Breaking Bread
If you’re a documentary fan with nothing better to do this weekend, and find yourself in the mood for a bit of good news from the Middle East, you could do a lot worse than turning over 90 minutes to watching Breaking Bread.
Made shortly before the pandemic, the Beth Elise Hawk-directed documentary has its origins in Israel’s MasterChef and its first Arab winner, Dr Nof Atamna-Ismaeel, who went on to establish the A-Sham Arabic Food Festival, an unusual blending of the best of local Israeli and Palestinian culinary traditions.
The annual event takes place in Haifa. It works by pairing Arab and Jewish chefs, charging them with coming up with the best they can do together in A-Sham, or Levantine, food.
Not surprisingly, the fare on display throughout the doco is salivating, but it’s the brotherly fragrance of the cooks themselves that leaves the best trace. Here we see the grandkids of Holocaust survivors working alongside local Arabs with their own troubled histories to create 101 new versions of hummus, eggplant dishes and all the rest. Hummus evidently knows no borders.
Haifa, a coastal town in northern Israel, makes for an ideal setting for such a challenge. A hillside centre of 600,000 souls, the town overlooks the Mediterranean, from whose shores it has absorbed its small galaxy of the aforementioned epicurean traditions — and plenty of others besides.
The city itself boasts a bedazzling array of culinary influences, many of which were brought by Haifa’s various rulers over the centuries, including the Phoenicians, the Persians, the Hasmoneans, the Romans, the Byzantines, the Crusaders, the Ottomans and later (if stodgy fish and chips counts, which hopefully it doesn’t) the jolly British.
All of those influences overlap in Haifa’s culinary DNA. As, of course, do those of Israeli Palestinians and Jews whose relatively trouble-free presence together in Haifa is often held up as a model of how things could and should be — and never more so than in a context like this.
Nor are even these groups monolithic, either. The taste, presentation and colours of many “Arab” styles, after all, change according to the geographical roots of whoever’s doing the cooking: Gazan cuisine (which gets a handsome namecheck in this documentary) is significantly different to, say, the Turkish-flecked style of Jenin; the kind of dishes Jews might favour in Jerusalem can be significantly different to what you find in trendy Tel Aviv.
All in all, a fabulous tonic of a documentary — a lip-smacking antidote to the usual doom and gloom we are often force-fed from out of the region. Sababa!