I am that boat drugged by the sound of the waves   in the darkened bay   The night is more immense than I remember your eyes   purple after you dived   We stayed on at the st george long after everyone left   it was a kind of bet   Long snakelike days glistening on concrete by the pool   no shadows at all   Above us lost worlds stretched in plumes of fuel and smoke   […]

Categories: Lebanese recipes, memory and culture

Little birds come in different shapes and sizes.  There are the ones my uncles used to catch and roast in the Bekaa.  Or those my brother still hunts from time to time in north Lebanon in an area he describes as a kind of Shangri La — a valley that no one goes to, that has been preserved from the random half-finished buildings that now blight so much of Lebanon.  The reason for its pristine beauty?  It’s where drug lords […]

Categories: Lebanese recipes, memory and culture

Again, it is almost dusk.  Here in England, it comes late — well after nine in the evening.  So, it’s been a long day for anyone fasting, although mercifully cool for now.  Iftar — the breaking of the fast — is only a short time away.  There is not the abrupt sunset of the Middle East where you free fall from burning daylight to total darkness within a few minutes.  But the anticipation is similar.  I visit many of my […]

Categories: Lebanese recipes, memory and culture

  The image is pretty much a cliche.  A distant, clear cut moon in a perfectly black sky silhouetting a minaret.  But it is what it is — and Ramadan is starting.  It’s the time of year when life takes on two dimensions in the Muslim world.  During the day, it stills as work slows down, people fast and await dusk when a very different life begins, full of colour, festivities and feasts.  In Saudi Arabia, for instance, even if […]

Categories: Lebanese recipes, memory and culture

 This is a dish I did not know when I lived in Lebanon, but discovered from Syrian friends here in London.  But its ingredients I know very well from the long weekends and summers I spent in the Bekaa.   I used to ramble and play in the wheat fields with cousins and friends.  Sometimes we would gather seeds from the tall stems of wheat while they were still green.  We would make a little fire and try to roast […]

Categories: Lebanese recipes, memory and culture

  One of the strongest and best memories I have from growing up in Lebanon are all the different trees that grew around my grandparents’ village in the Bekaa in the shadow of the mountain that we call Jebel al Sheikh — Mount Hermon to the Israelis.   The orchards stretched as far as I could see .  My grandfather was a farmer and had many acres of land.  Every spring I can remember the anticipation with which I waited […]

Categories: Lebanese recipes, memory and culture

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