Category Archives: Lebanese recipes

you can’t go home again – 1960s Lebanon

February 1, 2018 by samara cuisine

I came late to the party in Lebanon and to the wrong address. I was born in the 1960s when Beirut was a flourishing cosmopolitan city with an exciting touch of the exotic, but I grew up as it fell apart in the 1970s and the 1980s. Not that I would have known much about those halcyon days. My parents and I, swiftly followed by my sister, slept in one room in a small apartment a minute’s walk away from […]

Categories: Lebanese recipes, Lebanese recipes, memory and culture, memory and culture • Tags: 1960s jetset, Beirut, hamra

red lights and green lines — more street food with mana’ish

January 22, 2016 by samara cuisine

I‘ve recently been working with a cafe near where I live in London. It’s in a charming little cobbled street that leads to the Thames. The best seller is the soft Lebanese pizza — mana’ish, topped with cheese, meat or thyme. That’s jibneh, lahim bil ajeen and zaatar to give them their proper Arab names. And just writing them reminds me of a very different street in Beirut where my family used to get its own warm, fresh mana’ish. It […]

Categories: Lebanese recipes, Lebanese recipes, memory and culture, memory and culture, recipes • Tags: Beirut, Georgina Rizk, Miss Lebanon, street food, zaitounay bay

moufatka – the ugly duckling of Lebanese puddings

November 2, 2015 by samara cuisine

There’s no way around this. It’s no beauty. In fact it’s downright ugly. Maybe it’s the colour — a rather ill-looking brown — or the texture. But moufatka dares you to like it. That may be one reason why you don’t find it in Lebanese restaurants. This is very much a dish that you make at home and bring out on special occasions. But that’s what makes it such a treat for those who see past its unfortunate looks. Even […]

Categories: Lebanese recipes • Tags: Beirut, lebanon, pudding, twickenham, world cup rugby 2015

Araa wa batinjan mahsi — season of harvests

October 30, 2015 by samara cuisine

The smell of wood smoke at night, mist on the water meadows at dawn and strange suburban trees heavy with incongruous fruit — that’s what the season of harvests means to me here and now. It’s been a good year with plenty of sun and rain. My small garden is witness to it. A lemon tree that has struggled through two winters has produced large and succulent fruit. I hesitate to pick the lemons as I don’t know when or […]

Categories: Lebanese recipes • Tags: aubergine, Beirut, Bekaa, harvest, lebanon, marrow

flayfleh mahshiyeh (stuffed peppers) – or the time of ghosts

October 29, 2015 by samara cuisine

The time of ghosts is almost upon us. Halloween and All Souls Day. It’s one of the gravest times of year — when autumn begins to turn towards winter. In London, we have slate grey skies and speckles of rain. The clouds look like an utterly endless, empty sea — the cold Atlantic, not the Mediterranean I grew up beside. When I was a child in Lebanon, we didn’t have Halloween celebrations. We had a day almost a month later, […]

Categories: Lebanese recipes • Tags: Beirut, halloween, lebanon, recipe, stuffed peppers

Awwamat ( Lebanese honey balls) — or you stink so sweetly

August 30, 2015 by samara cuisine

(To mark the protests in Beirut, I am providing a recipe over-ripe with sweetness to counter the sour smell on the streets from all the uncollected rubbish. But first here is a little essay on the protests that my husband was asked to write…) Summer in Beirut is more often than not a victory of hope over experience. Hotels and restaurants gear up for what they pray will be a substantial temporary homecoming from Lebanon’s sentimental diaspora. And tens of […]

Categories: Lebanese recipes • Tags: awwamat, beirut protests, youstink

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Namoura — or abdel halim and lou reed in beirut

March 23, 2015 by samara cuisine

What is the soundtrack of a city? In Beirut, it’s probably the clanging and drilling of construction workers eternally raising up new high rises. It’s a kind of music that starts early in the morning and doesn’t let up all day. It’s the heartbeat of the city, as much as the traffic and the hooting and the thumping from late night discos and hotels, not to mention the calls from the muezzin competing on Sunday with church bells. The cacophony […]

Categories: Lebanese recipes • Tags: Beirut, david bowie, john cale, johnny hallyday, lou reed, soundtrack

kibbeh batata — or keeping a light burning

December 1, 2014 by samara cuisine

There are songs about love in every form — lost, unrequited, blind and all embracing — and there are songs about the other big subjects — death, loss and the many glories of life that somehow slip through all the bad stuff. Sabah — who died last week — sang about most of them. But the song of hers I liked the most was about potatoes — well, not really about potatoes but about living the simple life and not […]

Categories: Lebanese recipes, memory and culture • Tags: dabke, kibbeh, sabah

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sabah — or my family’s brush with fame

