Honey & Co: This is how you do middle eastern cooking...
Middle Eastern food has entered the mainstream - who isn’t addicted to dredging pitta through craggy mounds of hummus? Who doesn’t scatter pomegranate seeds on everything?
But there’s more to the cuisine than chickpeas and jewel-like fruits, as you’ll know if you’ve picked up Itamar Srulovich and Sarit Packer’s first two cookbooks.
The husband and wife duo, who hail from Israel, run three London stores and restaurants under the banner Honey & Co., but their new cookbook, Honey & Co. At Home, lets loose recipes from their lives.
It’s what the Honeys (as they’re affectionately known) are calling a “fluke book”. They were meant to be writing a recipe collection about their deli, Honey & Spice “but when we started collecting the recipes we were interested in,” says Packer, “we were like, ‘This is nothing to do with Honey & Spice, this is to do with us and how we eat, and how we entertain people’.”
Writing it was a process of rediscovery, because, after 15 years in professional kitchens and then launching Honey & Co. there hadn’t been much time for home cooking and entertaining.
The book is woven through with stories and memories too, which are inseparable says Packer. Srulovich tells of eating grilled anchovies in Greece, of picking figs in the Balearic Islands, and most charmingly, of their two weddings - an elopement to Cyprus, where they got hitched in a town hall above a KFC, and a party back home in Israel.
Their domestic kitchen is lined with books on garage-like shelving. “There’s a lot of light and plants, everything is pretty much on display,” says Packer. There’s no fancy equipment, no bizarre gadgets - what they cook at home, even though they’re chefs, you can do at home, too.
“Usually you learn to cook with someone,” says Srulovich, musing on the whole idea of following a recipe. “Written instructions is reverse engineering, if you know what I mean. Someone cooked this, and you want to recreate it, and this is the set of instructions.
“This is why the background, the stories and the culture is so important, because you are going to not only make the food that someone made, eat the food that someone ate, but actually do the same things in the same order as someone else, because you trust them to give you nice food at the end of it - that’s so incredible to me.”
The Honeys will be spending the summer demoing recipes from the book and appearing at festivals, and then it’s back to work with their kids (that’s what they call their restaurants) and their Honey & Co. team.
“It is not always clear why you would get up so early in the morning to start smelling like fish or like smoke . The only people who smell nice at the end of a shift are on pastry - they smell like cakes and sugar and vanilla,” says Packer . “It has to be fun as well, or no one would do it.”