Always learning
A nourishing fundraiser for Palestine
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Last Saturday I went to a fundraiser for Palestine organised by my grandson’s Arabic school near Bletchley. The community centre hosting the fundraiser bustled with life: children darted about or sat at the cookie decorating table; teenagers worked the crowds encouraging us to visit their family stalls, and adults wove their way through clusters of people, tiny coffee cups held aloft. The headmistress of my grandson’s Arabic school and organiser of the event stood by the door, greeting us as we entered. To our left, a balloon arch in the colours of the Palestinian flag lazily wafted in the breeze.
I gasped at the sight of so much incredible food arranged on long tables lining the walls. Sold by home cooks and female-owned local food businesses, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Iraq, and Libya were just some of the places cited by the women when we talked about their culinary roots. I think of this as culinary ombré where ingredients, techniques, and traditions blend and meld. The event was incredibly busy and it wasn’t possible to talk to stallholders for long— they had sales to make! — but guests enjoy a special place in Islam so we were nourished and treasured.
This post started life on Instagram but, like all my posts about Palestine and the Middle East, its reach has been deliberately limited by Insta’s ominous algorithm. I’ve expanded on my original post to include a truly comprehensive reading list about Middle Eastern food, focusing on some of the regions and nations represented at the fundraiser. I am not religious but I know Islam teaches that ‘God is addressing all of humanity, not only Muslims and created all human beings as one people (one Ummah) and it is human beings who created divisions within themselves.’ (Quran 10:19). With this in mind I know some readers will question why I have not included Israeli food in this newsletter. That’s on me and for no reason other than a desire to highlight the cultural ancestry of the people I met at the fundraiser and I hope you will understand and accept this. EDIT: political diatribes have been removed and their authors blocked. This is NOT the time and place so I have disabled comments.
My first snack was Kebda Eskandarani (spellings vary), a liver sandwich from Egypt served in Baladi or, as it is here, in hot dog rolls. It’s traditionally made from the liver of water buffalo and marinated in lemon juice, cumin, mint, coriander seeds, garlic and cinnamon before being fried ( sometimes with bell pepper and onion) and served with tahini. The flavour is knockout; I thought there might be liver pate on the bread because the flavour is so intense but it's their cooking skills. You get these soft melting bits plus the crunchiness from frying. Amazing. We bought some Lebanese Manoush, a flatbread spread with a paste of thyme, sumac and sesame, little pots of salad and Eitch, a bulgur dish from Armenia, sans herb garnish, as it was sold to take home to eat later. I didn’t have the right fresh herbs at home.
I bought a few pieces of Yansoonieh (spellings vary) a Palestinian olive oil, nigella, sesame, and anise cake drenched in orange or lemon syrup and often made during the olive oil harvest. It gets its name from the Arabic word for aniseed. The aniseed is simmered with milk until soft and kneaded into the yeasted dough before baking. It's incredibly soft and tender texture-wise. Aniseed is popular in Palestine where it's also used to flavour malateet, olive oil and mahleb cookies that gain their patterned texture from the dough being run down the side of a box grater.
Another purchase was Eetch/Eitch (Էտչ) which has one of my favourite names for food ever. This Armenian bulgur-based dish is pronounced 'midway between “itch” and “etch” and transliterated into English in just about all the ways you can imagine forming that sound' writes
in Serious Eats. Andrew is of Armenian descent. Please read his piece- there's a recipe!
It's better to think of eetch as a meatless meat dish, Andrew says, describing Armenians as 'both pious and carnivorous in equal measure' who, faced with a plethora of fast days 'faced near-constant roadblocks to enjoying meat.' Eetch is a 'meaty' and substantial bowl of food to be eaten with bread, simit, or spooned into lettuce leaves and rolled into a fat little package to be popped into one's mouth. The bulgur is of the finest grade and flavoured with double-strength tomato paste, Aleppo pepper, fresh tomatoes, chopped and torn herbs, cumin, onion, pomegranate molasses, lemon juice and olive oil. Some people refer to it as 'mock kheyma'. Eetch a perfect, transitional Lenten dish with a gorgeous spring-like feel; the preserved tomato paste reminds us of the departing winter, and the fresh tomatoes and herbs herald the warmer, more abundant months ahead.
