Already at the age of 9, Farhiya learned that the rabbis cook Tabitha, kitschy and tobacco, and even at the age of 78, the hands did not forget the smells and tastes of Iraq • Together with her young son and wife, she brings them here as well
"We sell 5 and a half tons of food, and she's not giving up anything."
Flowers that the rabbi and her daughter-in-law Limor
Photography:
Ithiel Zion
Farhiya, the rabbi of Beit Yona, was 17 and a half years old when her older brother married Morris, a friend of a friend, a construction worker who was then 23. She had been engaged for three years and three months, refused to marry before having some money in her pocket to buy a house in installments.
£ 150 was borrowed from Mashen, 250 from Auxiliary Farm, Bank Leumi lent them 500, Bank Hapoalim 300, and Morris' boss 1,000 pounds.
58 years have passed since then, but the numbers at Farhia are strong in the head.
Like the dimensions of the crates in which they kept the bread in Mosul, the city in northern Iraq where she was born.
"These were wooden crates made by the Turks. Twenty meters by twenty meters," she says as we sit in the yard of her home in the Morasha neighborhood of Ramat Hasharon.
Three of her and Morris' four children, his wife Eden, set up a house next to her, and the gate to the yard opens and closes, grandchildren come and go, make her mud coffee the way she likes, make a sponge without her asking.
"We lived in a narrow neighborhood," she goes on to tell the beginning of her life, "the houses were door to door and there was a baker walking around between them. Every day in a different house, you found the heat to the soul. She had a wooden stick where she would roll the dough thin, stretch it. On a kind of inverted tub up to a diameter of 80 cm, then, with a special cushion, would attach to the sides of the oven.
When he was ready, she would fold it into four and place it in a box.
It is kept for a long time.
It tasted like heaven. "
• • •
She does not remember her mother, who is said to have been the most beautiful of the girls in the family.
Her head, which turned 78 a month ago and remembers everything in great detail, seeks to grow this one portrait - and fails.
Farhiya was 3 years old when she died, leaving behind a husband and six children, one three months old, and no souvenir photography.
The breastfeeding that Dad hired after the disaster failed to keep the baby alive.
"At the age of three months she died, not about you, and Dad, who was 38 when he was widowed, never remarried," she continues with a smile, as if seeking to sweeten the bitterness in the words.
This little woman, with strong palms in which a cigarette is replaced by a cigarette, spread the glory of Iraqi sweetness on the table.
Coconut and sesame cookies, candied pomelo peels, milky sweets, fried dough snails - the zangula, and bubbling in the tamarind, are unforgettable, as if Purim is approaching and not Hanukkah today.
On the stove blossomed a forest of pots.
Meat with eggplant in sweet and sour - the ingrey, and next to it the salon, a fish stew that begins with soaking in water and lemon, which will give off bad smells like the smells of mud that sometimes accompanied the sturgeon, stuffed rice, meatballs with dried fruits and cubes But since hearing the doctor explain that bad beef has replaced it with chicken breast, it is much tastier than it sounds.
She was 8 years old when they immigrated to Israel.
Father and five children.
They lived in Tiberias for a year, then moved to the Ramat Hasharon transit camp, to live next to Aunt Yaji, the mother of the mother who took care of them.
She remembers the truck, which was loaded with the metal suitcases, the mattresses on which the family sat all the way to the center, and the neighbor from Tiberias, who wished them a puncture on the way because she did not want them to leave.
And how they slept in military showers until the agency got them a tent.
For three years they lived in this tent, "Winds, storms, one day we got up and all the kitchen utensils were floating in the water," she rolls with laughter.
"I killed three scorpions that were on their way to my little sister. I don't know how they actually felt about her."
After that the family moved to the hut and the scorpions were replaced by fleas.
"Today they are called bed bugs, but you will write Katamel, that all Iraqis will remember itching. You wanted to take a knife to cut the skin from most of the itching."
That way until 1956, when the family moved into an apartment.
Farhiya finished eighth grade in a religious school.
In the morning the boys and girls studied in the afternoon, so she had time for household chores.
Dad worked in the military industry, the brothers in agriculture, and in the evening they would go to evening classes in Herzliya.
When they gave her money for new shoes, she went and bought two vases.
"Because I knew that if next month they saw that I was without shoes, they would give me money. Nobody would buy vases, and I wanted us to have things at home. At the end of '56 I bought an Amishragaz stove," she says, and in her words the pride has not yet faded.
"Dad, my big sister and the brothers worked like donkeys. My little sister was rebellious. I would beg her to help me clean, cook, wash, I would beat her and she would start crying, and I would cry with her. On Saturday we would get one small cube of cow chocolate. Small, not like "Today's the dice, and I would try to do business with her. My cube in exchange for her washing the floor. Nothing. They would tell me, 'She's the little one, give her up.'"
• • •
Aunt Yaji was her first cooking teacher.
By the age of 9 she was already her sous-chef and by the time she reached the age of mitzvah she already knew how to make kitschy and tobacco, "What today is called makluba, layer upon layer. I learned to fill Latvian poultry. Today tabith is called all sorts of things, but there must be stuffed chicken, otherwise it Not Tabitha. "
Then, when she met Morris, it was his mother, Naima Shaharbani, who had a teacher in the kitchen.
Increased the sour-sweet in her food, "because they are Baghdadites, love that taste."
