Chava Dumas: The Professional Chef

Dinner was starting to take frustratingly too much time to prepare, with all the children clamoring noisily, "Imma, I'm so hungry!!" "That one's for me!" "I'm next!"

We were set up for 'technical failure' due to a lack, I realized finally, of adequate equipment to meet the challenge of providing food in large quantity.

I called my neighbor, a woman with over a dozen kids, who runs a home-based catering service, and said, "Help! I need a humongous frying pan! Do you know where I can buy one?"

She said I should call another neighbor who happens to be a gourmet chef for a yeshiva in the Old City.

He asked, "Are you planning to open an all-night diner?"

"No! I just want to serve supper!"

He kindly recommended a restaurant supply store with industrial size machinery and appliances, located near Mahane Yehuda in downtown Jerusalem. 'Oh, hooray!' I thought as I scribbled down the directions with an increasing sense of well being. A solution to our dinner-time dilemma was now in sight! I had a happy anticipation that my life was about to change, as I took this step in the direction of better organization and efficiency.

The next day I set off with my list of errands for the morning. The most important stop was at the shop, which I found easily enough.

Inside I saw an elderly, pious couple who were apparently the owners of the store. The woman was sitting on a stool reciting Psalms, and glanced up briefly in welcome. Her husband was busy with a customer on the phone, writing down an order. I had a few moments to myself to take in the surroundings.

The shelves were stocked up to the ceiling far above, piled high with an assortment of huge, colossal vessels capable of serving soup to hundreds of hungry souls. Giant colanders, metal containers, ladles and woks, heavy weight food processors and blenders were present--all the paraphernalia necessary for multiplying a recipe fifty-fold! Wow! I had indeed arrived at the right place!

The owner finished up on the phone and asked me if I needed help. I drew a picture of a frying pan and explained that I needed a VERY big one. He immediately brought me to a shelf with the appropriate selection of the big, bigger and biggest frying pans I'd ever seen. Picking out a sturdy one, I was disappointed to find that it was made of aluminum. The couple seemed amused when I asked if they had any in stainless steel.

"Oh, Lady, that will be four times the price, and too heavy for you to carry!"

Still, I insisted on seeing them, explaining that the 'literature' suggests a connection between aluminum and Alzheimer's and that I only used stainless steel cooking ware.

Well, the woman of the store told me food tastes better cooked in aluminum, and that everyone these days is using throw-away aluminum baking tins and besides, they don't sell just any old cheap alloy from the street--this is high-quality stuff!!

I really had not come prepared to pay four or five hundred shekels for a frying pan, no matter how large, and I had more errands with more packages still to carry. The stainless steel one was beyond bulky, it was downright too hazardously hefty to hold.

It took about five minutes to decide. Cognitive dissonance was definitely at play. Frying French toast and pouring in pancakes to cook for less than five minutes was barely long enough to constitute an opportunity for the dreaded aluminum to seep in and contaminate our food, I thought. I bought the cheaper, light-weight pan and watched joyfully as it was wrapped up in brown paper and put in a amply sizable blue plastic bag. Then off we went, my new mother's helper and I, out into the blue yonder of a bright Jerusalem day.

That very night I had the thrill of seeing so many slices of bread simmering side by side, with a sunny, yellow egg nestled inside each one. The children were impressed that Imma was now a "professional" cook, as they watched with joyous fascination as I gleefully flipped their eggs and bread to lightly brown on the other side. Forget about having more than twenty years of past cooking experience, what really counted was that I had purchased and now possessed a really enormous frying pan!