Solomonov Michael - Zahav : a world of Israeli cooking

I am about ten years old in this picture taken about 1988 at our house in Pittsburgh, with my little brother David, my dad, Big Solo, and my mother, Evelyn.

As inevitable as it likely seems now, since you are holding this book in your hands, nothing in my life happened the way it was supposed to. No one event followed logically from one point to the next. Luck, coincidence, hard work, even tragedy have shaped me, have led me to a life, a restaurantquite a few of them nowa true working partnership, a marriage, and my two sons.

I wrote this book to celebrate those things, of course. But something stronger motivates me. I am compelled, driven even, by the need to share what I have learned about the cooking of Israel and how I interpret it for others to experience and enjoy. To me, it is urgent that the flavors of Zahav reach a wider audience. I want you to fall hard for the warm spices of baharat, the lemony tang of sumac, the powerful peppery punch of the condiment called schug, and see how those things can enhance not just your cooking, but your understanding, too. I want you to know the mellow excitement of a bowl of Yemenite soup and appreciate how that bowl contains a world. Sure, Ill show you how I make fluffy matzo balls, but I want you to love other dumplings, too, like the stuffed kubbe, ghondi, and kofte that can float your soup.

I want to celebrate the vegetable classic that we know as Israeli salad, but then I want to show you how I make it in the dead of winter using persimmons and mangoes instead of out-of-season tomatoes. I learned so many things from my Bulgarian grandmother, Savta Mati, especially the flaky borekas she taught me to make as a young boy. We shared no common language, but we communicated just the same.