In '78 she opened Shukshuk, a small vegetable shop.
As it turned out, this is what happened, and Oded, the youngest of her children who studied law and accounting, is the only one who continued in the food business that this store grew.
To this day he remembers the watermelon truck Dad would unload there, how he would sit and with 12-year-old fingers pull out the black kernels to make nuts, and how Mom started the rocky, a craft that developed into tons of pickles marketed all over the country.
He increased his retail marketing to wholesale marketing for restaurants, and seven years ago, as part of his work, he met Limor Oren, who was the CEO of the Giraffe and Jafnica chain. A meeting that never stopped.
They moved in together, with their six children. From the previous marriage of the two, with a fire that new loves can ignite. After the store had to be vacated, they set up "smells and tastes" in the industrial area of Ramat Hasharon. prepared.
It is Limor who cooks, the property encouraged.
Spices are self-imported, self-made pickles of course, and among the cuisines of Asia, North Africa and Ashkenazi, there is also the cuisine of Farhiya.
"We sell 5 and a half tons of food a week, and she doesn't give up on me for anything," Limor says of her mother-in-law. "She insists I dry the chard leaves in the sun."
"Obviously. Because that's how they come out like a cloth. They don't tear at the filling," explains Farhiya, who will be clear that this is not just a whim.
A whole life she cooks, and has never turned to shortcuts.
If there are vegetables in the freezer, they are just the ones she cleaned, cut and divided into bags.
I look at both of them, at the late bride who came to the family, whose passion for cooking wakes her up in the morning and sends her to the kitchen, thinking of God doing tough business with her flowers since she was 3. That only this year, in two months, took him three of her siblings.
But in return he gave her the wisdom of laughter.
The wisdom of construction to put such a family, the power in the hands that to this day cook.
Who introduced her to good people at the stations of her life.
Who cared for her father who always gave her back and sent her this bride, and that maybe, even just in a dream, one wish would come true for her, "to go to Mosul, to mother's grave. I believe that there, above him, I will be able to remember her face."
In honor of childhood with power, in honor of women who believe in the power of love and the power of food, and in honor of her flowers, Lapidot's wife, I bring from her kitchen a recipe for a dish with history, and with it two companions who know how to ignite appetite.
Umbrellas with meat dumplings
The apricot, a stew of meat or chicken that roams Eastern cuisines in dozens of versions, with or without apricots, has a written history that goes back hundreds of years, to al-Baghdadi's 13th-century cookbook, where lamb is the star.
Farhia's recipe includes tomato and pumpkin puree, which arrived in the Old World several centuries after the publication of the same book, and has two touches that I planted from the original recipe, as published by Claudia Roden in "For the Delicacies of the East" (published by Sirkis).
In Iraq, such animal fat, lamb or beef was used for such dishes.
Here the olive oil replaces it.
The amount is good for 8-10 diners.
Ingredients for the dumplings:
√ 1 kg of lamb chops in one tahini
√ 1 large onion finely chopped
√ a little salt
√ a little black pepper
For the sauce
:
√ 1/4 cup olive oil
√ 1 medium white onion finely chopped
√ 3 heaping tablespoons tomato paste
√ 2 cups water
√ 2 carrots sliced into 1/2 cm thick rings
√ 1/2 kg peeled and diced pumpkin 4 cm in size
√ 1/2 kg dried apricots
√ 200 g light raisins
√ 70 g ground almonds
√ 3/4 tablespoon salt salted
√ 1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
√ 1 teaspoon ground black pepper
√ juice from - 1/2 lemon
Put all the dumpling ingredients together and narrow the mixture into 6 cm balls, which are crammed into a wide pan. Cover and cook over low heat until you see that they shrink "and become uniform". Turn the balls over and repeat the operation on the other side. The whole process takes about 6 Minutes and at the end turn off
the heat.Now pour the olive oil into the pot and brown the onion over medium heat.Add the tomato paste and stir for 2 minutes.Add the water and carrots, bring to a boil and cook for about 15 minutes in an open pot.Add the pumpkin, apricots, raisins, ground almonds , Salt, spices and lemon juice and bring to another boil, lower the heat, place the dumplings in a pot and continue to cook for about 10 minutes, serve over white rice.
Tomato salad in Amaba
How simple, how delicious.
This salad (like anything that has ambala), also knows how to whet the appetite, to instill in the mouth a desire for the next bite.
Flowers use an ambush of "sun".
The amount is nice for 4-6 diners, depending on what it is served with.
Ingredients:
√ 6 diced tomatoes about 1 cm in size
√ 4-5 finely chopped green onions
√ 1/2 1 tablespoon Amaba
√ 1/4 teaspoon salt
Simply mix in a bowl, taste and adjust seasoning.
This salad can hold up to two days in the refrigerator.
Pickled lemon of flowers
I love pickled lemon, and I especially loved it.
Ingredients:
√ 4 large lemons with a thick rind
√ 2 hot peppers, one green and one red, sliced into rings
about 2 mm thick ("with the seeds. Be spicy and have a light work")
√ 1 tablespoon salt
√ 1/2 tbsp Sweet paprika
√ 1/2 tablespoon hot paprika
√ 1/2 cup olive oil
Mix all the ingredients well in a bowl and compress into a jar.
It is important to make sure that the oil coats all the lemon slices well, and "even after half an hour you can start eating."
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