Around the World in 26 Meals: No. 7 - The Levant
Intro
If Turkey is the overlap between the Middle Eastern and European worlds, a statement that may have been more true fifteen years ago, we now go to the Middle East proper - an area where cuisines blend into each other and we take one further step away from Greek food.
I’ve decided to refer to this region as the Levant - this isn’t a perfect descriptor of the area (not least for the fact that Cyprus is in this region and is decidedly not covered today) but I think it’s the least worst shorthand to describe this area of the Eastern Mediterranean where national borders were assigned fairly arbitrarily after the Ottomans fell and, I suspect, most coherent food regions would cross a national boundary.
Keep in mind that. aside from the short lived Crusader States and some back and forth on the fringes of the Roman Empire, especially in Cilicia, this whole area would have been largely undivided under one state or another for a long time. A long time as in since before Islam existed and since before Christianity was anything more than an obscure branch of Judaism. When most people in the region wouldn’t have considered themselves Arab and those that did worshipped a mostly forgotten pantheon of gods. In short a lot of time for mixing and for cultural barriers, where they exist, to crop up in ways that don’t line up at all with future national boundaries.
To some extent this part of the world is still a patchwork, there are many nations both famous (such as the Kurds) or obscure (such as the Assyrians) resident, but broadly the region is part of the wider Arab world. So, unsurprisingly, Arab cuisine, though perhaps not as it would be in Arabia itself (unless you count Jordan as Arabia), is the backbone of this region’s food.
The book(s)
Ghillie Başan makes a return to these posts, completely by accident, with The Food and Cooking of Lebanon, Jordan and Syria - moving very slightly south from last week’s book. I wrote about her in my previous post so will not cover old ground here but suffice to say this kind of food is only moving slightly outside her area of particular expertise.
The other book was a gift out of the blue, received at no particular occasion, but one I’d been eager to try since receiving it. This is Falastin, a book on Palestinian cooking - the name was chosen in an attempt to pick the term for it with least baggage in Palestine itself. I don’t pretend to know the specifics of why Falastin may be less controversial than Palestine (as it is essentially the same word) but I do know even the basics of this part of the world can be controversial, so fair enough. Good call, I presume.
I’d also mistakenly thought this book was a Yotam Ottolenghi project, which it is not. Granted, this is very much part of his network as both authors, the Palestinian Sami Tamimi and the very much not-Palestinian Tara Wigley, are long term collaborators of Ottolenghi’s and have both co-authored books with him. But beyond a foreword and the occasional recipe carried over from previous collaborations (one of which appears in this post, the fritters) Ottolenghi himself is absent.
Truthfully this is probably a sensible decision - even in a cookbook the politics of Israel and Palestine can’t be entirely absent from the conversation and the presence of an Israeli co-author (even living outside of Israel) on a book of Palestinian cookery could be taken in many different ways, positive and negative. Ultimately if the self-stated goal of the book is to celebrate Palestine and its food, which it is, no matter where that conversation goes it’s probably one you don’t want to encourage more than you have to. You can’t avoid talking about Israel entirely, and the book does directly mention the understandably fraught politics around it, but why invite any more talk on the conflict than you need to?
What I cooked (and adjustments)
Going in I’d wanted to give each book a fair shake - however ultimately I do feel that Falastin got far more of the spotlight this time around. Perhaps this is right given it’s the second Başan book in two posts but nevertheless, it’s not my intent. With that in mind the first two dishes are from The Food and Cooking of Lebanon, Jordan and Syria and the remainder of the recipes are from Falastin. As usual I replaced garlic with asfoetida in all these recipes.
Firstly there’s chickpea and bulgur salad with mint and brown rice with walnuts and basterma - no adjustments were made for these, save the use of soaked rather than canned chickpeas in the former recipe. However it may be worth mentioning what basterma even is. It’s spiced, cured beef, particularly associated with Armenia and Turkey but popular across much of the former Ottoman Empire - its origins are debated but possibly date back as far as the Romans/Byzantines. The more common (at least in the UK) pastrami is a Romanian variant on basterma and, given translation and transliteration issues, both come in a variety of (cognate) names.
The next recipe is a variant of a previous recipe by Sami Tamimi, cauliflower and cumin fritters with mint yoghurt. For this recipe I ended up using more cauliflower than the recipe suggested, I could only find large ones, and I also increased the amount of spice in the batter as cauliflower tends to suffer more from being too plain than too spiced!
