Golda Meir's cooking follows the rhythm of Eastern European Jewish life transplanted to the land of Israel. No starter-main-dessert: meals are organized around the calendar (the frugal daily fare of the kibbutz, the grand seudah — meal — of Friday night Shabbat) and around conviviality. Chicken fat, braided bread, and pre-prepared fish structure a cuisine of sharing, where you first feed your own. For Golda, one more category matters just as much: coffee and cake served in her own kitchen, where public life unfolded.

In a kosher Ashkenazi kitchen where butter and meat are not mixed, chicken fat rendered with onions (schmaltz, and its crispy fried onions gribenes) replaces butter. It flavors soup, browns dumplings, spreads on bread. It is the fatty, thrifty soul of the shtetl, which Golda carried all the way to Kibbutz Merhavia.