Levant: Recipes and memories from the Middle East. Anissa Helou
which we reserve for cooking only, using the fine-grade variety that doesn’t need any soaking for salads and kibbeh. In fact, soaking fine-grade burghul makes it mushy. This is only one example but it illustrates the importance of sourcing the ingredients properly. So, go to a specialist store, buy the best you can afford, having read the recipe carefully, and you will be rewarded with superior results that will impress your family and friends.
And finally a word about the transliteration and spelling of foreign terms. There are many different ways of transliterating Arabic and, browsing online or looking through other books, you will see different spellings for the same word or recipe name. I have relied both on a classic form of transliteration and a phonetic one to transcribe words as I would say them in Arabic, whereas I have used only the classic transliteration for Iranian. The Turkish alphabet has been used for words in Turkish.
Anissa Helou
London, February 2013
My relationship with family meals has been one of love, hate, then love again. As a child, I loved eating en famille, sitting at our large, solid wood dining table in Beirut with my father at one end, my mother at the other and my siblings and I on either side.
We were four girls and a boy. I was in the middle with two older sisters, a younger brother and a baby sister. My two older sisters and I were very close in age, and we formed one camp on one side of the table while my brother and baby sister formed their own on the other side. Throughout the meal, we shifted between conspiratorial conversations within our camp, to silly arguments either within our camp or with my brother’s.
My father watched over us kindly while my mother busied herself with the food, telling us to eat if we didn’t (not something she had to do often) or to calm down if we got too excited. She also told our maid when to clear up, when to bring more water or the fruit, and so on. My mother was, still is, the most wonderful cook and she prepared delicious meals that we all ate heartily.
However, as much as I loved my mother’s food, I loved my grandmother’s better. She had been widowed early and lived with my aunt and four uncles in the Christian part of town – we were on the Muslim side – in a large airy flat with beautiful Art Deco furniture. We visited her often. Her kitchen was like ours, with lovely white marble counter tops. And although she cooked like my mother – she did after all teach her everything she knew, the way my mother taught me – she had little touches that made her food even more exquisite. For instance, the Lebanese always cook stuffed vegetables on a bed of bones for a richer sauce. My mother simply washed the bones and lined the pot with them, while my grandmother parboiled and rinsed the bones before using them. This, she said, helped get rid of the scum the bones release during cooking and made for a cleaner and more refined sauce. She had similar sophisticated touches for almost every dish she prepared.
Also, the meals at her house were jollier than at our own. My aunt and uncles were not that much older than us – people married very young in those days – and even though they were no longer of an age to be playmates, they were playful with us.
We ate in the kitchen unless sitto (granny in Arabic) had guests in which case we moved to the dining room. We often went there early and I would go straight into the kitchen to sit on the white marble counter, right by where my grandmother prepared our lunch. Sometimes, I helped with simple tasks such as bunching up the parsley for the tabbuleh but most times I just looked. My desire to be in the kitchen was not so much to help, nor really to watch the cooking, although I learned a lot by just being there, but rather because I wanted to taste everything. My mother never let me do this at home, insisting that I should wait for my meal, whereas my grandmother always gave us tastes of whatever she was preparing. I do the same, offering tastes to whomever is with me in the kitchen, not to mention my tasting everything as well.
My mother and aunt were in charge of setting the table and they always laid a selection of nibbles called ‘zinet el-tawleh’ (decoration of the table so that it looks appetising even before any of the prepared dishes are served). Their ‘decoration’ consisted of olives, cucumbers and carrots, cut into sticks and seasoned with a little salt and lemon juice, a bowl of hommus or labneh drizzled with olive oil, bright pink home-made turnip pickles (made that colour by adding raw beetroot to the brine), fresh nuts when in season or roasted ones when not, and of course bread. The meal itself consisted of a couple of salads, either tabbuleh or fattush plus a seasonal one such as tomatoes, purslane and meqteh (a kind of wild, pale ridged cucumber) and a main course, often stuffed vegetables, which we loved and which my grandmother regularly made for us. We always finished our meals with fruit.
If we happened to visit on a Sunday, she would grill kebabs. Sunday is barbecue day for pretty much everyone in Lebanon, and on those days, I would abandon my grandmother to be with my uncles on the balcony where they set up the manqal (Arabic for the small metal barbecue used throughout the Middle East) to start the charcoal fire.
When we finished eating, we moved to the drawing room for the grown-ups to drink their Turkish coffee but before that one of us girls had to grind the coffee in a beautiful brass grinder. After drinking the coffee, they all turned over their cups to let the dregs drain out, leaving patterns inside each cup that my aunt read to tell each their future. I loved listening to her interpretation of the various patterns. If the coffee dribbled down the side leaving a clear white line, it meant the person had an open road ahead of him/her. If the coffee was thick and the residue stayed on the bottom of the cup, it meant the person’s heart was dark and heavy, and if there was a big white patch on the bottom of the cup, there was marriage in the air, and so on.
My aunt was very beautiful with long wavy dark hair like Ava Gardner’s. She actually looked like her and when I met Ava Gardner many years later, she told me I looked like her sister; I didn’t say it but I immediately thought she must have been the family’s ugly duckling! In any case, once my aunt had done her coffee-cup reading, she played music to dance with one of my uncles. And despite my having no sense of rhythm, I would jump up to join them. They were very kind and never resented my interfering with their Paso Doble or Cha-Cha-Cha.
Those were our family meals in the city but I had just as many joyous meals in the mountains where we spent our summers, either in Mashta el-Helou, my father’s ancestral home in Syria or in Rechmaya, my maternal grandmother’s village in Lebanon. Sometimes, my parents rented a house in one of the Lebanese mountain resort towns for us to spend time on our own.
Then I grew into a moody teenager, and started spending all my time reading in my room. It was around that time that I began to hate family meals, often insisting on eating in my room, which for some reason my mother agreed to.
This antagonistic attitude lasted until I left Lebanon for London. Away from home, my relationship with family meals turned to love again, although not immediately. First, I went through a phase of wanting to eat out all the time and hardly ever cooked at home. Then I started cooking for friends, both European and Lebanese food but it wasn’t until I started writing about food that I became interested in family meals again, not only to soak up the warm atmosphere but also to learn more about the different dishes of each of the countries I visited and the customs that surrounded serving and eating them. What was interesting was that in many parts of the Levant and beyond, families gathered around the table pretty much the way we did when I lived in Beirut. Of course, the meals and the order in which the dishes are served change from one country to another but the conviviality, generosity and hospitality are the same, which is not surprising, really. The legacy of the Ottomans as well as common Middle Eastern traditions have yielded similar dining habits throughout the region, not to mention the common ingredients.
Lemony Swiss Chard and Lentil Soup
’ADASS BIL-HAMOD
I don’t like soup on the whole, possibly because my mother had this maddening habit of offering to make it whenever any of us were ill. That said, I do like some soups, especially those that don’t remind me of the diced vegetable and chicken soup that my mother invariably prepared for the