I've already posted about the plethora of regions and nations represented through food and drink with Lebanon being well-represented. But why was a stall with so many Lebanese dishes selling Armenian food? Was there a family connection? Turns out there's a large, well-established Armenian community in Lebanon descended from the people who fled the genocide in Armenia between 1918-22 and again in 1939. During the early 20th century, Armenians were stateless and lived under Ottoman rule. When this began to crumble, the decision to ‘cleanse’ their empire of minority populations was made forcing Armenians to flee to Lebanese regions not under the influence of the Ottomans. The decision by France to sign the Ankara Agreement in 1921 compromised its wartime pledges to Armenians about the security of their statehood in Cilician Armenia compounded this. Lebanon became the first Middle Eastern country to pass two resolutions condemning the Armenian Genocide. The resolution calls on all Lebanese citizens to unite with the Armenian people on April 24 in commemorating the atrocities. Don't underestimate how courageous this was.
More reading and watching:
Armenia:
Lavash, by Kate Leahy, John Lee, and Ara Zada (2019), documents their journey across Armenia and the food, places, and people they encounter. The authors tell us how lavash is so important to Armenia that UNESCO recognizes it as an expression of Armenian heritage. This book's premise is that lavash is the fulcrum of a meal so, alongside expansive instructions on how to bake it yourself, recipes for everything you might eat with it are included.
The Art of Armenian Cooking by Rose Baboian is a kitchen bible for many Armenians. The site I’ve linked to sells lots of books about Armenia. I like The Vegan Armenian Kitchen Cookbook by Lena Tashjian which was reviewed by the Armenian Mirror; here’s Lena’s website.
Sonia Tashjian is one of Armenia’s most valuable culinary historians. I loved her piece about the life of Armenians in the city of Dikranagerd during the Ottoman era which includes her recipe for Soud Koufta (Fake Koufta).
A lovely essay about Armenian survival songs and more information about Lebanon’s Armenian population.
In 2022,
interviewed and Lara Talatian about manti and Armenian food in general. Read it and get his recipe for faux manti here. Andrew has also written about lavash for Serious Eats and it’s worth searching their site for everything he’s written about Armenia and its food.Egypt:
A comprehensive review of John Feeney’s Egyptian Soups: Hot and Cold by Lisa Kaaki in Arab News. ‘…we are treated to a sumptuous desert truffle cream soup. With his wonderful sense of humour, Feeney tells us that for this recipe we need “not only a basket of white desert truffles but also a female camel. If a camel isn’t handy, you can use cow’s milk or, even better, light cream’, she quotes. Colette Rossant's Apricots on the Nile: A Memoir with Recipes is one of my favourite food memoirs. It’s published in French too, with the title Mémoires d'une Égypte Perdue. My Egyptian Grandmother’s Kitchen by Magda Mehdawy is another gem packed with traditional home cooking underpinned by cultural research. First written in the 15th century, The Sultan’s Feast: A Fifteenth-Century Egyptian Cookbook by Ibn Mubarak Shah has been translated by Daniel L. Newman and is the last known medieval Arabic cookery book. It’s an invaluable resource as is Kanz al-fawāʾid fī tanwīʿ al-mawāʾid, a fourteenth-century cookbook that includes 830 recipes for meals, snacks and drinks translated by Nawal Nasrallah with useful glossary of terms and methods, relevant texts and alternative translations. Recipes are correlated with modern-day equivalents where possible. A Culinary Legacy: Recipes from a Sephardi Egyptian Kitchen by Viviane Bowell is expansive, reflecting her Spanish, Syrian and Egyptian ancestry.