The centrepiece of the Falastin recipes was the pulled lamb shawarma sandwich - marinaded, slow roasted and pulled with forks. I’m aware that this is very much not the traditional way of making shawarma but given the good ratio of fat to meat on the cut used (shoulder) it seems a reasonable method for a home cook without access to specialist equipment. This also gives me a flimsy excuse to pull some meat - this series of posts probably won’t visit the USA as its cuisine is, shall we say, mixed in quality and it didn’t make the cut when I was sketching out my itinerary. But pulled meats are genuinely lovely so it’s nice to visit that technique in this series of posts, even via Palestine.
Largely I made the pulled lamb as directed, though I think I increased the volume of spice in the marinade and I definitely used a blender instead of a food processor when making the marinade. One large change is the omission of shatta as a condiment. Shatta is a fermented chilli paste that would have required preparation a few days ahead, something I’d be willing to do but which I only noticed one day before cooking. Ultimately I substituted with plain (not rose) harissa, which is far easier to find pre-prepared.
The bread required for this sandwich is, given it’s for shawarma, clearly not a Western-style loaf but pita (known in Arabic as khubez adi or khubez kimaaj, terms explained in the book). This was largely made according to the instructions provided but manually kneaded by my partner (thank you!) rather than using a stand mixer, on account of not having one or, realistically, room for one. Some other minor changes had to be made to accommodate the lack of counter space in our kitchen, these were all rather spur of the moment things, were not desirable, but somehow ended up not causing any real problems..
As a note this also necessitated my dropping a recipe from The Food and Cooking of Lebanon, Jordan and Syria - bread with feta and figs. Another flatbread, manoushi rather than pita, this would have been a nice link between Greece and Turkey and this region of the world - however two breads in one cooking session seemed a bit much, particularly as I expect to be making yet more bread for almost every post until we’re out of India.
For dessert I made muhallabieh with cherries and hibiscus syrup - described as essentially Palestinian panna cotta, and omitted pistachios (because I forgot) and used dried hibiscus flowers instead of hibiscus teabags in making the syrup. The teabags were a substitution for the dried hibiscus flowers in the original recipe as the flowers were deemed too hard to find. However I could easily find them but not the teabags, so, I suppose I may have made a desubstitution.
Finally I made the decidedly non-traditional sticky date and halva puddings with tahini caramel. These are described as a Palestinian take on sticky toffee pudding, though to me they seem more like a variant on caramel cupcakes. I made some changes to the recipe when making the caramel sauce - as the recipe suggested making caramel by cooking sugar on a hob for 3-4 minutes. This actually ruined it, making a burned mess, so I chucked it and started again with much reduced cooking time and much better results.
Finally, for those unfamiliar, halva is a confectionary made from tahini and sugar, therefore ultimately of sesame and sugar. It has a dry, sandy texture and can easily be found pre-prepared plain or in a variety of flavours.
Cooking
With this project I bit off more than I could chew, so work proceeded over the better part of a week. On day 1 I soaked some chickpeas (which is visually uninteresting and so omitted) and prepared the marinade for my lamb.
The chopped onion, ginger and asfoetida is shown already in situ in the blender. This was blended with a bit of water, slightly more effort than using a food processor as the recipe suggests but if you can’t figure out how to get the food processor attachment to work blending’s the nearest equivalent!
The spices were simply combined in a pestle and mortar,
Parsley was chopped and some oil and vinegar combined with salt and pepper.
This was all blended together, the lamb pierced all over and covered in the marinade overnight, loosely covered in foil. Here it is at the start of day 2:
Yeah, it’s a bit ugly.
The next day it was time to attend to the lamb, ultimately it needed slow cooked in stock, onion and garlic (read: asfoetida) at 140 degrees for a total of 5 and a half hours and another half an hour at 160. While this is going on the various accompaniments to the sandwiches were prepared.
Firstly some tahini, lemon and sumac yoghurt, pictured below.
And some chopped red onion, tomato, mint and parsley, as well as the harissa. These were all stored for many hours while everything else was prepped!