November 26, 2014 by samara cuisine

One of my family’s few brushes with real fame was with Sabah, the great Lebanese singer and actress who has just died. The connection was through one of my cousins, a writer, actor and theatre director, called Wasim. Sabah may have been adored for her wonderful, passionate, keening voice, but she was also notorious for her many marriages. And Wasim was one of her nine husbands — number four or five, I think. One of the most vivid memories from […]

Categories: Lebanese recipes, memory and culture • Tags: damascus, jumblatt, sabah, tabbara

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shakshoukeh — or waiting for winter

November 15, 2014 by samara cuisine

Outside tonight here on the edge of London by the Thames, we are deep into November and it’s eight degrees. I notice that it’s 19 degrees in Beirut. The difference is here we are still waiting for winter, while in Lebanon, you can simply drive straight up into the mountains and you can have a quick shot of all the winter you want. For years, everyone here has been trying to persuade me of the glory of having four real […]

Categories: Lebanese recipes, memory and culture • Tags: Bekaa, shakshoukeh, winter recipe

Barazik — or a tea that never happened

October 16, 2014 by samara cuisine

There are meals you never had, but which you wish had happened. I imagined when I was learning and practicing recipes in Beirut in my teens that I would serve them at various occasions that were never very likely, not just because I was a girl and had little freedom to invite anyone home but also because the war made any such gestures all but out of the question. One thing I would like to have done, but that was […]

Categories: Lebanese recipes, memory and culture • Tags: American University of Beirut, Beirut, brian keenan, hostage, kidnap, Rafik Hariri

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arayess bil kofta — or discovering street food

September 30, 2014 by samara cuisine

Street food in Beirut wasn’t really street food for me for much of my childhood and adolescence because the streets where you could get it near me like Hamra were dark and forbidding and downright scary at night. The lamp lights would be off. The cinemas and shops that once blazed all down the street were extinguished. It was more like a wild habitat for militias and starving stray cats than the shopping and social heart of West Beirut. And […]

Categories: Lebanese recipes, memory and culture • Tags: kofta, lebanese catering

Shorbat al Dajaj maa al-shairiyeh — or autumn approaching

September 12, 2014 by samara cuisine

Think of Lebanon or Beirut and you probably see pin sharp blazing Mediterranean days — a dazzling array of mezze, an ice cold drink and the sea below you. Most of the year, it’s like that by the coast, but climb into the mountains up into the Bekaa and beyond and you feel the seasons fiercely as they change. My husband tells me that one of his earliest memories is driving with his grandparents, who lived in Beirut, up what […]

Categories: Lebanese recipes, memory and culture • Tags: Bekaa, burgul, chick, chicken soup

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Itch — or a different twist on tabbouleh from Aleppo

September 4, 2014 by samara cuisine

This is the time of the year in the Bekaa Valley when the harvest is being brought in. In the village where my relatives live, they have all been out in the fields cutting the ripened wheat. From this is produced their staple food and one of the most ancient in the world — bulgur or cracked wheat. Producing it is one of the oldest processes in the world. In the Bekaa, it has been done the same way for […]

Categories: Lebanese recipes, memory and culture • Tags: Aleppo, Bekaa, burgul, tabbouleh

‘Atayef/Qatayef bil Joz — Lebanese pancakes with walnuts and syrup

July 10, 2014 by samara cuisine

We are well into Ramadan now. It probably won’t go down too well with some of my more intense Muslim friends, but the longer it lasts the more I think of the delicious treats I first started to make during the holy month when I was at university in Beirut. No-one in my family had a sweet tooth, except for me and my dad. So, it’s lucky that I had enough friends to help me get through the heart attacks […]

Categories: Lebanese recipes, memory and culture

From Beirut to London in 100 Dishes

keeping my arab heritage alive through food

Category Archives: Lebanese recipes

you can’t go home again – 1960s Lebanon

red lights and green lines — more street food with mana’ish

moufatka – the ugly duckling of Lebanese puddings

Araa wa batinjan mahsi — season of harvests

flayfleh mahshiyeh (stuffed peppers) – or the time of ghosts

Awwamat ( Lebanese honey balls) — or you stink so sweetly

Namoura — or abdel halim and lou reed in beirut

kibbeh batata — or keeping a light burning

sabah — or my family’s brush with fame

shakshoukeh — or waiting for winter

Barazik — or a tea that never happened

arayess bil kofta — or discovering street food

Shorbat al Dajaj maa al-shairiyeh — or autumn approaching

Itch — or a different twist on tabbouleh from Aleppo

‘Atayef/Qatayef bil Joz — Lebanese pancakes with walnuts and syrup