Cooking a Nation: Israel’s Forgotten Culinary Contest
How the 1960s Queen of the Kitchen competition mixed politics, identity, and stuffed cardoons to cook a nation.
Shalom from Israel,
In 1962, Israel had a food problem. Not scarcity - abundance. The country's Tourism Ministry was embarrassed. Out of 5,000 food establishments, only 191 were deemed worthy of recommendation to visitors. Sixty percent of tourists complained about the bland, repetitive meals that bore no resemblance to anything recognizably "Israeli."
The solution? A nationwide cooking competition that would become one of the most ambitious culinary nation-building projects ever attempted.
The Architect of a Culinary Revolution
The man behind this audacious plan was Aryeh Avishar, whose personal story embodies the complexity of Israeli identity itself. A Holocaust survivor who had worked in Africa and Brazil before dedicating himself to Israeli tourism, Avishar understood that a country's reputation could rise or fall on what it put on the plate. His vision extended far beyond recipes - he was building bridges, "to the world and to nations" through food.
The Launch: October 1962
On October 5, 1962, at the Tadmor Hotel School in Herzliya, officials launched מצעד מטעמי ישראל - the "Parade of Israeli Dishes." This wasn't just a cooking contest. It was cultural engineering disguised as a recipe swap.
"In the hope that vanilla will reach the Eastern Jews and that cumin and coriander will reach the Ashkenazi Jews," read the rallying cry of the 1963 Queen of the Kitchen competition.
The press coverage was synchronized across major newspapers - Haaretz, Davar, Al HaMishmar, HaBoker, and HaTzofeh all ran nearly identical stories - revealing this as a coordinated, state-driven campaign. The language was ambitious: "Help us return Adam to Eden through the flavors of Israel," Avishar declared at the launch. But behind the biblical metaphors lay practical desperation about Israel's culinary reputation.
The campaign was explicitly inclusive from the start. Organizers specifically reached out to Arab, Druze, and Circassian communities, framing food as a bridge between peoples. As one newspaper put it, "Gastronomy loosens tongues when a common language dries up; it dissolves resentment and hostility."
The Culinary Challenge: Engineering Fusion
This was no small affair. The campaign involved:
Residents of 101 towns and villages
Immigrants from 52 countries of origin
Three competition tiers: home cooks ("Queen of the Kitchen"), professionals ("Master Chef"), and international representation
But there was a problem. When the judges reviewed the initial submissions in 1962, they made a startling observation: most recipes were "not distinctly Eretz-Israeli." Israeli cuisine, they concluded, was simply, "a mix of Greek, Iraqi, and Mediterranean dishes."
The competition had a specific agenda beyond mere diversity. As contemporary coverage of "The Grand Ceremony of the Parade of Israeli Dishes" reveals, organizers explicitly promoted "combination of foods" (שילוב מאכלים) - encouraging fusion cooking that would blend traditions from Iraqi, Yemenite, and Jerusalem communities into something distinctly Israeli.
The scope was staggering. In 1963 alone, 1,400 participants entered the competition. Over the competition's 12-year run, more than 10,000 recipes poured in from across the country - a culinary census of the young nation, deliberately organized to create synthesis rather than preserve separation.
The organizers' vision was captured perfectly in the 1963 contest booklet, which expressed hope that, "vanilla would reach the Mizrahi communities and cumin and cilantro would reach the Ashkenazi communities." This wasn't just about cooking - it was culinary Zionism.
The Unexpected Winner and Her Recipe
The first crowned Queen of the Kitchen in 1963 wasn't a Tel Aviv housewife or a kibbutz cook. She was Abla Mazzawi, a 32-year-old Christian Arab from Nazareth and mother of four.
Mazzawi's Winning Recipe: Stuffed Cardoon (חרשף) Lamb-stuffed cardoon with pine nuts
Mazzawi's winning dish was stuffed cardoon (חרשף) filled with lamb meat and pine nuts, a recipe she had learned from her mother.
Cardoons, a thistle-like vegetable that tastes like artichoke but looks like a prehistoric celery stalk, were hollowed out and filled with a savory mixture of ground lamb, rice, pine nuts, onions, and warm Middle Eastern spices.
The announcement came at the Sheraton Hotel in Tel Aviv before an audience of 500 people, with Ora Namir, Chairwoman of the Public Committee for the "Parade of Israeli Dishes," declaring Mazzawi the winner after deliberation by ten judges.
Namir's announcement captured the competition's broader ideological goals: "The Queen of the Kitchen competition gave housewives public appreciation for their role as dedicated and faithful homemakers. A healthy family is the foundation of a healthy nation, and a healthy family is dedicated."
