This is a dish that combines my lives in Lebanon and in England.  Fish was always seen as a great luxury by my family in Beirut.  Partly of course because it is expensive there.  The fish restaurants on the Corniche were some of the most opulent in the city, with terraces gazing away from the chaos of the city and out over the Mediterranean.   Up the road in Baalbek, the epicentre of Lebanon’s cosmopolitan glory in the 1960s and […]

Categories: Lebanese recipes, memory and culture

  It still stands there after all these years.  Never inhabited by anyone but ghosts and snipers.  The Burj el Murr.  I remember it going up just before the war amidst a frenzy of high-rise blocks. At the end of my street going towards downtown, you just turn to the right and there it is.  For something like forty years now, it’s been there — perched above Hamra and the bay.  During the civil war, this was the green line, dividing […]

Categories: Lebanese recipes, memory and culture

Give us this day our daily bread… Although my family is Muslim, I went to a Catholic school with nuns when I was a child — so I grew up knowing Christian prayers better than the Koran.  But whether it’s Christianity or Islam, bread plays a central role in each — as a symbol, a giver of life.  And of course in the Arab world — in Lebanon — it remains the essential food.  The dishes that are most closely […]

Categories: Lebanese recipes, memory and culture

 Back to cooking…  I have already talked in an earlier post about how I developed a seriously sweet tooth as a child, aided and abetted by the treats my father would take me on when we went downtown.   How I would stand with him as I guzzled down my little pudding with coconut shavings and nuts.  This is what I was talking about — moughli. It was, I think, the first pudding recipe I got just right.  I didn’t […]

Categories: Lebanese recipes, memory and culture

There are a few dishes that anyone who knows anything of Lebanese cuisine will be familiar with.  Most form part of what is Lebanon’s major contribution to food — the mezze.  That of course is the sumptuous, dizzying series of plates that come to your table almost as soon as you have sat down in a Lebanese restaurant.  There are hundreds of possible dishes, but several that are essential.  Of these, tabbouleh stands out.  It symbolises all that is best […]

Categories: Lebanese recipes, memory and culture

 The smell, the feel, the look of this cheap, delicious Lebanese cake all fill me with an intense nostalgia.  I can still remember debating with myself as a teenager in Beirut with the latest bombardment of shells intensifying around us whether I could just keep working a little more in our kitchen in our sixth floor apartment on the recipe that might finally deliver the perfect sfouf.  That or racing down to the basement where everyone in the block would be […]

Categories: Lebanese recipes, memory and culture

  Okra looks very tempting when you see it fresh in a Lebanese market.  But the perennial problem with okra — and the thing that puts some people off it for life — is the slime that can appear when you heat it and cook it.  I know this, because I have felt exactly the same way.  But there are methods to stop the slime, which comes from something called mucilage that is found inside the plant. You need to […]

Categories: Lebanese recipes, memory and culture

  Now we are moving away from poor man’s dishes.  For me and my friends in Beirut, the idea of mulukhia is a party in itself.  I am not quite sure why, but it always seems like a big social event when we make the dish.  Perhaps it’s because of the whole rigmarole over sourcing the mulukhia leaves– which are also known as jew’s mallow — and then preparing them.  My father gets the spinach-like leaves from a farm in […]

Categories: Lebanese recipes, memory and culture