Antonio Tahhan, who designed a menu of Aleppan dishes, and Laila El Haddad, who featured dishes from Gaza. “After a day of reading academic papers about Levantine cuisine from diverse academic disciplines, we crowded around kitchen tables to put theory into practice,” remembers Tahhan. “We commandeered the dining hall with lively Arabic music and dedicated prep stations. One for shaping makrouta, irresistibly crumbly shortbread cookies stuffed with a fragrant date filling. Not far away was the group rolling thin sheets of dough for Armenian lamb pies, lahm b’ajeen, a staple in cities with Armenian communities from Aleppo to Beirut. Those who wanted a challenge tried their hands at kbeibat, Assyrianstyle semolina-bulgur dumplings stuffed with a spiced lamb kofta filling. These intricate dishes lend themselves to communal preparations. Between chopping and kneading, rolling and pressing, conversations me-
andered and meaningful connections were made. Cooking is not practice that exists in isolation, but something that is made, collectively, over generations. The title, Making Levantine Cuisine, is a nod to this collaborative process—one that honors practical culinary knowledge alongside more theoretical academic perspectives.” The symposium and cooking workshop set the tone for the balance the volume seeks to strike between scholarly inquiry and practical know-how. “Bringing together historians, anthropologists, and literary scholars, but also poets and food writers, [Making Levantine Cuisine] is interdisciplinary in the truest sense of the term,” wrote reviewer Andrew Arsan, author of Lebanon: A Country in Fragments. “Taken together, these enlightening essays do more than simply provide us with new insight into Middle Eastern foodways: they also open up new conversations and suggest new ways of looking at the world.”
It is this view of food as a lens into cultures and histories that the volumes editors hope readers will take from the book—which has already sold out of its first print run. “The cooks, kitchens, and landscapes of the modern Levant have produced some of the most popular foods in the world today, within and beyond the wider Arabic-speaking world: hummus, shawarma, tabbouleh, and more,” writes Gaul. “Yet there is surprisingly little scholarship on, say, the politics of kibbe, the cultural meanings of mahshi and dolma, or the history of falafel. My co-editors and I envisioned this book as a first step towards addressing that fact…We hope it is an invitation not only to readers but also to scholars and writers working on the region to consider food as a way to understand history, politics, and culture from a new perspective.”
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Vicki Valosik is the CCAS Editorial Director.
ON MAKING LEVANTINE CUISINE The following is an excerpt from the Introduction to Making Levantine Cuisine: Modern Foodways of the Eastern Mediterranean.
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By Anny Gaul and Graham Auman Pitts
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Center for Contemporary Arab Studies - Georgetown University
100 years before the “Jerusalem” episode was recorded. Ottolenghi and Tamimi’s cookbook does correctly cite the date for the Ottoman withdrawal but reproduces a tired Orientalist cliché, describing the early twentieth-century city as “miserable, congested, and squalid.” The history section glosses over Zionist immigration from Europe, the signal development of modern Palestine’s history. The falafel that Zionist settlers eventually came to claim as their national food was made by Palestinians first. It belongs to a family of fritters made with fava beans, or chickpeas in the Palestinian version, that had long been shared throughout the Arab Eastern Mediterranean, from Alexandria A rare 1907 Judeo-Arabic cookbook, which is discussed in Noam Sienna's chapter on Tunisian Jewish foodways
Image credit: National Library of Israel
n sight of Jerusalem’s Damascus Gate, restaurateur and cookbook author Yotam Ottolenghi tells Anthony Bourdain that the Ottoman occupation of Palestine ended “150 years” before their 2013 interview. The cameras for Bourdain’s Parts Unknown TV series then follow the pair to a falafel stand inside the Old City’s Muslim Quarter. In response to Bourdain’s query about the origin of the iconic fried chickpea dish, Ottolenghi declares, “There’s actually no answer.” As the author of several best-selling cookbooks (including Jerusalem: A Cookbook), Ottolenghi, along with his collaborator Sami Tamimi, is perhaps the most prominent chronicler of the Levant’s cuisine. However, his answers to Bourdain distort the history of Levantine food. The Ottoman occupation ended in late 1917, not even
