Open Sesame

My daughter sent me a video the other day: A couple making tchina from scratch. She knows her dad. We buy tchina in the spice market in south Tel Aviv in 4 kilo buckets, which results in about 10 kilos of tchina sauce, which lasts us barely, oh never mind. It’s a bit embarassing to say just how much tchina we consume. I chalk it up to my early childhood love of peanut butter, but that’s a whole nuther story.

So I go to the local market and buy a half kilo of raw sesames for around 11 shekels ($4). You are supposed to toast them lightly until the smell of sesame starts to pervade. I hate instructions like that, since my sense of smell, frankly, sucks. Not a promising trait for someone who cooks professionally. And I am sitting there stirring the sesame seeds on a low heat , knowing ruefully from experience how quickly they can burn. And I’m not smelling A THING. And the, all of a sudden, this aroma is released and I am back in my old neighborhood in Savannah, Georgia, unwrapping this hard candy of sesame and honey that you only used to see around Passover. The connection of smells and memories knocked me over. That was my first girl friend, Karen, who gave me that first sesame hard candy.

The tchina turned out pretty damn good, by the way, at about half the price of and I think better than the premium tchina concentrate we typically buy in the market. And that’s before you factor in the priceless memories. Not sure exactly how to introduce THAT sensibility into our soul food kitchen, but the intent is there.