Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Cookery writer and restaurateur known as a culinary trendsetter, blending Mediterranean Middle Eastern flavours with British ingredients.
On the island
Eight records
GUEST quote: "This is a song by Joan Baez. …That symbolizes a big chunk of my childhood."
GUEST quote: "This is from a childhood album called … the sixteenth sheep. …the song … starts off by I love chocolate. And that's what I listened to with my son Max when we were driving in the car."
GUEST quote: "I had all his albums and used to listen to them a lot when I was in secondary school … I felt like I was being super … sophisticated for loving Prince … I just loved everything about him."
GUEST quote: "The Waterboys were the band that he [my brother] liked the most when he was killed. …this song … is a song about opportunities and with him it's all missed opportunities."
GUEST quote: "Arkadi Duchin is an Israeli singer … He has the most wonderful voice, a little melancholic … also, he's slightly marginal … So I always connected to that kind of outsider-ness in him."
Here Comes the SunFavourite
GUEST quote: "Nina Simone … is probably my favorite artist … There's something about her voice, the fragility, but like inherent optimism that I just love."
GUEST quote: "That's the Smiths and that's Carl's favourite band. …for me the Smiths is Carl."
GUEST quote: "My eighth is by The National. …Often I come back from work and Carl's cooking and the window's open and this is blaring out. So it's the music of the moment in our house."
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:52In your store cupboards, what will we always find if we open it?
Well, you'll find a bunch of spices. There will be cardamom and cinnamon and star anise, some cumin and turmeric, and then you'll have other dry stored ingredients like tahini, orange blossom, rose water. You'd find pomegranate, molasses … and also some Asian ingredients like miso, a couple of sesame oils, mirin. So a bunch of things that really make the food kind of come to life.
Presenter asks
5:04So tell me about your very earliest culinary memories from Jerusalem.
Well, those are so varied and many … in Jerusalem when I was growing up, which is the seventies and the eighties, there was this explosion of foods … you'd go into East Jerusalem, to the Old City, and you'd see wonderful … baklawa-style cakes … you'd get these wonderful mezze restaurants where you sit down, you get this incredible spread of baba ganoushas and the hummus and the labnehs … That was a very seductive experience for me.
Presenter asks
8:19Tell me … about your paternal grandparents. They were exiled from Tuscany and they built a sort of little Italy in a suburb of Tel Aviv in their home. Just describe that to me.
My [grandparents] arrived to Palestine, then Israel now, in 1939 … they were like metropolitan Europeans … they managed to create a little haven, a little Tuscany in Ahuzat Bayit, which is a suburb of Tel Aviv, with a house that even the doorknobs were imported from Italy … my grandparents would have like Italian coffee, little espressos, parmesan cheese and anchovy paste in a tube … going into this house, seeing my grandmother sipping her espresso, making … semolina gnocchi, and it's those kind of evocative smells that are really the smells of a part of my childhood.
The keepsakes
The book
Vikram Seth
it's also a fantastic book about family, which seems to be a theme in my life. And it's complex, it's emotional, it's a journey, and I think I could spend many hours enjoying that family aspect vicariously via this story.
The luxury
I need lemons so much that I'd rather just, you know, give up any other luxury for that. And over the years I've kind of developed a hundred ways of dealing with lemons, from pickling them to roasting them to just juicing them. And I think a lemon is one of those magic ingredients that really kind of livens up a dish.
Presenter asks
12:30What were their expectations for you, their son?
The expectations … were never stated … I think what was made clear to us, to us three children, was that we would probably become academics or at least go to university and do something with our degrees. And it just wasn't really a question.
Presenter asks
14:12In 1991, in Tel Aviv, to be living with your boyfriend, was that something you could do openly? Was it accepted?
Yeah, surprisingly it was accepted. I mean in a small bit of Tel Aviv of the 1990s it felt kind of quite normal. … The difference between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem is night and day. … Jerusalem is a … historical place with a lot of people that are … immersed in history and religion and orthodoxy and Tel Aviv is this more secular open place that kind of reaches out to the rest of the world. … it would have been impossible in Jerusalem of the nineties to live out as a … gay person.
Presenter asks
18:46And you had completed your master's thesis in Amsterdam, and then this very bright young man … decided … instead of a life of the head, he was going to have a life of the hands. You went to train in pastry work … Why?
I think I never questioned going to university. And although I had a really great time at university … I always had this kind of inkling to do something which isn't that. And I also found university and academy really exhausting. The job was never done. … I remember when I did start cooking professionally … I worked in a restaurant in London whipping up egg whites for soufflés, quite literally. And when I came back home, I said, wow, this is so refreshing. I've done something that I loved and I finished. … to this day, I find being in the kitchen cooking the most relaxing thing I could do.
“I was a greedy boy. … I really had this kind of intense passion and love for food from very early on.”
“The process of kind of analyzing and reaching a conclusion is very attractive for me. And when I went to university, I felt that's something I really like doing. I love reading something … and discussing it and understanding it fully and giving it a context. And I still love this.”
“After my brother died, I felt a lot of responsibility for [my father's] well-being. And my dad is … a very gentle person, extremely loving … I felt that I didn't want to hurt him. … a few years later I did speak to him and things end up being patched up quite surprisingly easily because he was very … loving … I was happily surprised to see that he was absolutely fine.”
“We recreated the kind of the Jerusalem souk effect. … piles of beautiful food. … The idea was that you really … create something quite spectacular.”
“I'm just a bit worried that if we are not going to have that diversity, we're going to lose a lot on the diversity of food that we're exposed to. … I think it would be a great loss if other people like me won't be as welcome.”