Welcome to the latest issue of Weekly Special, a food-art newsletter by Andrea Gyorody.
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Before we get to our artwork of the week, a few morsels to share:
Apropos of my focus, this week and last, on knafeh, I want to recommend a book I’m finally reading after letting it languish on my shelf for way too long: Palestine Inside Out, by Saree Makdisi. A professor of English and Comp Lit at UCLA, Makdisi narrates in clear, considered language what life looks like for Palestinians in East Jerusalem, Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel, with heart-rending anecdotes about the daily violence and trauma of occupation. It’s not an easy read, but a necessary one. If you want more historical context to understand the news (and take action), start here.
On a lighter note: Follow Weekly Special on Instagram for regular food-art news! If you have any tips, send ‘em my way by DM or email.
Now let’s dig in!
This Week’s Special
Sigalit Landau
Knafeh, 2014
Ultra HD video, 16:20
Collection of the artist
I was captivated by Sigalit Landau’s videos the first time I saw them, in a special screening organized by Will Brown at MOCA Cleveland a few years ago. The screening was held in one of the museum’s intimate video galleries, which I recall because I was very pregnant and had to jockey for a seat, my huge bump not quite as commanding as I needed it to be in the darkened room.
Two videos from that night stuck with me: DeadSee, from 2005, which shows Landau floating nude in the Dead Sea, encircled by a snaking formation of hundreds of watermelons; and Knafeh, from 2014, which documents a young baker making a tray of knafeh from start to finish.
Over the course of 16 minutes, we watch from overhead as the baker layers butter, semolina, and shredded cheese in a large baking pan spinning slowly on a gas-lit stove. Once he’s satisfied that the semolina has browned and the cheese has melted, he flips the whole dessert onto an even bigger pan and douses it with crushed pistachios and sugar syrup tinted blood red. He uses a metal scraper to cut rough portions, served on white plates to unseen eaters. Once the knafeh is gone, he splashes the remaining syrup onto the empty tray, and the hypnotic, thrumming soundtrack suddenly turns to the loud cry of air raid sirens.
Knafeh is, on the one hand, a kind of structuralist film, its duration and framing dictated by the straightforward, step-by-step process of making knafeh. But the elimination of ambient sound and the invocation of terror in its final minutes turn the film in a different direction, one rich with metaphor and ambiguity.
I wanted to know more about what Landau, an Israeli artist, was trying to capture or convey in making a video about a distinctly Arab—and more specifically Palestinian—dessert. I reached out to her with a few questions, which she graciously answered via email. (On a side note: I did also reach out to Emily Jacir for last week’s issue, but did not hear back—fully understandable given the state of the world. If I do hear from Jacir in the future, I’ll publish a follow-up.)
I’ve lightly edited Landau’s responses for clarity, but I’ve allowed some idiosyncrasies and possible misspellings to remain because I found them to be poetic and provocative, of a piece with Landau’s approach to her subject.
What sparked the idea to film the process of making knafeh?
Knafeh—the pastry which in recent years, has been available in multiple variations minus it’s incredibly important ingredient: the fluorescent orange food colouring—was adopted by chefs and embraced by mainstream Israeli gastronomy. However, this was not the case when I was a child. It was and still is one of my favourite secret foods, and, like smells and religious rituals is linked with moments of childhood bliss in Jerusalem—I used to go with my family and our occasional guests from abroad, to the old city when I was a kid and later adolescent in the 70’s and 80’s, as a student there in the 90’s to eat it extra fresh and hot in one specific cake shop. It was before the first Intifada. It was an experience that sometimes evolved into me sneaking into the crazy kitchen where fumes of butter and honey filled the air and mixed with the shouting and odours of cooking gas […]. This regular pilgrimage became a positive-wound in my identity.
Where—and with whom—was Knafeh filmed?
The bakers in Jerusalem were not cooperative when I returned 20 years later, asking them for their time and enthusiasm for the creation of my new video. The time that passed didn’t make co-existence easier in East Jerusalem. Moreover 2014 was a year in which a war between Israel and Hamas broke out. The parallel pastry parlour to Jerusalem’s Jafar Sweets we found was Kashash in Acre, Northern Israel. [Editor’s note: Jafar Sweets, readers may recall, is the pastry shop Emily Jacir visited on Abdulhadi’s behalf for the project Where We Come From, featured in last week’s newsletter.] They were inclined to collaborate and I adjusted to this substitute. I wanted to shoot the process from above, as a top shot, but the bakery had a really low and arched ceiling, so we transported all the magic + the baker’s son, who was happy to star in the piece, to our studio in Southern Tel Aviv in order to shoot this work.
