Kibbutz life was an eating continuum ad infinitum or at least that's the way it felt, and for a good reason. We had cakes made of yeast and chocolate layers, rolled into such a delicacy, I can still salivate just thinking about it 40 years latter. These cakes are extinct since our Kibbutz bakery is no more and the one person who knew how to make this extraordinary culinary miracle has long gone. We will eat these cakes fresh, we will eat them toasted, we will eat them before going into the fields early in the morning, as children we (that means all the boys but me..) will break into the bakery on Thursday nights when these cakes, we called "Shabbat Cakes" , were just out of the ovens, we will eat them every Shabbat, we were addicted, and you would too if you ever ate one of those.
A great chef I will not be, not in this life. We, the boys of 10th grade, went to a Yeshiva for few months when the girls learn how to cook, they never let us on the culinary secrets. Tried as I may to master this art, nope, it does not yield very good results, not yet.
We ate only once a day, we started in the morning and never stopped until going to bed. One of the top experiences and the highest of my culinary Kibbutz achievements was going at midnight to a god forsaken hut, where there was a primitive gas stove, one of those black contraptions of pipes you can move easily from place to place, with gas fumes often present. You break few eggs, scramble, and vwalla, you have an omelet. We called it "The Night Meal". This was the last bit of the non-ending meal starting right after morning prayers were over.
The 4 o'clock meal was the one meal we had at home with our family. we will come home from the children-home and start gorging on my mom homemade ice cream, my mom home made addictive cakes, or the famous Shabbat Cake. Chocolate bars were scarce. Our parents hid them somewhere we could not reach, and we will try to find them anyway, sometimes we did.
Ice-cream on stick would arrive only once every 3 weeks to be divided precisely 1 for each person, if you have missed that, well., you won't want to miss that. But once I did. and it was the end of the world, I anticipated it for 3 weeks and then.. I missed it. My dad had to find an available Kibbutz car and take me to a nearby city of Gederah to buy me ice cream. He could not find any so he bought me mashed potatoes instead convincing me it is a "Winter Ice cream", boy, how gullible I must have been. But I did stop crying. We had a competition amongst us children, who can eat his ice cream the slowest, and the winner will get an extra one if there was any to spare.
Then there were the eternal cookies we will eat at the 10:00am school break everyday, every week, always, same thing, never changing. I can get a flash of memories just seeing or smelling one of those cookies. I do not believe any of us will ever want to touch one of those ever again. But on chilly mornings, dipped in a morning coffee just before going to work in the fields it is not that bad, it has been almost a ceremony, hot coffee and a cookie softened and made feeble by the action of coffee.
Shabbat meals were a colossal communal affairs, almost a thousand people weekly event, maybe for a different Ramble sometimes, stay tuned.
Boaz Pnini
Bridges 2 Israel
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