"Puree with a little cheese": Emily Damari recreates a recipe from captivity

Almost three years after being kidnapped to the Gaza Strip, Emily Damari recreated yesterday (Sunday) a dish that one of the terrorists used to make for her in captivity "in subhuman conditions" – this time with the highest quality ingredients she could obtain.

"In captivity, it was puree with a little cheese that happened to arrive once in aid trucks. I decided that I am going to make it with the best and most worthy ingredients available because I can. I call it a victory dish. It is a kind of pizza in a pan without dough."

Damari said that she promised herself that upon returning home she would recreate the dish, "in different qualities of course, so that it is well cooked. Even with the fire, there was an issue of rationing." During the preparation, she added pieces of tuna to the pan, about which she said with a smile: "Everything I didn't have in captivity, this is tuna worth like 60 shekels for a fillet." Later, she upgraded the dish with small pieces of chili as well.

When everything was ready, the survivor of captivity sat down at the table and began to taste. Just before the bite, she said with a smile that spelt pita was also something that was not available to her in captivity. Immediately afterwards, she called Romi Gonen, and the two shared memories that the dish evoked.

"This cheese reached us after there was no food at all and we didn't eat anything. We didn't believe what we were seeing," Gonen said.

Damari said: "Everything became like hummus in captivity, you don't have a knife, you don't have a fork – pita and go." She concluded the series of videos with a screenshot of her correspondence with Adam Berger, who suggested she recreate other recipes from captivity. "Come on, when is the correction for lentil soup?" she asked, while Damari replied honestly: "Lentil soup is a major trigger."