When historians examine a cookbook, they do not see a collection of recipes, explained Dr. Erela Taharlev Ben Shachar, a historian of nutrition. “They view it as a window to a certain point in time, and through this window we can get a glimpse of the values of that time, as well as of the life of women and their status in society.”
In a conversation with journalist Ronit Vered at the Asif library, Ben Shachar discussed the rare cookbook “Sefer Bishul,” which translates simply to “Cookbook” published by the Women’s International Zionist Organization’s (Wizo) training department in the late 1940s, and the national mood in the years before the founding of Israel.
“I am familiar with the first books written in Israel in the 20th century, aiming to shape and define its emerging culture, but I was not familiar with this book,” said Vered, food journalist and senior content advisor for Asif, at the start of the conversation. She isn’t alone. Little is known about the book, there’s no mention of the name of the authors of the recipes or the year the book was published. “It’s a mystery,” said Vered. Asif asked Ben Shachar to dig into the book’s past and find out who authored it, who they were writing for, and why.
A Cookbook With a Purpose
Founded with the goal of providing agricultural training for women, Wizo had existed for just seven years when a severe economic crisis hit Mandatory Palestine in 1927. It invested its scarce budget in founding a training department, which taught urban women how to grow vegetables in their yards. The first area to rise to the challenge was in Balfour Street in Tel Aviv. These gardens were the motivation for the book: “It’s one thing to grow vegetables and quite a different thing to know how to cook them,” Ben Shachar said. “At Wizo, they understood they needed to push cooking. The recipes were meant to encourage those vegetable patches.”
Ben Shachar defines the kitchen these women created as “a kitchen of effort. You can feel they made an effort, for example in making vegetables pose as meat: liver-flavored eggplants, zucchini ‘brain,’ cabbage schnitzel or eggplant goulash.” Unlike what we are accustomed to thinking, said Vered, this was not only the result of the tzena (austerity) period. Ben Shachar added: “Everything had to imitate meat, because meat was what people ate. You only ate vegetables if they pretended to be meat.” The recipes also highlight seasons and the need to use up a bounty of produce like summer zucchini before it rots.
Local ingredients, such as tahini or fish from the Mediterranean, are hardly used in the Wizo recipes. This shows the complex relationship settlers had with the local, native Arab population. “On the one hand, the settlers thought they were better, with science on their side; what do the Arabs eat, vegetables? We eat them for vitamins, but they are simply stuck behind. On the other hand, there was always this feeling that they know things we do not know, they know what to do with chicory, with cumin, etc. So the dialogue was patronizing on the one hand, and on the other hand there was some peeking and copying,” Ben Shachar explained.
The Golden Age of (Cooking) Science
Likely published on the eve of the declaration of the state of Israel, in 1947, the book is the life’s work of 20 women, summing up a 20-year long attempt to shape the kitchen of the Jewish Yishuv (Jews living in Mandatory Palestine before 1948). “I don’t think they aspired to create an Israeli kitchen,” Ben Shachar explained. “They aspired to survive in very hard conditions, both physically and mentally. Within this difficulty, food is always a big drama, because in the end everybody is hungry, and that is what the book betrays.”
The book opens with a table of contents, immediately followed by “An Introduction – the Food Your Body Requires.” In this strictly scientific foreword, dedicated to the importance of nutrition, it says: “To be able to provide your family members adequate nutrition, you must be familiar with the various nutrients required by the body, as well as their purposes. Together, food nutrients satisfy the body’s demands – they build, strengthen, renew, and revitalize.” In many parts of the world, said Ben Shachar, this era was associated with the glorification of science, and that affected cooking, too: “There was an attempt to subjugate all kitchen activities to nutrition. Women were expected to know all about proteins, vitamins, and calories, so that they could feed those under their responsibility with the right quantities. This project by Wizo, of trying to write recipes in Hebrew both for urban women and for the women who cooked for the kibbutzs, corresponded with the rise of vitamins worldwide.”
How was this trend so quick to penetrate Israel, a relatively remote and isolated country, with a small population? Ben Shachar explained that the Israeli menu relies on scientific principles more than any other menu in the world, as part of the settlers’ wish to establish a utopian society. Naively, they believed they were immigrating to an empty land, so “the feeling was that there were no foundations. It’s not like having a French tradition that you have to fit into. So [they thought]: let’s already do this ‘rationally,’ and use science to create an Israeli menu.”
The second most common ingredient in the book, after vegetables, was flour, which stemmed from a concern over calories, explained Ben Shachar. “Calories were considered an optimal part of nutrition, especially for the main heroes of Zionism, the hard-working workers and farmers.”
The Women Behind the Recipes
Except the general attribution to “The Women of Wizo,” the recipes bear no credit to writers or editors. As Ben Shachar reveals, the recipe writers were 20 senior instructors at Wizo and the editor Ruzia Yevnin. Most of them held a BA or a higher degree in home economics. “Home economics was nutrition science adapted for housewives,” Ben Shachar explained. “It was a combination of nutrition with Taylorism (scientific management) – aiming at science-based efficiency. For example, figuring out the best sitting position for washing dishes, so as not to move one’s hands too much. There is a right way for every action, and this way is of course scientific, research-based and measured by the minute.”
