Dutch author Jigal Krant won the Dutch Booksellers Federation’s 2018 Golden Cookbook Award (Het Gouden Kookboek) for his TLV: Recipes and Stories from Tel Aviv, a paean to Israeli cuisine.
At the Amsterdam ceremony earlier this month, jury chairwoman Janny van der Heijden said Krant’s book “teaches, pleases and entertains. It’s a cookbook, good reading material and a travel guide.”
TLV has been described as “a culinary declaration of love by Jigal Krant to his second home, Tel Aviv, translated to more than 100 recipes and stories.”
Krant writes: “Tel Aviv is a progressive city in a conservative region. A melting pot where many cuisines fuse. In an area where religious rules often determines what end up on the table, Tel Aviv has an innovative and free cuisine with no rules.”
The dishes in his cookbook include, for example, purple tabbouleh, fish shawarma, pita ratatouille, beetroot carpaccio, grilled avocado and freekeh risotto.
Here’s one of his videos, showing how to make malabi as presented in the book. Krant speaks in Dutch, but the images say it all.