Tel Aviv - You won't find the word "pork" on an Israeli menu, not even on any of the many which pay scant attention to Jewish dietary laws. What you will find - on the menu, and in the growing number of non-kosher supermarkets, butchers shops and delicatessens - is a bunch of code words which fool nobody, such as "white meat" "other meat" and so on.
Retired cardiologist and current cooking maven Eli Landau is of course aware that even though Israel is becoming an increasingly secular and modern society, eating pork is still the sin that dare not speak its accurate name.
But he is unfazed enough to write and publish Israel's - and by extension the world's - first-ever Hebrew-language pork cookbook, 157 pages, and with around 80 recipes and glossy photographs enticing enough to tempt at least one wavering non-pork eater.
Jewish dietary laws, as laid down in the 14th chapter of the book of Deuteronomy, stipulate that Jews are forbidden to eat animals which do not have cleft claws and which do not chew the cud.
The swine gets its own verse in this section, and over the centuries has become the symbol of forbidden food for Jews, even though, religiously-speaking, it is no worse than any other food on the proscribed list.
Jews who have no trouble eating other forbidden food, such as lobster or prawns, or meat not prepared in the kosher manner, or even mixing milk and meat together, somehow draw the line at eating any pig product.
In fact, porcine stigma used to be so strong in Israel that film director Melville Shavelson,making a move in the country in the mid-1960's, found himself confronted by an angry religious chemist who refused to develop photos of a pig farm.
The pig farm was in the north of the country, where, according to a law passed in 1962, all pig farms have to be located, in an areas heavily populated by Christian Arabs.
That is where most of the country's approximately 300 pig farms are still located. The exception is a kibbutz (communal farm) in the south, which skillfully employing a loophole in the law, raises pig legally for researchpurposes as part of the Animal Research Institute.
Landau admits there is an element of provocation in his decision to publish his cookbook, but says he was approaching the matter from the gastronomic sense, since more and more Israelis eat the meat and it is freely available in virtually every non-kosher supermarket chain - one in fact sells the equivalent of 1,000 pigs a week.
He thinks the greater acceptance of pork in Israel is not solely because of the large influx of immigrants from the former Soviet Union, who are less connected to Jewish tradition.
"Israel has grown up," he says simply. "There is a mix of different cultures. The new generation has also shed the inhibitions of their parents."
He says his book - called "The White Book" for obvious reasons - and published at the new year - will not change the world, but only shows the way.
The approximately 80 recipes are arranged according to parts of the pig and Landau says he kept it all simple.
"There is no nouvelle cuisine, and I did not try to "Israelize" the recipes," he says, although he did select recipes which suited the Mediterranean environment.
Given the passions pigs still provoke in Israel, despite the greater acceptance of pig products on the menu, it is perhaps surprising to hear Landau admit that reaction to his book has been mostly positive, including in talkbacks on internet forums.
"At last, pork literature," ran one comment, although there have also been negative reactions as well - "Another example of self hate" fumed one respondent on an Israeli internet news site.
And perhaps most surprisingly, there have been no reactions from Israel's religious establishment, which usually is quick to condemn what it sees as any encroachment on Israel's religiousness.
Pig meat has always been a part of Landau's life, if not his consciousness.
When he was young, growing up in Tel Aviv, a young butcher, a new immigrant to Israel, tracked down Landau's mother, who had looked after him in ghetto in the Polish town of Lodz during World War II.
He sent her a ham, explaining that this was the food which had saved him from starvation in the dark days of the ghetto.
For years, the butcher sent a parcel of ham to the family, saying simply, "this saved me then, it will save the boy now."
