Steven Rothfeld is a highly regarded professional travel photographer with an artistic emphasis on works of cuisine and cooking. He has travelled to more than 40 countries and collaborated with world famous chefs in producing culinary books. Israel Eats is his first book as both author and photographer.

It is profoundly delightful.

It offers the reader more than 90 recipes, many of which are accompanied by sumptuously rich photographs for which the author is justly acclaimed. Rothfeld, however, sweeps into his work more than visual and literal descriptions of these treasures of the Israeli kitchen.

The book is about Israel as well as its delectable dishes. In addition to his primary focus on a personal discovery of Israel’s cuisine, Rothfeld also engages in a geographic, cultural and sociological discovery of the Jewish state. His writing is assertive and nuanced. In seeking the food of Israel, he encounters the country’s widely diverse people. These relationships lead him to reflect upon his own relationship to the country. Time and again, his discoveries reach beyond the clichéd images of the country.

But the book is, foremost, about food, and Rothfeld is impressed. “The Israeli cuisine is a nirvana for salad lovers,” he writes. Not surprisingly, therefore, the majority of the recipes focus on vegetable and fruit dishes.

Rothfeld travelled throughout the country, dividing it into five distinct regions in order to categorize the recipes he records and photographs. “I zigzagged north and south and east and west and appeared at the door and asked the chef or cook or baker or cheese maker what he or she wanted to prepare for me. This cuisine is a vivid reflection of the kaleidoscopic culture of this country. It is unique and could only be here, now.”

Apart from a handful of recipes containing ingredients that are not kosher, most of the recipes pose no kashrut issues.

One of the many satisfying features of the book is Rothfeld’s willingness to share its pages with other experts in the field. Ronit Vered, an expert on the Israeli food scene, has written a brief, highly informative essay about the evolution of modern Israel’s cuisine. It is her view that Israeli cuisine is still emerging, and therefore, it is too early to pin it down with its own definition. But she does offer a vivid description of what Israeli cuisine looks and tastes like at the moment.

“The emerging Israeli cuisine is growing vigorously, and the absence of centuries-old rigid and restrictive traditions has proved to be beneficial for Israeli chefs. These chefs have the freedom to create an innovative and daring culinary world. The new Israeli kitchen takes its inspiration from the Mediterranean, from the Middle East, from the history of the Land of Israel, from the Roman Empire to the Ottoman Empire, from the two millennia of Jewish exile and from the ethnic and religious minorities living in the modern state.”

Nancy Silverton, one of America’s pre-eminent bread bakers, chefs and culinary authors, travelled to Israel with the author to work on this book. She, too, was overwhelmed with the variety, splendour, style, presentation and taste of Israel’s cooking.

“People take vacations for various reasons. Some go for history, some for adventure, some for relaxation. I go for food. Before this trip, I would never have thought of Israel as a food destination.

“Now, I’ll never think of Israel without thinking about the wonderful cuisine. In fact, the only controversy this trip has caused me is when I tell people – people who know I go to Italy every summer for six weeks – that across the board, the best food I’ve ever had on a vacation was on my recent trip to Israel.”

Rothfeld’s book belongs on the kitchen shelf alongside the quickly growing corpus of cookbooks about Israeli cuisine, such as those of Yotam Ottolenghi, Joan Nathan and Claudia Roden, to name but three outstanding chefs/authors.

“This roasted beet carpaccio is one of the best things I have ever eaten,” Rothfeld writes. He suggests we eat it too. And now we can.

As part of the Jewish Book Festival, Steven Rothfeld will present his book on Nov.17, 6:30 pm, at the Prosserman JCC.  The event will include exclusive meet and greet, a copy of the book, book signing and dinner with the author (recipes from the book). Tickets are $40.