It’s just food... it’s not rocket science
ELLA WALKER meets the Honeys, aka husband and wife chefs Sarit Packer and Itamar Srulovich, on the release of their third cookbook
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 private 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 Sarit, “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.
They’d never even had weekends, and “it takes skill to do a weekend properly,” says Itamar. “We’re getting quite good at them now,” adds Sarit. “Our life is starting to get back to normal, and we’re spending more time at home and with each other again.”
Sharing that, in recipe form, just made sense. “Spread the joy,” says Sarit. “It’s just food, it’s not patented, it’s not magic, it’s not rocket science. If we enjoy it, and then someone else makes it and enjoys it – perfect.”
There are the potato and feta fritters drizzled in thyme honey that Itamar calls his “secret weapon” and the tinned tuna cakes they are forever dipping into their store cupboard to make after a long day.
The book is woven through with stories and memories too, which are inseparable says Sarit, “or it is just sustenance”. Itamar 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. “It was such a disaster,” he recalls happily.
They both still cook every day, but you’re unlikely to find them in their kitchen at home together. “Yep, is the long and short of it,” says Itamar when asked if it leads to arguments.
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 Sarit. 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 Itamar, 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; so you are in a literal way repeating the actions that someone broke down and wrote down so the result would be the same.
“That’s a very intimate thing, because, even with fiction, you will read it, but it will stay contained in your imagination, it’s not going to be 3D in your kitchen, in your home.
“This is why the background, the stories and the culture [behind a recipe] 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 demonstrating 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 the Honey & Co. team.
Honey & Co. At Home: Middle-Eastern Recipes From Our Kitchen by Sarit Packer and Itamar Srulovich, Pavilion Books, £26. Photography Patricia Niven.