.

I wandered around the aisles, enjoying shocks of nostalgia when some product from my childhood caught my eye. Maypo breakfast cereal! I still remember the jingle: “Every single morning, I want my Maypo!”

But what really struck me, forcefully and not for the last time, was how much folks in the States require convenience from their food. It’s becoming like that in Israel, too. I just hope that the kitchen influences of all the grandmas and grandpas linger in the Israeli mind, so that we don’t lose the precious heritages of our ethnic foods.

I was starting to feel a little lonely for the warmth of Hebrew – I, who have never been able to drop my American accent and whose aleph-beit vocabulary shrinks when I get flustered. Not exactly homesick; I was too happy, being with my boy. Who’s 30 years old and a big, scary guy. (What can you do, a Jewish mother is a Jewish mother.)

But my boy knew what to do – he took me to Mansoura Bakery in King’s Highway. There, we found the petite, vivacious Josiane, whose sparkling friendliness and French-accented Hebrew made me feel at home right away.

Not to mention the fabulous confections and pastries in the shop. Like this rich baklava. Enough to drive all thoughts of dieting right out of your mind.

But I was able to withstand temptation because of these hand-made, pistachio-stuffed, sugar-free chocolates.

Magical. In fact, the whole shop was magical, with it’s European air and Mediterranean delicacies.

Another kosher bakery on Kings Highway is Sababa. My son is friends with the owner, who allowed me to photograph his tempting baked goods -

and even to descend a steep staircase to the basement, where the work is done.

We were just leaving Kings Highway, when this sign stopped me in my tracks.

Isn’t it strange to have felt a shock?  I’m used to seeing young soldiers with their rifles everywhere in Israel. I hardly see the guns anymore. Yet realizing that shooting a cop is a common enough crime to warrant this sign – well, it rattled me.

Other things amused me, like the bottles in this Russian liquor store.

Notice the one in the shape of a machine gun, in the back right-hand side. Draw your own conclusions.

I loved this wall mural, a big advertisement for a laundromat. There isn’t much street art in Brooklyn, I noticed. But this mural, cleverly using  protruding bricks for the girl’s ironing board, was great.

One of the highlights of my Brooklyn experience was meeting with my friend Leda Meredith, who has contributed guest posts here at Israeli Kitchen.

Leda – dancer, choreographer, writer,  authority on locavore life and sustainable food, and I – Jewish matron, doulah, soapmaker and writer, have been email friends for ten years. Two women as different as a robin and a hen, but meeting and chatting was natural and easy.  Leda gave me a copy of her latest book, The Locavore’s Handbook. I’ll be blogging about the book and about Leda herself in a later post.

Is that all there was of New York for me? Of course not. There were mornings spent in museums, interviews with people I work for – or just found interesting- a delicious kosher Chinese meal, horrible coffee at Starbucks, tramping around with my son, a kaleidoscope of impressions. But for now, and it’s 4:30 in the jet-lagged morning, it’s enough.

Feel like hearing about my trip to Calgary? I’ll write about it if you like, and that will be Part 3.