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Za'atar & Sumac

Za’atar is one of the fundamental condiments of the Middle East. It is used to accompany breads and cheeses, and is often mixed with olive oil prior to serving. Pictured are Pita baked while topped with a mixture of za’atar and olive oil. These are irresistible, especially when hot!
The za’atar and olive oil mixture can also be used as a dip, or to top off Labaneh – the infamous strained yogurt cheese, which is one of the most delicious things on earth – tangy and refreshing, thicker and creamier than yogurt, but much less fat than the cream cheese that is so over used in North America.

Sumac

To make your own za’atar, you will need to pick your own za’atar leaves – which is actually a species of hyssop, and very similar in flavour to oregano, but more delicate. To that, add sumac and toasted brown sesame seeds, and that’s it!
Some also use thyme, but it is not necessary (especially because there is so little thyme growing on the mountains…). The sumac is the red fruit of a wild bush, but is widely available in the spice section of many stores. It has a very unique flavour – extremely sour and salty at once. It can be also used to make a strange cooling lemonade-type drink in hot days. In most pre-made za’atar mixtures you buy in the stores, though, it is sadly substituted with red food colouring and citric acid (which is also salty and sour at once, but in a very harsh and non-authentic way).

Bagels


Za’atar powder is also served with these legendary huge Arab bagels sold at every corner of Ancient Jerusalem. They were used to be sold with hard boiled egg, but now it is more common to have a side of a large falafel patty, which I find innacceptably wrong. It must have been some tourist’ idea, as this is not the traditional way to serve neither bagel nor falafel!

Le Parfum de Thérèse

One of my new discoveries during my trip to Israel was Le Parfum de Thérèse, which I enjoyed on those hot dry spring days when the wind from the desert blows steadily and hydration is a question of sanity, not just simple survival necessity.

Le Parfum de Thérèse is both fluid and stable. Slippery like a cool veil of satin, moist and refreshing like a film of cucumber and aloe vera gel on a sun-warmed skin verging on a burn. Yet it breathes out coolness like a stone-house in the summer, and has the dry sensuality of a marble rock. It is so utterly Mediterranean and is most magical when worn on a hot and dry desert day – than its true beauty glimmers and shines.

With sparkling top notes of basil, lemon, melon and peach, Le Parfum de Therese was revolutionary for its time and preceded the watery trend of the 1990’s by a few impressive decades (and also is far superior in my opinion to any of those). The hedionic jasmine heart is sheer and uplifting, and creates a unique feeling of reviving euphoria. Some of the rose heart notes remain until the very dry down, which is a simple and gorgeous chypre accord of oakmoss and labdanum. Le Parfum de Thérèse shares a lot of its charm with the more widely available Diorella, only is somewhat deeper and more complex in my opinion. Though I barely notice any of the plum and leather notes that it shares with Femme (another great creation of Roudniska), it has a similar sensuality and warmth that is softly captivating and sensual.

Le Parfum de Thérèse reminds me of all that is summer – folding the tart grapevine leaves stuffed with rice and spearmint on a marble-tiled patio and the scent of laundry drying fast in the desert wind, and enjoying the coolness of fragrant melons in the evening.

Thorny Experiments

One of my missions for this visit was the harvest and tincturing of the thorny bushes that account for the most intoxicating fragrance of spring in my village. The yellow flowers of a variety from the family of broom – only much more thorny. In Hebrew it is called Kidah Seirah. The thorns are sharp and evil and can be likened to small poisonous swords and may cause quite some pain for a while for those unfortunate enough to be wounded by them. The flowers, however, are heavenly smelling – with a scent reminiscent of sweet peas and sunshine. When the peak of the blossoming season arrives, it is almost dangerous to walk outside without becoming intoxicated by their sweet and ethereal aroma.

It was my dream to be able to extract and even a little bit of spring in my visit, but I was not able to make it true. When it comes to tincturing, I am quite the novice and am yet to feel successful with the results.

After an elaborate harvesting process with my devoted assistant, and waiting for over a week to mature, the result is not quite satisfying. Once the blast of alcohol brashly escapes the vessel, I am left with a sweet, honeyed yet sickening aroma that is not floral, but rather – reminiscent of propollis. Medicinal and not quite what I would call pleasant, not to mention inspiring or spring-like. I have left the jar behind, and took with me the renewed memory of the dangerous beauty of spring blossoms, and a few pictures to share with you.

The first one being the bushes in their natural rocky hills environment.

This is a handful of the precious flowers, which took about an hour to pick:

And this is how I ruined them by soaking them in alcohol, hoping to get their essence in return for the free booze:

I am quite convinced that the absolute of these flowers would have been incredible. But given the challenge of picking the flowers, despite their abundance, it would not be very realistic to keep such an operation for an extended period of time. It was fun though!

Art-ificial

Spending almost a week at the highly fragrant countryside where I grew up was, as expected, thought provoking in a way that may make one question what they do for living. The fragrance in the air did not originate in the perfumes I was wearing – in fact, I hardly wore any fragrances in my visit there. When one is surrounded by myriads of species of wild flowers, herbs and shrubs in full bloom, wearing perfume will be missing the whole point: the abundance and variety of beauty that nature has to offer at this time of year.

Once again, my suspicion that I became a perfumer to compensate for the lack of fragrance in the city I have recently chosen to make my home, was given an extra boost. Do I need to choose between the two? Apparently yes. I need to choose between living in a highly fragrant, unpredictable and ever-changing scent environment; and between living in an odorless town in the other end of the world, and surround myself with artificially made perfumes extracted from flowers from all over the planet where I decide, for the most part, what I smell at any given point during the day or the year. One is the origin, the inspiration, a memory carved in my heart and etched upon my olfactory existence with powerful spells. The other is an asylum, an emotional lab and an art studio where I can create and fill in the gaps.

One environment is too powerful to create in. It would be just like carving a sculpture of your lover in the middle of making love. The other provides the space and perspective for putting my thoughts together communicating myself. The predictability and the control that is possible there is strangely peaceful and calm.

Photograph: Beautiful and odorless pomegranate flowers from my orchard in Clil.

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