Anny Gaul’s Revolutionary Landscapes and Kitchens of Refusal: Tomato Sauce and Sovereignty in Egypt examines the relationship between material conditions, female agency and sovereignty, and culinary genealogy via a classic method for cooking tomatoes. How did Egyptian women evolve culinary tradition in ways that belied efforts to canonise a national cuisine or standardise citizens’ diets, she asks? If you enjoyed Small Fires by
, this article is for you.How to make Kebda Iskandarani:
And a recipe for Kebda Eskandarany in Arabic:
Iraq:
The first recorded recipes were found in Iraq on clay tablets dating back to circa 1700 B.C., now kept in the Yale Babylonian Collection. Here’s an interesting article about the team who are decoding and cooking the recipes. Nawal Nasrallah’s blog, In My Iraqi Kitchen, has lots of useful context to this story. And here’s another BBC story about what the Mesopotamians had for dinner. Nawal’s cookbook, Delights from the Garden of Eden: A Cookbook and a History of the Iraqi Cuisine is essential reading too.
A Baghdad Cookery Book: The Book of Dishes (Kitaab Al-oTabaikh) by Muhammad Ibn Al-H Al-Baghdadi and translated by Charles Perry dates back to the 13th Century; a copy commissioned by the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II can be found in the British Library.
The Vegan Iraqi Cookbook by Lamees Ibrahim follows her successful Iraqi Cookbook. It delineates ‘unique Iraqi flavours’ and sources of vegan protein before breaking recipes down into categories (small bites, stews, breads etc).
A journey through London’s Iraqi cuisine by Zahra Al Asaadi.
Juma in Borough Market is one of my favourite stalls and they’ve just launched a within-M25 delivery service.
Here’s Joel Hart on Amba, the beloved pickle made from mangoes: ‘According to legend, it was the Baghdadi Jewish Sassoon family who began the process of importing mangoes to Iraq from India. On discovering the golden, luscious flesh of the famous Alphonso mango, they felt their compatriots in Baghdad must experience the same pleasure. On realising mango’s limited shelf-life would not allow the fresh fruit to be exported, they decided to pickle them according to their Baghdadi palate.’
Lebanon:
Maureen Abood’s site is a fantastic resource for Lebanese food. If you’re looking for cookbooks, I like A Taste of Lebanon by Mary Salloum, Lebanese Cuisine by Madelain Farah, and Man'oushé : Inside the Lebanese Street Corner Bakery with Barbara Abdeni Massaad; it’s a really tightly focused primer on baking. Bayrut: Recipes from the Heart of a Lebanese City Kitchen by Hisham Asaad is exquisitely photographed whilst Lebanese Mountain Cookery by Mary Laird Hamady is fantastically specific in its focus on recipes from Baakline where her grandmother-in-law grew up. Look for secondhand copies of Sahtein; Middle East Cookbook, a spiralbound community cookbook published by Detroit's Arab Women Union in 1979.
Here’s an interview with Hana-El-Hibri, author of Mayylu! Discovering Lebanon's Hidden Culinary Heritage.
The Great Oven make ‘great big beautiful ovens’ for whoever needs them most. Their story began in Lebanon.
Palestine:
The Palestinian Table by Reem Kassis is comprehensive and delicious. I’m looking forward to Sami Tamimi’s Boustany to be published this June (25). Baladi by Joudie Kalla was The Times Food Book of the Year in 2018, The Gaza Kitchen: A Palestinian Culinary Journey by Laila El-Haddad is indispensable as is Yasmin Khan’s Zaitoun. Skatepal, a community of skaters in Palestine have published a guide to some of their favourite Palestinian cookbooks here. Recently, they published Sah-ten' صحتين, a portrait of the skateboarding scene in Palestine told through food.
is a treasury of contemporary writing on food, and Doha Kahlout’s piece about Palestine profoundly moves me. Here’s a short quote: ‘Yet though my grandmother lived through times of scarcity and fear of famine, the mention of food always sent her back to a single place and time: the land of her youth.’ And here’s Mira Mattar on starvation as a tool of genocide in Gaza.Yasmin Khan writes about the joys of Palestinian food for Lithub. Essa Grayeb, an East Jerusalem-based Palestinian nurse heard Yasmin was researching local food culture for an essay and cautioned: “We are not clowns in a circus for you to come and watch and make research notes about and then make your name from writing down our suffering.” Fortunately, Yasmin is the polar opposite of this.
went on a research trip to Palestine organised by The Amos Trust. What she witnessed shocked her to the core. No media organisation was prepared to commission her story so she wrote about it here.
