shocked by the whole situation, and kept my distance from the mirrors. And I remember that at a very young age I was forced to eat Eshel with white cheese (yes, there used to be such a thing!) and that I have an unresolved issue with the white of the egg - which to this day I am unable to eat.

On the other hand, I remember wonderful reasons! My grandmother was the champion of cooking, everything that came out under her hands was food that cannot be described in words. She cooked fine Cochin food but not only. She learned to make Kovna from her Yemenite neighbor, and knew how to make a Jerusalem mix that to this day I have never tasted like anywhere, and she even made an Ashkenazi tshulant with an amazing kugel that I have no idea where she learned to make, and she made cheese borax that to this day I have not been able to recreate.

I loved going with her to the markets in Tel Aviv, Petah Tikva or Ramla. We would carry around with two huge plastic baskets of all the goodness of the market. And she would always treat me to a falafel dish or something else delicious.

From my grandfather I learned that good food always starts with fine ingredients. He would always buy the best fish, the most beautiful vegetables and fruits, there is no room for compromise. And there was always abundance, which God forbid will never be lacking. Grandfather loved mangoes the most, every summer there were boxes of mangoes and he made sure to peel them with a special sharp knife with all the patience so as not to damage the texture. I once asked him why he doesn't use a peeler? Why does he only use a knife? He just gave me a look that made me realize that mango has rules that must not be broken.

And I remember the holiday season. You can say that the Cochins lived from holiday to holiday. Saturdays and holidays this was the most important thing. Best food was during the holidays! what a pleasure! lots of colors, textures, flavors, just one big celebration.

But I was far away from kitchen and cooking matters, and always the option of playing treasure hunt or just walking around the moshav and the fields, or watching those episodes of the "Lost islands" were a much more interesting option for me than the noise of the kitchen.

 

My friendship with the kitchen began when I got married and gave birth to Yotam and Neta. Step by step I learned to make all kinds of dishes, I tried, and failed quite a bit, but I had the desire and also the love for the food aesthetics , and I used to invest a lot in it, because as I taught the children - you eat with your eyes first!

I have learned to make very few Cochin dishes and never had that willing to learn more. It was a world that belonged to memories from grandma and nothing more.

I grew up as an Israeli girl in all kind of intents and purposes. In my parents home my mom mostly cooked Israeli food: schnitzel, spaghetti, chips, etc. I also did not know how to speak the Malayalam language. They only spoke to me in Hebrew. Nobody talked to me about India, I didn't grow up on heritage stories. India was closed behind a screen that not only did I not have access to, it also did not interest me or attract me at all. The story of the Cochin Jewish community is a story that I have never been told and I didn't know I'm suppose to ask.

Then I decided to start the blog

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I collected recipes from everyone I knew, I made a lot of attempts to turn the "a little" , and "by eye" into exact quantities. I recuptured a lot of lost recipes, and childhood tastes that have already been forgotten.

The blog exposed me to people from all over the world, I participated in cooking competitions, and the stories behind the food led me to explore and question and discover a whole world and heritage that I did not know. Following the blog, I had the need to take a roots trip to Cochin in India, a trip that I will tell about in a separate post.

Chipappam, is the name of a snack that Cochin Jews used to eat on holidays. It was also my grandparents favorite snack, so I decided to use it for naming the blog, and cherish the blog to their memory and to the memory of all immigrants from the Cochin Jewish community, who are no longer with us, but left us with the taste of the wonderful food.

With the establishment of the State of Israel, all members of the community fulfil the Zionizm dream and all of them immigrated to Israel.

Over the years, the amalgamation of the so-called Ingathering of the Jewish exiles, that is typical in the Israeli society, did not pass over the members of the Cochin community who mingled within the Israeli melting pot, and as a result, in one or two generations it will bring to an end a chapter in the history of the oldest Jewish community in the world, which existed for over 3000 years.

This blog is a collection of recipes of a special culinary heritage and glorious tradition, which uses basic ingredients and produces wonderful flavors with them.

For a decade, thousands of people shared with me photos of foods they made from the recipes on the blog, and through food, an entire generation born and raised in Israel, opened the curtain that the same generation of immigrants closed after it. The whole new Israeli born generation began to ask questions, to search for identity, to explore history. An entire young generation is today returning a crown to its former glory.