Tag #125477 - Interview #78561 (Sofi Eshua Danon-Moshe)

At Fruitas [10], for example, we didn’t use to eat so many sweets, we ate more fruits. My father and I would go buy the fruits first thing in the morning. That was the best part of the holiday. We would also go to the shops together with my brother. There was a big shop for tropical fruits in Pazardzhik. I can’t remember if we used to buy fruit from there during the year but at Fruitas we would invariably go to buy raisins, figs, dates, oranges or tangerines. We used to buy lemons during the year as well. From there we would also take hazelnuts and walnuts, and we roasted them. At Pesach we used to put them in water and afterwards they tasted like fresh walnuts. At Fruitas we used to roast them a little. They become very delicious. Even now when I eat raw walnuts I start thinking how a little roasting would improve the taste. And when we roasted them a little bit more we used the soot that appeared on the nuts to paint our eyebrows.

We also got some hard flat loaves called ‘boyo’ made of flour, water and a little salt, without yeast or leaven. We used to eat them instead of bread. And on returning from the market with two bags full of those tropical fruits and walnuts we would add apples and Jerusalem artichokes to them. My mother put all the fruit in a baking plate with the Jerusalem artichokes in the middle. When my mother got older and her teeth weren’t so good anymore she would cut a slice of Jerusalem artichoke and eat it with the help of a spoon.