The 1963 Runners-Up and Their Dishes:
Matilda Elkalai (Ramat Gan): "New Wave Chicken" Chicken braised in white wine with tomatoes, olives, and orange slices
Perhaps most remarkably, one of Israel's winning dishes at the Miami Beach International Culinary Exposition in 1966 was "New Wave Chicken," a recipe that had earned housewife Matilda Alkalai from Ramat Gan the title of "Deputy Queen of the Kitchen" in a domestic competition two years earlier. This demonstrated how the competition created a direct pipeline from Israeli home kitchens to international culinary stages.
Blanche Cohen (Savyon): Banana Soufflé Mashed bananas with white wine, lemon juice, and whipped egg whites, baked until golden
But there was a problem with nationwide implementation of Mazzawi's winning dish. Restaurants that had committed to serving the winning dish and suddenly cardoon was in high demand. Officials discovered they couldn't source enough fresh cardoons to meet the demand. Nothing says "national cuisine crisis" quite like running out of the main ingredient for your inaugural dish. The gap between culinary nationalism and agricultural reality became immediately apparent - a metaphor for the challenges of building a national cuisine from diverse traditions in a young country still figuring out what it could actually grow.
The 1965 Recipe Arsenal
The 1965 finals at the Sheraton Hotel revealed the competition's theatrical nature. As Haaretz reported on March 3, 1965, seven women competed in what became a two-hour spectacle with remarkable dish diversity:
Miriam Heinberg (Ramat HaSharon): Nine-Salad Vegetarian Platter A collection of nine different salads designed for her husband's medical dietary restrictions
Carmia Burak (Rehovot): Original Kinneret Tilapia Recipe A "scientifically planned" fish dish by the PhD cancer researcher
Ruth Richter (Haifa): Fish in Wine and Pomegranate Juice Baked fish with a Middle Eastern-inspired sauce she often prepared for her family
Shoshana Bechor (Jerusalem): Chicken with Quince Garnish Traditional Sephardi preparation showcasing seasonal fruit
Fortuna Cohen (Haifa): Ground Chicken in Pastry Egyptian-influenced dish wrapped in phyllo or similar pastry
In an unprecedented move, two Queens were crowned that night, Ruth Richter and Shoshana Bechor. The ceremony dragged on for hours due to kashrut requirements separating meat and dairy tastings. "Only the husbands wrung their hands nervously," the reporter noted, "while their wives sat in the spotlight, maintaining their composure," presumably because they were used to timing elaborate meals around religious requirements.
But not everyone was convinced this theatrical exercise would reshape Israeli cuisine.
A skeptical Haaretz columnist warned, "It's hard to believe that these two dishes will represent the Israeli palate, which is still far from homogeneous. It's even harder to imagine them replacing gefilte fish, kreplach, shashlik, kebab, hummus, tahini, cholent, or tzimmes."
Breaking Gender Barriers and Expanding Winners
In 1969, Yaakov Lishansky broke barriers by becoming the first man ever crowned Israel’s “Queen of the Kitchen” - an achievement that earned him the tongue-in-cheek title of “King of the Kitchen.” His victory marked a turning point, shifting cooking in Israel from the realm of homemaking into the realm of culinary art. According to food writer Joan Nathan, Lishansky had tasted an avocado for the first time, more than a decade earlier, on a trip to London in 1956. That encounter sparked an obsession: sometime later he compiled 50 inventive avocado recipes for a pamphlet published by the Ministry of Agriculture, among them a daring avocado halvah with tahina and honey. He would go on to capture his passion for local produce in two full cookbooks: one devoted to eggplants and another to pickling vegetables.
The mid-1960s also saw Dalia Cohen, a home economics and nutrition teacher, win the Queen of the Kitchen competition after advancing from the northern regional round. Years later, she opened Misadat Dalia in Amirim - one of Israel’s first vegetarian restaurants, rooted in the same values of health, seasonality, and simplicity that had earned her the crown.
From Israel to the Diaspora
The “Queen of the Jewish Kitchen” competition officially went international in 1970, when a British housewife named Cynthia Davis took the crown in London with her inventive moussaka-style noodle casserole. A panel of prestigious judges—including Evelyn Rose of the Jewish Chronicle, food editor Margaret Costa of the Sunday Times, and Nathan Goldenberg, the influential food department manager at Marks & Spencer - unanimously selected Davis’s dish over other contenders. His presence lent commercial clout and underscored the competition’s dual aim: to celebrate Jewish home cooking while boosting the visibility and sales of Israeli food products in the UK. Davis’s winning dish layered sautéed eggplant, seasoned tomato and green pepper, spiced shredded chicken with garlic and onion, and a vibrant turmeric-tinted noodle topping bound with beaten egg and a touch of chicken bouillon. The entire dish was baked until golden and served with a quick tomato gravy enhanced with onion, margarine, and soup powder. The prize? A free trip to Israel. The contest itself was modeled on Israel’s “Queen of the Kitchen” series and aimed to promote the use of Israeli ingredients in British Jewish homes.
