The Original Jerusalem Cookbook
Why a 1984 cookbook still gets it right and most new cookbooks don’t
Shalom from Israel,
In my last newsletter, I promised to tell you about Rina Valero and her remarkable work documenting Jerusalem’s recipes in the early 1980s. It’s a story worth your time, especially if you’re tired of the endless debates about who “owns” which dishes.
Sometimes the most important cookbooks are the ones you’ve never heard of.
While everyone knows Jerusalem: A Cookbook by Yotam Ottolenghi and Sam Tamimi, there’s another Jerusalem cookbook that came out in 1984 and has since become what eBay sellers call “hard-to-find.”
Delights of Jerusalem by Rina Valero was documenting the city’s shared culinary heritage thirty years before it became trendy to do so and she got the approach right in ways that still feel radical today.
A Name That Opens Doors
Rina Valero was more than a home cook with a passion project. The Valero family was Jerusalem aristocracy - one of the old, established Sephardi families that helped shape the city. They founded Jerusalem’s first Jewish bank, were representatives of the Rothschild banking family in Israel, and owned the land where the Mahane Yehuda market was first established. In fact, the first iteration of what we know today as Mahane Yehuda was once known as, “Valero Market”.
This family connection gave Rina something money can’t buy: credibility and access. When someone from the Valero family knocked on your door asking about your grandmother’s recipe, you opened that door. Rina’s heritage also meant she could move between communities in a way that outsiders simply couldn’t.
When you’re from a family that’s been part of Jerusalem’s fabric for generations, you notice when traditions start slipping away. You have a different relationship with preservation and tradition. For Rina that meant she understood what was at stake.
The Woman Who Wore Out Her Shoes
In the early 1980s, Rina Valero walked around the city collecting family recipes. Not the kind of recipes you find in magazines, but the ones passed down through kitchen conversations between neighbors. She literally wore out her shoes doing this - visiting homes, sitting in kitchens, watching techniques that had never been written down.
Her book included recipes from “Jewish, Christian and Muslim families” - Arab makluba, Syrian muhammara, Sephardi macaroni hamin (also called skulacha in Ladino), and Atayef pancakes made for Eid celebrations.
The subtitle tells you what kind of book this was: “A Treasury of Cooking and Folklore.” Not just ingredients and instructions but the stories behind the dishes. The family anecdotes. The holiday connections. The techniques that only made sense when someone showed you with their hands.
The book also functions as an unintentional time capsule of Jerusalem’s commercial life: it includes old advertisements from local businesses, creating a small archive of the city’s economic landscape throughout the years alongside its culinary one.
What She Got Right
Here’s what Valero understood that today’s food politics often misses: Rina explicitly credited origins while acknowledging that multiple communities were making similar dishes. She used original names alongside Hebrew translations. She treated each recipe as part of a larger cultural puzzle rather than trying to claim everything as generically “Israeli.”
She didn’t police who was “allowed” to make what. She described the reality: Jewish, Muslim, and Christian families all working with the same ingredients, cooking side by side, and shaping dishes that echoed each other while still carrying their own twists and stories. Jerusalem’s food wasn’t some deliberate “fusion.” It was cultural “diffusion” - the unplanned kind that grows out of proximity, neighbors adapting, learning, and borrowing from one another in the everyday rhythm of markets and kitchens.
Why It Matters Now
The book’s rarity today reflects how we value food heritage. We celebrate cookbooks that gain international recognition while the local documentarians work in relative obscurity.
Valero’s approach was radically different from today’s food media in that she positioned herself as a translator and documenter, not as the creator of these dishes - a one-woman preservation society capturing knowledge before it disappeared.
Her method offers a better standard: that the best recipes that came from the kitchen next door, not the test kitchen; that stories behind dishes matter as much as techniques; and that authenticity isn’t about purity - it’s about honest documentation of how people actually cook and eat.
The Recipes That Connect
The dishes Valero documented weren’t fancy. Sofrito - a simple meat and potato stew. Borekitas - small cheese pastries. Kiftikas de prasa - leek fritters. But she also captured the special occasion foods: the elaborate makluba that demanded patience and precision, a recipe attributed to Chef Abu Halil of The National Restaurant, which opened in 1945 across from the Barclays Bank (today the Jerusalem Municipality). And then there were the holiday sweets that tied families to traditions stretching back generations.
Many of the dishes she documented have largely disappeared from everyday cooking. Take pepitada - a spiced melon-seed drink that Sephardi families used to break the Yom Kippur fast; or Syrian Urfa Meatballs - meatballs cooked in a sweet and sour sauce composed of tomatoes and apricots (recipe below!).
The Real Recipe
In our age of Instagram-perfect food and carefully curated culinary narratives, maybe we need more people willing to knock on doors and ask, “So how do you actually make that thing that smells amazing?”
The recipes that matter most aren’t the ones designed for viral potential. They’re the ones that connect us to each other, to our histories, and to the simple pleasure of feeding people we care about.
Valero captured something that’s harder to find now: food as community glue rather than personal brand. Recipes as cultural bridges rather than competitive advantages.
A Better Standard
Valero’s book reminds me that some of the most important culinary work happens quietly. It’s not about innovation or cultural claims - it’s about paying attention to what’s already there before it disappears.
Her approach offers a more constructive model than arguments about who “deserves” to claim certain dishes. Instead of creating hierarchies based on political status or state age, we could focus on honest documentation, explicit attribution, and respect for the reality that food cultures overlap and evolve.
Every neighborhood has its own version of Rina Valero’s mission - the family recipes that exist only in someone’s memory, the techniques that haven’t been written down, the food stories that deserve preservation. The question is whether we’ll approach them with her spirit of inclusive documentation or get bogged down in debates about who has the right to cook what.
Until next time,
Harry
Meatballs with Apricots and Raisins
Sweet-tart gravy meets tender meatballs in this classic combination.
Total Time: 45 minutes
Yield: Serves 4-6
Ingredients
For the meatballs:
18 oz (510 g) ground beef
1 large egg
2 Tbsp breadcrumbs
1 onion, finely chopped
3 Tbsp oil
salt and pepper, to taste
For the gravy:
¼ cup (70 g) tomato paste
juice of 2 lemons
2 cups (475 ml) water
1 Tbsp sugar
1 cup (150 g) dried apricots
½ cup (75 g) raisins
salt and pepper, to taste
Instructions
In a bowl, mix the beef, egg, breadcrumbs, salt and pepper. Knead lightly until combined. Form into small, uniform meatballs.
Heat the oil in a wide pan over medium heat. Brown the meatballs on all sides to build flavor and color. Remove to a plate, leaving the oil and browned bits in the pan.
Add the chopped onion to the same pan. Cook until soft and golden, adding a splash of oil if needed.
In a bowl, whisk together the tomato paste, lemon juice, water, sugar, salt and pepper until smooth. Add the apricots and raisins.
Return the browned meatballs to the pan with the onions. Pour the gravy mixture over them. Bring to a gentle simmer, cover and cook on low for 20 minutes until the meatballs are cooked through and the sauce has reduced slightly.
Serve with rice.
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Great piece, Harry. Journalistic and culinary detective work wrought well.