FEW PEOPLE know Lebanese cuisine like Anissa Helou. The James Beard Award-winning author and Beirut native has penned nearly a dozen cookbooks on topics ranging from Mediterranean street food to modern mezze. But it wasn’t until she began researching her latest, Lebanon: Cooking the Foods of My Homeland, that she realized how little she knew about the diversity within her own country’s cuisine.
Speaking with Reuters ahead of the book’s March 10 release, Helou, who lives in Sicily, reflects on uncovering regional specialties that most Beirutis wouldn’t know and why documenting these recipes now feels more urgent than ever.
This conversation, conducted before the outbreak of the latest conflict in the Middle East, has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Q: Can you tell me about your introduction to cooking growing up in Beirut?
A: My mother and grandmother were very, very good cooks and they always prepared the food for us. We spent some of the summers in Syria, because my father is originally Syrian, and we spent it in (the northwestern Syrian town of) Mashta el-Helou with my aunt who grew everything and did everything at home. So from when I was a kid, food has been incredibly important in my life.
Q: How did that passion manifest into cookbook writing?
A: I didn’t have to cook when I was in Lebanon, so when I left at 21 and started living with a man, the first thing I said to him (was) “Don’t expect me to cook for you,” mainly because I was into women’s liberation and I was a bit of a feminist. I loved food and I loved eating and going to markets and everything, but I saw cooking as a domestic occupation rather than an interesting way of approaching culture.
(Then one day,) a friend of his came to the house and she cooked. I was looking at them eating and him with his beatific expression and I was thinking maybe I should review my attitude to cooking. I very foolishly decided to cook a Lebanese meal for 30 of our friends, most of them foreign, in mid-’70s London, a culinary desert. Olive oil, flat-leaf parsley, burghul (or bulgur wheat), tahini — (all) almost unknown ingredients for the general public. I crisscrossed London to get the ingredients, and I managed to produce a meal having not been able to get in touch with my mother because it was at the height of the (Lebanese) Civil War and there was no communication. But I cooked from memory.
It wasn’t until 20 years later (that I had) a chance encounter with a Lebanese friend (who had) taken a literary agent to write a book. They were talking about cookbooks as an emerging genre in publishing. I started thinking, you know, my mother is such a great cook. She won’t be with us forever. Maybe I should write down her recipes. And because a lot of young people had been displaced in the Civil War, I thought a good Lebanese cookbook would be great for people who didn’t have the chance I had.
Q: Lebanon examines the country’s cuisine through a regional rather than a national lens. What inspired that approach?
A: What people eat in the south is quite different from what people eat in the north. There’s a whole selection of kibbehs (a popular dish made of spiced ground meat and bulgur wheat) in the south that you don’t find anywhere else; even breads that you don’t find either in Beirut or in the north. So, looking at it from a regional point of view makes you focus more on the communities and on the specialties of that region.
Q: How unfamiliar to you were some of these dishes?
A: Take the example of a flatbread called mishtah. Until I did my book on savory baking (in 2007), I didn’t know it existed. That bread was made on a daily basis an hour away from Beirut and I never saw it. Even my mother, who was a fount of knowledge of Lebanese cuisine, didn’t know about it. So, it was a revelation — there’s this flatbread that’s more like focaccia than pita with texture because it has like cracked wheat in it and lots of spices that I had never seen or tasted.
And then the different kibbehs. There’s what I call our own “steak tartare,” frakeh. The burghul is mixed with herbs and spices and then with the raw meat. And that again I didn’t know about until I started researching this book.
Q: You’ve written nearly a dozen cookbooks. What was your aim with this one?
A: There are lots of books on Lebanese food, but there are very few authors that have had an approach that is both historical and aesthetic and in-depth. What I wanted to do with this book is to have these approaches (for) those who don’t know Lebanese cuisine and to present the beauty of our food and to make them discover new things. Like why, for instance, the Druze will not eat molokhia (a popular, nutrient-dense stew made of jute mallow). I didn’t know until I found out that they don’t eat it because their sheikh in the 11th century decided that it was an aphrodisiac and there (are) still many Druze now who, not knowing why, still will not touch molokhia.
Q: You’ve been living outside of Lebanon for more than 50 years now. What were the biggest changes you observed going back?
A: I live in Sicily now, and you go to places where they look like medieval paintings. They haven’t changed at all. One thing that struck me (in Lebanon) is how little conservation there was in the rural parts. I’m not talking about the cities because it’s quite obvious that Beirut has been overdeveloped. I mean, Tripoli is a city that I love that still has kept a lot of its old character, especially in the souks and the old part, or Saida in the south.
But the people were always very nice. We were in Tyre and we were walking down the street and I saw a woman rolling vine leaves on her veranda and I just barged in on her and started talking to her and asking what she was doing, who she was cooking for. And she offered us coffee and talked to us. Everywhere we went, everybody received us with open arms. I know it’s cliché, but they’re so hospitable and generous with the food, whatever they’re preparing.
Q: Your work often explores how food preserves cultural memory — something that has been similarly discussed by cookbook authors like Palestinian chef Sami Tamimi. How important is it in the Lebanese context?
A: I think it’s very important. My whole purpose writing about food is preserving culinary traditions for future generations. Food is much more important for Palestinians to preserve for their identity because most of their food is being appropriated. Whereas in the case of the Lebanese, we don’t yet have that problem. But there is the problem of instability, conflicts, aggression. There is a risk of loss of this knowledge because people get displaced, places get destroyed. Lebanon is not immune to destruction, especially now.
So it’s very important for me to preserve and to document, especially visually, because you might lose that beautiful village or this gorgeous house with the old lady who is making mishtah in a hole in the wall. These places are going to go eventually; they will not stay. And so to document them visually, as well as in the written word, is very important.
The perspectives expressed in Culture Current are the subject’s own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Reuters News. — Reuters
