Since Shavuot lost its context, let’s celebrate White Cheese

Since Shavuot lost its context, let's celebrate White Cheese

How did Shavout become a holiday of cheese? For us secular Israelis, the many layers of context this holiday once had have mostly melted like mozarella in a pizza oven. An ancient agricultural rite? we have some faint memory of kibbutz festivities involving children carrying baskets of fruit. A ritual date of pilgiamage? not since 70 AD, when the temple was wrecked. The day the Torah was given at Mt. Sinai? That seems a little contrived, even if you do believe the Torah was given at Mt. Sinai.

All we’re left with is the peculiar tradition, srupped on by commercialism, to eat dairy products on this day. The papers are full of cheesecake recipes, the stores offer discounts on yogurt and people talk iosbessively about cheeses and the caloric disaster awaiting them at the holiday table.

Why so? googling the question only leads to very peculiar explanations. According to one of them, Mt. Sinai is also known as “Har Hagvnoonim”, – “the mount of humps”, since its crest resembles a camel’s hump. The word “Gavnoonim” is somehow similar to the word “Gvina” (cheese) and hence the national quiche obsession. Another explanation is that the numerical value of the letters in the word “Chalav” (milk) is 40, which is the number of days Moses spent on the mount.

None of this makes any sense to yours truly, but I would still like to take the festive occasion and praise one type of local cheese. No, it is not any of the various traditional Palestinian cheeses, of which the “labneh” is most popular. It is not one of the fancy cheeses produced in recent decades by contemporary Israel’s “boutique dairies.” It is the one and only “White Cheese.”

An American friend of mine spent a summer on a kibbutz in the 80s and would later poke fun at the dining room’s veriaty. “There were two kind of cheeses, White Cheese and Yellow Cheese!”  That was joke enough for her. Having come from an upbringing where words like  “cheddar” were in use, she found the idea of naming cheese types by their color hilarious.

Yellow Cheese (a sort of local Gouda) was for my friend the epitomy of the Israeli existence, not merely rustic but practicaly neanderthal. White Cheese (“Gvina Levana”) was to her not quite cheese at all: a spread much softer and lighter than American cream cheese, served literally in buckets at the kibbutz dining room, mixed into the salad, lavished on the toasted bread, eaten with a spoon… it was truly a cultural phenomenon. White Cheese is extremely mild in flavor, it’s light – far lighter than traditional creme fraiche, which it resembles to the eye. Some white cheese available on supermarket chelves contains only 1/2 percent of fat. You can’t blame a person for not accepting it as food.

Having been born and bred here, I do. In fact, White Cheese is a staple of my diet. I wake up in the morning, toast two slices of bread, cover them liberally with White Cheese and top that with several chunks of cured herring. My love for such a breakfast stems from the bottom of my Ashkenazi genes, but even I wasn’t too sure whether White Cheese was really cheese until visiting the Tnuva cooperative’s state of the art dairy near Mt. Tabor several years ago.

It is cheese, unripened cheese, or rather – a form of quark. Gvina Levana contains milk, germs and a cheese enzime. It ages for only about 24 hours and then is packed to be sold in plastic cups, reaching up to one liter in size. Food journalist and editor Janna Gur believes White Cheese originated in Germany and was brought here by the Templers, a Christian sect that founded several agricultural communities on these shores over the late 19th century. Their Weißkäse was so warmly embraced by Zionists, she writes on her food blog, that Israelis may be its most devout consumers worldwide.

Interestingly, According to Wikipedia, the production of White Cheese used to involve the use of a powder derived from pig stomachs. This ingridient was approved as kosher by Rabbi Issar Yehuda Unterman, Israel’s second Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi. He cited a Talmudic ruling stating that if the non-kosher ingridient makes up only a minute portion of the final product, it may be used.

There’s no sin involved in White Cheese today, which makes it a perfect cause for celebration. If you have nothing concrete to celebrate on Shavuot and are a bit unclear on why all the shops are closed, celebrate White Cheese! It’s lean, it’s pretty and white, it’s nostalgic, it’s far more central to local culture than the book of Ruth, it goes well with cured herring, it gives off no smell, so even your vegan friends will tolerate you having it in their company. Best yet – it is what most Israelis celebrate on this holiday anyway. So make your pick: Tnuva or “Ski” brand, 9 percent or 5 percent fat (please avoid 1/2 percent, that’s just not right). Grab your spoons and have a lovely holiday one and all.