Food

Today was a great day for learning about -- and eating! -- Lebanese food. This morning the student group Slow Food Beirut hosted a 'traditional Lebanese breakfast,' or 'Terwi2a Libnaniyeh.' Food producers from ten different Lebanese farms, bakeries, and apiaries set up booths on campus and sold their products and answered questions about traditional Lebanese food production. Most of the food was certified organic and really yummy, though some of it was unfamiliar, if not downright mystifying. Luckily, there was a short film playing in one of the campus buildings that explained what some of the food was and interviewed the bakers/farmers/beekeepers. And it had English subtitles!

One of the neat aspects of Lebanese cooking is the dome-shaped griddle called a 'saj' on which sandwiches are made. A lot of street vendors and snack shops have them. They'll throw a piece of flatbread on the saj, add some cheese and maybe some veggies, and then wait until the cheese melts to roll it up and fold it.

The sandwich (or manouchi) I had today, though, was not done on a saj. It was a wonderful labneh (thick plain yogurt) sandwich with basil, olives, cucumber and tomatoes. Oh, and it also had a special ingredient sprinkled on it: zaatar. I learned from the film that zaatar is a blend of thyme, toasted sumac and sesame seeds, and salt. I liked it so much that I bought a bag of it from a farmer who grows organic thyme. Maybe I'll start making my own labneh sandwiches!

Zaatar is also baked inside these handbag-shaped loaves of bread. The loop on top makes it easy to store them or carry them on a pole or stick.

Another highlight of the event was getting to sample some cedar honey from an apiary in the mountains of Lebanon. It tasted sweet, of course, but also had an unusual flavor that probably came from the cedar pollen. It was really good.

I should mention that the men in black robes and white headcoverings are Druze, which is an intriguing and somewhat mysterious religion I don't really know very much about yet.

For dessert (as if the honey weren't dessert enough), I had a mwaraka. It was SO good! The dough is filo-type pastry dough, and it's filled with nuts, sugar, rose water and orange blossom water. The film showed them being made. The bakers roll the filling up in the dough so it doesn't drip out during baking and make a mess. They then have a long dough tube which they coil up and bake. Yum!

To cap off my day of food, I went to a lecture titled 'What is Ottoman Cuisine, and What is the Mediterranean?' by Sami Zubaida. It was a really interesting examination of the intersections of empire and cuisine. Professor Zubaida basically said that 'Ottoman cuisine' was a result of empire forcibly bringing together the very different local cuisines of different counties and regions. The more recent hype about the 'Mediterranean diet' is thanks to savvy marketing by olive oil trade groups and others. Did you know that up until fairly recently in the Middle East, olive oil was mostly used for lighting and soap, and that butter was the preferred cooking fat? Or that the tomato was regarded with suspicion and not part of people's diets here until the early twentieth century? Neither did I! The upshot is that countries of the Mediterranean and the former Ottoman empire are much more heterogeneous than most people realize. Of course, there is also a big difference between the foods eaten by rich people and poor people in all countries.

In other gastro-political news, today a Lebanese group said it is suing Israel for marketing hummus as an Israeli dish. A member of the Lebanese group said of the Israelis: "It is not enough they are stealing our land, they are also stealing our civilization and our cuisine." Hummus is a big deal!

Most importantly, I have so far suffered no ill effects from eating all this fine local food. My digestive system may finally be turning Lebanese after all!