Logically it makes sense to move onto the pita now, though chronologically the actual baking had to wait until after the lamb due to the recipes needing very different oven temperatures. All the components needed are shown below, the milk powder was indeed specified in the recipe:
After combination, dealing with the yeast and so on my partner helpfully kneaded the dough for me (correctly estimating how much it needed, given the instructions assumed access to a stand mix) and it was set to prove.
At the end of the cooking time the lamb looked a bit wrong - far too much liquid, far too much charring. It looked ugly, but at least the dough had risen slightly. Pay attention and you might notice a difference from the last picture:
The dough was divided and rolled into balls, the recipe insists an additional ten minute proof is necessary at this stage, but that no visible changes will occur. I have no idea if it was necessary or not but gave it a second proof:
The balls were flattened and rolled and given a third twenty minute proof. the recipe suggests spreading these out rather than stacking them (for obvious reasons) but in the absence of enough counter space I had little option but to stack and hope for the best.
Back to the meat - lemon juice was squeezed over the meat and it was clear that the slow cooking had worked, as the bone cleanly detaches. Still, everything still looks a bit of a mess.
In the meanwhile the pitas stuck together. necessitating frantic re-rolling before giving them each about five minutes in a very hot oven.
Despite the recipe warning repeatedly of the danger of tears in the dough all of this tearing and re-rolling still produced lovely pitas - the ones below were thoroughly puffed up when coming out of the oven, even moreso than the one at the bottom:
And transferring the lamb to a shallower dish and removing the bone made it look … well, not good but a lot less bad.
Despite my serious misgivings this actually all came together spectacularly. The lamb was tender, flavourful and delicious and the freshly baked pita was a whole new world compared to pre-made bread. The appeal of pita as a general purpose bread rather than purely a taramasalata vessel was now open to me in a way it never had been before.
Though, this all said, all of this food was far nicer on the day. It was still fine the day after but both the pita and the lamb simply couldn’t compare to how it was fresh. Notably the pita was more dense, less tasty and less prone to forming a natural pocket than when fresh. So perhaps this is better as a meal for a huge group than for a few people over a long period,
This day of cooking wasn’t just dedicated to the lamb though. It was the most busy day and I also worked on both of the Başan recipies, the simplest of which was the bulgur salad. The ingredients sans the soaked and boiled chickpeas are shown below, during the soaking of the wheat, and before the toasting of the sesame or the chopping of the veg:
In terms of preparation this was by far the simplest recipe: chop the onion and herbs, toast some sesame, combine all the ingredients and squeeze some lemon on top:
Some mixing and a generous sprinkling of paprika and it was done. Overall I think the least interesting of everything I made, and I had far too much of it, but fine for what it was.
The brown rice with basterma (pastirma in this picture) was more involved but still quite simple. Shown are many of the ingredients with some olive oil and butter, which was used for the cooking - ghee would have also been acceptable.
Onions, chilli (and later coriander and mint) were chopped and a mix of cumin seeds, sugar and asfoetida were made.
These were fried in the oil and butter mixture as other ingredients were prepped. Spices, rice, chickpeas and stock were added in that order and the mixture simmered for half an hour.
Then the meat was fried separately and added, along with the herbs.
The walnuts were added last and this dish was complete!
This was another dish that turned out better than expected, brown rice is rarely a favourite of mine but this was still a flavourful, satisfying dish. However, and surprisingly, its flavour also diminished overnight - the basterma in particular didn’t seem to withstand reheating very well.
The fritters were next, I started with the low hanging fruit of making some mint yoghurt, literally mixing the two ingredients together with a bit of lemon juice and olive oil. This particular dried Moroccan mint was far better quality than typical supermarket herbs and would probably have been suitable for making mint tea!
I then got to work on the ingredients needed for the batter.
The cauliflower was boiled and lightly mashed with a fork and the flour, egg, parsley. onion, baking powder and spices were combined with water to make a mix with “the consistency of a slightly runny batter”. This, dear reader, was not what emerged:
This rather unappealing looking mixture, barely a batter at all (thanks to my excess cauliflower?), was stored overnight as I got to work on the muhallabieh.
A cornflour paste was made with whole milk and another 400ml of milk was boiled with some water and sugar. These were combined together as the milk started to boil and the mix whisked until it had thickened to a consistency similar to thick custard. It was then allowed to cool.
Also may I introduce Boris? He is our squid whisk and I stress not named after the prime minister. He worked very hard on this dish, far moreso than his namesake would.