What can you tell me about the video's soundtrack? And more specifically, about the decision to remove ambient sound?
Ambient sound was the heavy and loud traffic near my studio back then, Salame street level. The musician who created the soundtrack for this video is Jean-Philippe Feiss, who made a very subtle and meaningful abstract soundtrack which helps the visual story evolve with very sensual tension.
What is your own relationship to knafeh? Do you think of it as a Palestinian sweet?
Absolutely. No one can argue that Knafeh is anything but a Palestinian dessert. My memories are of an OTHER’s tradition: living and loving in parallel proximity, big hopes and sweet dreams. The experience was an interaction: the tasty color, the family outing, the awe, the metaphor and and also the pain. They are shared in a way—this was Palestine for me, the same as the building sites I used to poke around in before or after working hours.
In the description of Knafeh that appears on your website, you refer to the dessert’s portions as “luscious land-like plots.” Is there a larger metaphor or thought about land (and land division) in your video?
Yes the metaphors are defiantly all there. The pastry, like reality: is multilayered, hot, wet, soft and vulnerable. A man-made sediment, if you like. Someone who knows how to create this unity is feeding it to the “people.” The tray is round, the movement is meditative, the magic is exposed to the viewer innocently in a lengthy top shot—like an abstract painting created before one’s eyes. The cake, when sliced and served: is in a way violated. The amount is finite. It is contested and consumed with strong gestures. Another metaphor is how it is inverted very suddenly towards the end of the preparation, like life in the region—where the fragility of a planned life can be overthrown and capsized at any given moment: changing the rules of the game. Another anecdote could be the rapid obligatory transformation of innocent youths into professional soldiers at a blink of one’s eye.
Is there anything else about this work you want to share?
That orange as the citrus fruit was very much the symbol of zionistic agriculture and accomplishment in returning to the land of Israel. My father kept telling how he remembers that once a week his family in Czernowitz bought one expensive ‘Jaffa’ orange and split it into 4, delicious and healthy—they cherished this as a message of hope to one day arrive in the real land where oranges grow. So I think orange is an issue ... it comes with temptations.
Huge thanks to Sigalit Landau (and her studio assistant Tal Caspi) for answering my questions at a rather challenging time.
If you want to know more about Kashash, the sweets shop in Acre (Akko) featured (remotely) in Sigalit’s video, I recommend this article, which has tantalizing photos of all their goodies, including a rolled version of knafeh that I am dying to try. Kashash also appears in Michael Solomonov and Steven Cook’s Israeli Soul: Easy, Essential, Delicious, which includes beautiful photos of Kashash’s bakers making mountains of kataifi (finely shredded phyllo dough) from scratch.
For Further Eating
There are so. many. knafeh. recipes. I’ve been swimming in them, and my research has barely scratched the surface—and not only because I’m limited to recipes in English. This beloved dessert is being made, as I write this, in many, many bakeries and homes across the Arab world and the diaspora, as it has been for hundreds of years. Variations abound: there’s coarse and fine knafeh (and rolled, too), made with either kataifi or semolina, but there are also regional cheeses, flavorings that include either rose or orange blossom water, natural or artificial coloring (or no coloring at all), and on and on.
For my first attempt at making the dessert at home, I wanted to aim for something that resembled Nablus-style knafeh, so I bought a jar of brined Nabulsi cheese, which I was delighted to find at an Arab market in Cleveland. But once it was sitting in my fridge, I slipped down an internet rabbit hole of recipes, some of which say you need to desalt the cheese by soaking in water for 8 hours, some of which say you also need to simmer the cheese to soften it, and others that say all of that is unnecessary and you should just grate the cheese and move on with your life. Paralyzed by a surfeit of advice, I chickened out and decided to go the mozzarella and ricotta route, following the instructions for Euro-Americanized knafeh that appear in Reem Kassis’s The Palestinian Table (thanks for the birthday gift, Mom!) and Sami Tamimi’s Falastin (where feta is also added to the mix). I also consulted Michael Solomonov and Steven Cook’s Israeli Soul and Claudia Rodin’s Arabesque: A Taste of Morocco, Turkey, & Lebanon, and gathered helpful tips from the TartQueen’s Kitchen blog, but ultimately sorted out a recipe that I thought would come closest to the coarse knafeh I’ve eaten and loved.