Laila El-Haddad’s aunts and cousins were murdered in an Israeli airstrike. In an essay for Saveur, she explores how Palestinians learn to cook. ‘I was intensely curious about Gazan food and the stories it told: of villages erased from the map, of places I’d only heard about, of people I’d never met’, she says. ‘….Ask any Palestinian how they learned to flip a pot of maqlooba, and they’ll likely tell you it was through an elder’s patient instruction, not a cookbook or YouTube video. Israel’s checkpoints, separation walls, and roadblocks may have physically separated our families, but they could not eradicate our culture. To quote Jerusalem-born Palestinian chef Sami Tamimi, “Recipes transcend mere culinary instructions; they encapsulate narratives, and memories and serve as a testament to the resilience of those who have entrusted them across generations.’
Clay ovens are keeping Palestinians alive.
Mosab Abu Toha writes about his family’s daily struggle for food in the New Yorker. ‘But, lately, hearing about unprecedented starvation in Gaza, I have felt a sort of hatred for the food in front of me. As I eat simple meals of chicken, rice, salad, and olives with my family, I think of the hunger in my homeland, and of all the people with whom I want to share my meals.’
on Palestine’s olive oil harvest. I buy my olive oil from Zaytoun because it is delicious.An interview with Reem Kassis via NPR and again for Mondoweiss on the central role played by food in Palestinian liberation.
Syria:
I loved Arab Cooking on a Prairie Homestead by Habeeb Salloum about how his family coped with dustbowl conditions on the Canadian prairies by deploying diasporic ingenuity to maintain their ancestral food traditions. The Bread and Salt Between Us: Recipes and Stories from a Syrian Refugee's Kitchen by Mayada Anjari, Sumac: Recipes and Stories from Syria by Anis Atassi, The Aleppo Cookbook by Marlene Matar, and Our Syria by Dina Mousawi and Itab Azzam are all wonderful. Imad's Syrian Kitchen: A Love Letter to Damascus by Imad Al Arnab is another one of my favourites having eaten his food, as is Itab Azzam and Dina Mousawi’s Syria: Recipes From Home. Itab and Dina can be heard making an aubergine salad from their book on Women’s Hour here. Lastly, a new edition of the 13th-century Scents and Flavors: A Syrian Cookbook (trans: Charles Perry) was released in 2017 with 635 recipes. Reading it is a dizzying sensory experience.
‘Danish bees are mild but the Syrian ones are very aggressive,” he explains. One wrong move and they will sting you; there is instant punishment for the careless beekeeper.’ I enjoyed this interview with Aref Haboo, a Syrian beekeeper now living in Denmark.
‘Before the War: The Lost Delicacies of Aleppo’ was written by Alissa Helou in 2016 but stands the test of time. Unstable food supplies remain a major threat to Syria’s future, says Arab News. Syria is the sixth most unstable food nation in the world.
Joel Hart on British Syrian restaurants and their Jewish clientele. My son-in-law told me about his childhood in Aleppo where Muslims and Jews lived next door to each other in peace. His playmates were Jewish and Muslim, they ran in and out of each other’s homes. Christians too. This is what Netanyahu is destroying.
Transregional Middle East:
Arabesque by Claudia Roden (Turkey, Lebanon and Morocco), Lugma by Noor Murad (Gulf Coast, Levant, India and Iran) will be published this March, Feast: Food of the Islamic World by Anissa Helou is timeless, and Arab Fairy Tale Feasts: A Literary Cookbook is just beautiful for kids and adults alike. Nadiya Hussain has just published Rooza: a Journey Through Islamic cuisine inspired by Ramadhan and Eid which I’m glad to see; I’ve been waiting for her to write a book like this after enjoying her TV shows about food and culture. She shines very brightly. Matay de Mayee’s Oldest Kitchen in the World, The: 4,000 Years of Middle Eastern Cooking Passed Down through Generations is stunning, tracing Assyrian (Aramean) recipes back to their original cuneiform some 4000 years ago.