The 1972 Spectacle and Sophisticated Fusion
By 1972, the competition had evolved dramatically. That year's winner was Yael Latzur, a 28-year-old certified nurse from Kiryat Haim.
Yael Latzur's Winning Recipe: Turkey with Apples 1 kg turkey (40cm long, 10cm thick piece), 4 medium sour apples, 100g dried black plums, onions, carrots, soy sauce, 5 cups natural orange juice, almonds, Middle Eastern spices (curry, cumin, garlic seasoning, paprika)
This complex recipe demonstrated how sophisticated the fusion cooking had become - Japanese soy sauce meeting Middle Eastern spices in a dish that somehow felt distinctly Israeli.
But the real story was how the Israeli media now covered these events. HaOlam Hazeh, known for its irreverent journalism, published a brilliantly satirical piece that treated the entire ceremony like a recipe. The "preparation method" involved cutting Tourism Minister Moshe Kol "in half," arranging judges like ingredients around a table, and "dipping Kol in eloquent sayings." The piece described audience members with "lustful tongues" reaching for leftovers and the formulaic nature of crowning ceremonies.
The magazine's mock recipe for "cooking a Kitchen Queen" revealed how performative these events had become: "Remove the pot lid from above the judges, give them half an hour of evaporation in the recovery room, return them to their places accompanied by the excitement of the packed Hilton events hall, add applause every few minutes."
This satirical coverage marked a cultural turning point. By 1972, Israeli society had grown sophisticated enough to laugh at its own nation-building rituals—perhaps the surest sign that the nation-building project had succeeded. When you can satirize your own cultural engineering, you've probably made it as a country.
The Institutional Legacy
Multiple official cookbooks were published in the "Mataamei Israel" series for 1963, 1965, and 1967, compiled by editor Bella Almog. These volumes preserved not just recipes but also the stories of their creators, serving as cultural documents of a nation in formation.
Most significantly, the competition laid the groundwork for Israel's cookbook boom of the 1970s-80s. Ruth Sirkis's 1975 bestseller "From the Kitchen with Love" sold nearly one million copies across 70 printings, building directly on the foundation the competition had established.
From Nazareth to Miami: A Prize That Changed Everything
For Abla Mazzawi, the competition's impact extended far beyond national recognition. The prize she won in 1963 funded her family's entire emigration to America. In 1968, five years after her victory, Abla and her husband Norman Mazzawi packed up their five children and moved to Miami, where Norman opened a sandwich deli in the old Miami Herald building.
The business became The Original Daily Bread Marketplace, which the family operated together for decades. When Norman died in 2008 after 59 years of marriage to Abla, their obituary noted how they had built a food empire in Miami that supported five children and nine grandchildren.
Today, their grandson Nicolas Mazzawi continues the family tradition, running Daily Bread in Pinecrest, South Miami - a business his father opened 45 years ago. What began as a market with a small take-out menu has evolved into a counter-service restaurant with over 40 items showcasing flavors from the family's ancestral home of Nazareth and across the Middle East.
Four generations after Abla's stuffed cardoon won Israel's first Queen of the Kitchen competition, her family continues the tradition of Middle Eastern cooking excellence - now serving Miami instead of Nazareth, but carrying forward the same recipes, values, and unwavering commitment to quality that made her a culinary pioneer.
What We Lost When It Ended
The "Queen of the Kitchen" competition quietly faded away in 1975, hastened, perhaps, by the deaths of its champions Aryeh Avishar (1968) and Chef Nikolai (1973), the rising tide of feminism, and the national trauma of the Yom Kippur War. But its influence outlived its final ceremony, leaving a lasting imprint on Israeli culinary identity.
The competition had documented thousands of recipes that might otherwise have remained in family notebooks. It had elevated women's domestic labor to national significance. Most importantly, it had attempted to answer an impossible question: What does a country taste like?
Israel's approach was ahead of its time - other young nations like post-independence India, Malaysia, and Singapore would later attempt similar culinary nationalism campaigns, but none matched the scope and sophistication of Israel's contest-based approach to food diplomacy.
Today, when Israeli chefs win international acclaim and Tel Aviv appears on global restaurant lists, they're building on foundations laid by women like Abla Mazzawi and Sarah Azulai - home cooks who understood that recipes carry more than instructions. They carry stories, identities, and dreams of what a country might become.
That skeptical Haaretz columnist was both right and wrong. These dishes didn't replace gefilte fish or hummus. Instead, they joined them in a messy, contradictory, gloriously unresolved conversation about what it means to cook - and eat — like an Israeli.
The vanilla had indeed reached the Mizrahi communities, and cumin and cilantro had found their way to Ashkenazi kitchens. In the end, the Queen of the Kitchen competition had achieved exactly what it set out to do: it had helped cook a nation, one stuffed cardoon at a time (if there were enough available, of course).
Until next time,
Harry
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What a great story! Could be a whole book!
A great read. 🙏