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 the tall stems of wheat while they were still green.  We would make a little fire and try to roast or barbecue […]

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

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

  Clearly, this is not the most photogenic of Lebanese dishes.  It needs as much soft focus as an ageing diva from the golden age of Hollywood.  It is said in Beirut that if you can’t make a plate of mujadara, you better keep out of the kitchen the rest of your life.  It is just about the cheapest and most basic meal you can make — a feast only for the poorest of the poor.  But it is extremely […]

Categories: Lebanese recipes, memory and culture

  This is a poor man’s dish in Lebanon.  We have many types of lentils that are grown in the Bekaa valley.  They range in colour from green to reddish brown. When I was a child, my grandmother used to make this dish for us with green lentils that grew in her village.  She used burghul — cracked wheat — rather than rice, though.  As a Beiruti, I know the dish as Moudardara, although it is also called Mujadara.  But […]

Categories: Lebanese recipes, memory and culture