Some Like It Hot

One of my absolute top frustrations about cooking soul food in Tel Aviv is that the vocabulary, not to mention the interest in and tolerance of all things spicy is VERY LIMITED. And if you happen to have a rather spicy cuisine, which Etzlenu definitely does, getting orders for things like cajun shrimp “but don’t make it spicy” is enough make one want to double up on habanero-infused oil I use to make that dish.

My good friend Yoel says I should avoid ranting in my posts and blogs, so THIS IS NOT A RANT. It is an academic, dispassionate disquisition on the connective tissue between language and taste. This isn’t brain surgery. If you have only one word for “snow” in the English lexicon, then that’s about how you feel about and experience that phenomenon. And if your vocabulary is limited to the words “spicy” and “piquante,” pretty much the same holds true. No real sense of the nuances of smokiness or heat or fruitiness. Oh never mind. You get the picture.

Which begs the question: Why in the hell do I, in a culture that basically views spiciness as if it were a binaryism, as if the choices were between hot and cold water, why do I not just have a full-sized refrigerator devoted significantly to a ridiculous range of spicy sauces, but why I have created an entire menu around that very range of tastes that no one here seems to care about. Stubborness” Willful blindness? Idiocy? To add insult to injury, if I am being totally frank, my dream here is to pen up a food truck, to be named, ready for this: Some Like it Hot. It’s a very small “Some.”