Quad Faculty Perspective
Thursday Night Cooking: From Gaza to Milton
Preparing the dishes of his Palestinian homeland is a source of great enjoyment and comfort for Mahmoud Abdalrahman.
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Milton Academy
starting as a new teacher at Milton Academy during a very unusual academic year, I did not know how things would go. It was only my third year of teaching at a high school level, and I was still learning how to navigate this world. When my faculty mentor, Jessica Bond, asked me to share some information about myself that she could use to introduce me at the first faculty meeting, I wasn’t sure what to say. The only thing I could think of was my love for food and cooking international cuisines. This soon became the topic that other faculty members used to start conversations with me whenever we met on campus or in a Zoom breakout room. Not long after, Kelly Reiser, the director of student activities, reached out to me and asked if I would be interested in hosting virtual Thursday night cooking sessions with Milton students. I appreciated the opportunity because I was already trying to think of ways to connect with the students and interact with them outside the classroom. I also thought it could offer the students some sense of community and normalcy during this particularly odd year. Cooking has long been a passion of mine, so I was enthusiastic to share that with the students. It is also an important part of my culture and identity—and a delicious way to represent it! Moving to Italy from Palestine to attend high school at the United World College of the Adriatic at the age of 17, and being a practicing Muslim, brought some challenges. Food was one of them. It turns out that Italians love to cook with pork and wine! While my school made an effort to have appropriate meals
available for those with food restrictions like me, our options became quite repetitive. With the help of my mother (and Skype), I started teaching myself to cook all the dishes I was missing. Ever since—for the entire 15 years I have lived abroad— making the food of my homeland has been a source of enjoyment and comfort. It has helped me feel connected to my heritage. It was also a great way to share my culture with friends at my high school and later on in college at Clark University. When eating at Arabic restaurants in the United States, I noticed that they generally feature meatheavy dishes (kabab, shawarma, etc.). Many people are familiar with Levantine side dishes such as hummus, falafel, and taboule, but many of our main dishes are vegan or plant-based. I believe this is partly because meat is a luxury that the majority can’t afford on a regular basis, and also farming is a historically common profession in that region. My Palestinian refugee grandparents, who settled in Gaza, came from farming villages where they ate what they planted. Such dishes focus heavily on fresh, high-quality, seasonal local produce. This inspired me to share less-known vegetable-heavy dishes such as stews based on spinach, chickpeas, black-eyed beans, okra, and green beans. If the vegetable is not the focus of the dish, it becomes the spice or the herb used. In general, Levantine cuisines deviate from other more famous Mediterranean cuisines in our use of spices, which is influenced by ancient Indian trade routes. However, unlike many South Asian cuisines, ours tends to
c o urt e s y of ma hmo u d a b da l ra hm a n
SCIENCE TEACHER MAHMOUD ABDALRAHMAN SHARES WITH STUDENTS SOME OF HIS FAVORITE FOODS FROM HIS HOMELAND
