Levant: Recipes and memories from the Middle East. Anissa Helou
Fry the onions, stirring occasionally, until golden.
Add the burghul and rice to the pulses when they are ready. Tip in the fried onions with their oil and season with the spices and a little salt. Let the soup simmer for 15 minutes, then taste and, if needed, adjust both seasoning and consistency to your liking. If the soup is too liquid, boil for a little longer; if too thick, add a little boiling water and simmer for a few more minutes. Serve hot or warm. You can also serve the soup at room temperature.
Green Beans in Tomato Sauce
LUBYEH BIL-ZEYT
The traditional way to serve this dish is by spreading the beans and their sauce on open pita bread: you tear off strips from the dry edges of the bread and use them to scoop up the beans. When you have finished eating the beans, you roll up the sauce-soaked bread to eat like a sandwich with wedges of raw onion. It was my favourite dish of all the ones my mother and grandmother cooked, and in a way it still is, especially when I want to have a taste of home. I always ask my mother to make it for me when I am in Lebanon. Lubyeh bil-zeyt was the first dish I ever cooked. I was 16 at the time and we lived in a small building that my father had bought. My room was on the same floor as the kitchen and dining room, with my parents’ on the floor above and my brother’s and sisters’ on the floor below. I was always the odd one in the family, insisting on having my own room and not wanting to share anything! It made me feel quite grown up to have a whole floor to myself, and one night my two older sisters and I decided to have a midnight feast. I made the green beans while my sisters prepared a chocolate cake. We ate the beans – I kept a little for my mother to taste the next day – and we used most of the chocolate cake in a cake fight that took forever to clear up. We didn’t want my parents to be angry at the mayhem we’d created while they were fast asleep. My mother never knew about the cake fight but she was very proud of my culinary efforts and impressed at how, on my first attempt, I’d managed to prepare the beans almost as well as she did!
Serves 4
3 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil
1 medium-sized onion, peeled and finely chopped
6 garlic cloves, unpeeled
400g (14oz) Helda beans or fine green beans
Sea salt
1 × 400g can of Italian cherry tomatoes, drained
Put the olive oil, onion and garlic in a wide saucepan. Place over a medium heat and fry until the onion turns golden.
While the onion is cooking, top, tail and, if necessary, string the beans. Then cut them on the slant in 5–6cm (2–2½in) lengths; if you are using fine beans, simply top and tail them. Rinse under cold water, then add the beans to the onions. Sprinkle with a generous pinch of salt, and cook, covered with a lid, for about 5 minutes, stirring regularly, until they turn bright green and become glossy.
Add the tomatoes and season with a little salt. Mix well and cover the pan, letting the mixture bubble gently for about 20 minutes or until the sauce has thickened and the beans are done to your liking. I like to keep them slightly al dente; my mother cooks them until quite soft. Serve hot, warm or at room temperature, with pita bread.
Tabbuleh
Tabbuleh is basically a parsley and tomato salad with a fair amount of mint and a smattering of burghul and spring onions. However, despite the salad having gone global, it is still rare to see it made properly in the West, with a lot more herbs than burghul. Somehow it is not natural for Westerners to regard parsley as an essential ingredient when they are used to it as a garnish. When I was a child I loved perching on the cool marble worktops in my grandmother’s kitchen to help her bunch up the parsley, being very meticulous about aligning the sprigs where the leaves started, so that my grandmother could chop the parsley in neat slivers with a minimum of stalk attached. I also helped my mother in our kitchen, where we had the same worktops – most Lebanese kitchens at that time had white marble work surfaces. And today I chop the parsley exactly as my mother and grandmother did all those years ago. I hate to say it but there are no short cuts. Using a food processor to chop the herbs is not an option because it turns the herbs to mush. You just need to hone your knife skills, which you’ll also need for dicing the tomatoes, plus a very sharp knife to avoid crushing them. As a final tip, drain the diced tomatoes before adding them to the salad. This will keep your tabbuleh crisp and make it last longer.
Serves 4–6
30g (1oz) fine burghul
600g (1lb 5oz) firm ripe tomatoes, diced into small cubes
50g (2oz) spring onions (about ½ bunch), trimmed
400g (14oz) flat-leaf parsley, most of the stalk discarded
70g (2½oz) mint, leaves picked from the stalks
¼ tsp ground cinnamon
½ tsp ground allspice or Lebanese seven-spice mixture
¼ tsp finely ground black pepper
Sea salt
Juice of 1 lemon or to taste
150ml (5fl oz) extra-virgin olive oil
4 Little Gem lettuces, quartered
Rinse the burghul in several changes of cold water, then drain well and put in a bowl. Stir with a fork every now and then to help fluff it up.
Put the diced tomatoes in a separate bowl and set aside while you thinly slice the spring onions and chop the herbs. A word of warning: do not chop the herbs with a mezzaluna – this will only bruise them. Instead, use a razor-sharp knife and gather as much as you can handle in a bunch and slice them very thin to end up with nice, crisp thin strips.
Drain the tomatoes of their juice and put in a large bowl. Add the spring onions and herbs and sprinkle the soaked burghul all over. Season with the cinnamon, allspice (or seven-spice mixture) and pepper, adding salt to taste. Add the lemon juice and olive oil and mix well. Taste and adjust the seasoning if necessary. Serve immediately with the quartered Little Gem lettuces.
Mushy Lentils and Rice
MUJADDARAH
Mujaddarah is a typical Lenten dish and a great vegetarian option for those who do not eat meat. My grandmother, who was more religious than my mother, often made it on a Friday, when Christians traditionally don’t eat meat. I loved watching her fill white soup plates with the smooth brown mixture, then line them up on the white marble counter to let them cool before she handed them out to each of us with a big bowl of lemony cabbage and tomato salad. Like lubyeh bil-zeyt, mujaddarah was one of my favourite family lunch dishes. It is also a typical dish to serve for lunch on spring-cleaning days, when it is put on to cook early in the morning and left to cool while the women of the house set about washing floors and beating the dust out of carpets. I was reminded of this the other day in London when my neighbour’s housekeeper started beating the dust out of his drawing-room cushions on the loading bay opposite mine. It was a sound from the past!
Mujaddarah is normally served at room temperature with a salad, raw onion and Arabic bread – all classic accompaniments. You can serve it in one big dish or, like my grandmother, in individual soup plates, where it sets like jelly with a very even top. And you can vary the recipe by puréeing the lentils before adding the onions and rice to make mujaddarah m’saffayeh (‘sieved’ mujaddarah). Simply drain the lentils, reserving the cooking water, then put them in a food processor and process until smooth. Return to the pan with the cooking water and finish as below.
Serves 4
400g (14oz) brown lentils, soaked for 30 minutes in cold water (enough to cover the lentils by 2–3 fingers)
100ml