One of the experts who contributed to this project was Dr. Erna Meyer. Like many others, she was an immigrant who fled the Nazis, leaving behind a successful career as a home economics guru. She even published a book, which was printed in multiple languages, including Chinese. “She was a woman who shaped a kitchen,” Ben Shachar says.
Although home economics told women they were professionals adhering to science, and not simple dishwashers or choppers, its goal was to discipline women, said Ben Shachar. “Suddenly they had an ‘office,’ a kitchen where they could cook. They were respected in that office, yet it was separated from the rest of the home, or the common dining hall at the Kibbutz…. Nobody saw how much work, how much effort, they were putting into the kitchen.”
Another prominent member of the writers’ team was Lilian Cornfeld, who later wrote several cookbooks including “Israeli Cookery.” “Lilian did not let Zionism discipline her,” Ben Shachar said. “First, she came from Canada, unlike most immigrants who came from Europe. And she lived across the street from the Carmel Market, which I also believe was a crucial factor. She understood the wonderful richness of Israel, beyond the Mandatory Palestine of that time.” This can explain why her recipes were so different from others of the time. She wrote a column for the Jerusalem Post, with a recipe for apricot dumplings, for example, and as Dr. Dafna Hirsch discovered, she was also the first to publish a recipe for hummus.
Another of the authors was Ziona Katinsky, the only sabra, or native-born Israeli, in the group. After graduating from high school, she planned to study literature abroad. “But unfortunately for her, she met Hana Meisel,” recounts Ben Shachar. “She told Ziona, never mind literature, the Yishuv needs you, calls you, it needs home economics experts. She succeeded in convincing her…. As an instructor, Ziona later founded the chadar ochel, the communal dining hall of the kibbutz.”
One of the difficulties the Wizo instructors faced was that some of the women refused to be assigned to the kitchen. “When Ziona reached the kibbutz, she met some fierce resistance. These were women who immigrated in the Second Aliyah, most of them from socialist Russia, wishing to form a new utopian society based on equality – both economic equality and gender equality,” Ben Shachar said. Eventually, Ziona succeeded in making the chadar ochel a well-known establishment and convinced women to work there.
Urban immigrants weren’t eager to enter the kitchen either, though for different reasons. “Sefer Bishul” urged them to: “Let go of your precious baked goods of the Diaspora and start cooking on a kerosene stove.” Yet the real crisis, according to Ben Shachar, was how entirely different the food was. “The last thing immigrants give up on, except their accent, perhaps, is food. Yet immigrants to Israel were told: ‘Your food? Forget about it…. Wizo instructors attempted to teach cooking to women who were not interested, and whose husbands did not want to eat the food they cooked.
Taking Advantage of the Season
The second volume of the book starts with a table of seasonal vegetables. “Think how amazing it is,” exclaimed Vered. “It took us about 70 years, if not longer, to somehow get back to this point.” Ben Shachar explained that the focus on vegetables had various goals, one of them was the attempt to use women, in their role as consumers, to promote Israeli agriculture.
The recipes “Sefer Bishul” were collected in the years 1927-1947, at the time of highly dramatic events: the Fourth Aliyah and the extreme economic crisis which followed, the Arab Revolt of 1936, and War World II. The Arab Revolt included a general strike, and Ben Gurion saw it as an opportunity to create an autonomous Israeli economy and encourage women to only purchase produce grown by Jewish farmers. “Another, less-known story is that the instructors encouraged women to buy produce from women Jewish farmers,” Ben Shachar explained. Headed by Meisel, they challenged the exclusion of women from agricultural work. To be a Zionist meant to be a farmer, “to conquer the land, the conquer the body, to become native, strong, to bring forth bread from the land. Telling these women they could not be farmers was like telling them they had less value.”
Hana, who had a PhD in agronomy, wished to make room for women in agriculture. She realized that what stood in their way was the kind of agriculture developed by the pioneers – falha, or field crops. “Hana said, let’s plant some vegetable patches, and she founded Havat HaAlamot (The Maidens’ Farm), an agricultural school where women could also learn other jobs, such as dairy and poultry farming. Vegetables were a way for women to become integrated in society, to become powerful and to provide for themselves…. Those who started growing vegetables could suddenly support themselves.”
The first of those farms was on the shore of Lake Kinneret. “Some of the graduates of the Maidens’ Farm, which closed shortly before the end of WWI, helped women who turned to prostitution during the war. Independent female communes, dubbed ‘vegetable groups,’ were formed around vegetable patches,” Ben Shachar noted. All in all, there were nine such farms, and nearly all of Meisel’s graduates were involved: “They were thinking, that’s that, no one will tell us what to do anymore, we will no longer be waiting for outside help.”
A Self-Sufficient Woman
These books created conventions. They do not necessarily tell us what women cooked in practice, Ben Shachar noted at the end of the program, but they testify to the spirit of the times and what was expected of women.