The upshot is that I’ve now got many other versions lined up to test (I’ll probably end every dinner party for the next year with knafeh; apologies, lactose intolerant friends!), and I also plan on picking up some fresh pita so I can make myself a Nabulsi knafeh sandwich. IYKYK.
Knafeh (كنافة), aka Kanafeh, Kunafa, Kunefe, Konafa…
Serves 12-15
For the sugar syrup:
1 cup (240 ml) water
2 cups (400g) sugar
2 tablespoons lemon juice
1 1/2 tablespoons orange blossom water
For everything else:
13 oz (368g) kataifi (shredded phyllo pastry), defrosted
3/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons (200g) ghee (you can use butter, but it is much more likely to burn)
14 oz firm (low-moisture) mozzarella (save your fresh mozz for another purpose!)
8 oz (250g) ricotta cheese
4-6 tablespoons coarsely ground pistachios
1. Make the sugar syrup: put the water and sugar into a medium saucepan and place over medium-high heat. Bring to a boil and add the lemon juice, swirling the pan until the sugar dissolves. Remove from the heat, stir in the orange blossom water, and set aside until completely cool.
2. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F. Use a brush to generously grease a 9 x 13 baking dish with some of the melted ghee. (You can also use an 11-inch round pan.) If you are desperate for the reddish-orange tint of traditional knafeh, you can add coloring to the butter before greasing, but be warned that most food coloring isn’t fat soluble, so you’ll end up with streaky tiger stripes; you could try a natural dye instead or buy a packet of powdered knafeh coloring at an Arab market.
3. To prepare the cheese stuffing: using either a box grater or food processor fitted with the shredding attachment, grate the mozzarella into a large bowl. Add the ricotta cheese and mix well to combine. (I used my hands for this step, as a spoon seemed useless.) Refrigerate until ready to use.
4. Remove the kataifi from the packaging and pull it apart so that the whole thing resembles a giant tumbleweed. Working in batches, place kataifi in a food processor and pulse until the shreds are roughly 3/4 inch in length. (It took me about 3 batches to work through all of it.) Place the kataifi in a large bowl.
5. Drizzle all of the remaining melted ghee over the kataifi and toss with your hands (or a set of wooden spoons if you’re nervous about hot ghee) until thoroughly distributed.
6. Transfer half of the dough to the greased dish, pressing it with your hands to cover the bottom. Dollop the cheese mixture evenly over the pastry, careful not to disturb the kataifi below.
7. Spread the remaining kataifi over the top of the cheese layer, making sure to fully cover the cheese, then firmly pat the whole surface.
8. Bake in the oven for 25 to 35 minutes, or until the cheese has melted and the crust is golden brown. (Based on my binge-watching of knafeh YouTube videos, it’s totally acceptable to check on the melt status by lifting an edge of knafeh with a spatula and then patting it back into place.)
9. Remove the knafeh from the oven and allow to cool for 5 minutes, then flip onto a serving platter or sheet pan. (Make sure the platter is big enough before you flip! The best method—again, YouTube—is to put the serving platter or pan on top of the baking dish, grab it all with pot holders or towels, and flip quickly with confidence.)
10. Immediately pour the sugar syrup over the entire surface. You don’t have to use it all, but you do want to soak the dessert. (Any leftover syrup can be used as a sweetener in coffee, tea, cocktails, etc.)
11. Wait 5 minutes for the syrup to be absorbed, then sprinkle with pistachios and cut into squares to serve right away.
Leftovers can be refrigerated for a few days. Reheat in the oven at 375 degrees F for 8 to 10 minutes or until the cheese is bubbly, then drizzle with more sugar syrup before serving.
Thank you for reading! If you have anything to share, you can hit reply on this email to be in touch directly, or click the speech bubble icon below to comment publicly. (And I don’t want to be presumptuous… but you can also “like” the post by clicking the heart icon. Just saying.)
See you next week!