The plain milky mix was poured into wine glasses. I did get distracted from whisking so one ended up a tad lumpy, which isn’t great. They were then cooled overnight in the fridge.
I also made the syrup up ahead of time - soaking hibiscus flowers in boiling water and making a mix of sugar, thyme, vanilla (despite moaning about the cost of this I found a cheap-ish source for vanilla pods) and lemon juice. The hibiscus water was then combined with this mix and heated until the sugar dissolved, with cherries added at the end.
Everything needed done on day 2 was now done, the next steps could wait until day 3.
On day 3 I began by quickly finishing my muhallabieh. This overwhelming task involved pouring syrup on top of the milky puddings made the day before.
They turned out alright but, truth be told, the puddings themselves were a little plain, the syrup was too watery and the thyme in the syrup overpowered the hibiscus and vanilla. Fine, not much more.
The final savoury to polish off were the fritters and, surprisingly, the batter held together quite decently during frying.
Although the lumpiness of the batter made it hard to evenly cook the fritters they all turned out well, and they were quite pleasant with the mint yoghurt. They were certainly not as remarkable as the lamb was but they were still pretty good.
On day 4 I was either tired or busy so I decided to finish off my overambitious cooking project on day 5 with the date and halva puddings.
The method of making the caramel sauce was a tad elaborate (and the recipe said to start with the sauce) so pictured are combined tahini and rose water, along with some fresh coffee, some double cream with butter and two separate servings of sugar to be added in batches.
The sugar was heated over a medium-high heat, with half added initially and another half later, to make a caramel sauce. The dairy products were then mixed in slowly, followed by the tahini and rose water mix and some salt.
The end result was a fantastic sauce, though this picture represents my second attempt - as mentioned before following the recipe to the letter resulted in a burnt mess, whereas going by cooking instinct produced something far superior.
After this chopped dates were placed in a bowl to soak in a coffee, vanilla extract, water and bicarbonate of soda mix. Didn’t look too appealing.
A smooth mix of sugar and butter was made at roughly the same time.
Sesame seeds and flour were incorporated, in that order, before the date mixture and halva were added.
Mixed together this formed the baking mix.
Which produced little puddings. Or, to me, little cupcakes.
With some caramel sauce and sesame sprinkled on top this dessert was finished off. I’m not sure I agree with the cookbook that these are sticky toffee puddings, these are definitely just caramel cupcakes, but absolutely delicious caramel cupcakes.
Though, again, these were much nicer fresh than on subsequent days.
What I’d do differently
Bluntly, I’d do less! Nothing panned out badly but both cooking this and writing it up has felt quite stressful and I couldn’t even finish the bulgur salad. I’m locked into at least one future project being similarly massive but hopefully beyond that I’ll learn to be more cautious. As we’ve only got a little while left in the land of meze hopefully that will be easier going forward, at least unless we visit the land of tapas later in the year!
If I were to do all this again though, I would arrange the event differently and have a large group of friends over, when government advice allows of course. Quite how I could work that while keeping timings sensible I’m not sure, but pretty much everything except the bulgur salad lost something when eaten after the day of cooking. This is strange, as usually I find the opposite is true, but it’s also quite disheartening going through massive leftovers that pale in comparison to what was eaten that first night.
In terms of specific changes to recipes the brown rice and basterma recipe does actually allow for the substitution of bulgur wheat for brown rice, something I would be tempted to try if returning to the recipe as, frankly, it’s a better grain.
Other recipes wouldn’t need so drastic a change - I wasn’t a huge fan of muhallabieh (it was just a bit dull) but vanilla in the main milk pudding, far less thyme in the syrup and allowing a bit more reduction in the syrup would go a long way to making it interesting. Also remembering to add the chopped pistachio on top would be nice, it was already there in the recipe!
Finally, with the cupcakes or sticky toffee puddings, whatever they were, there was very little flavour of coffee coming through so I would be tempted to add more coffee and less water to the baking mix - I do presume I was meant to taste the coffee. I’d also chop up the dates more finely, each cupcake had a big chunk of date in the middle and I think it’d be nicer more evenly distributed in each one..
My view on the book(s)
The recipes from The Food and Cooking of Lebanon, Jordan and Syria did turn out a little more plain than I’d have liked - but this isn’t my first outing with this book and this is the first time I’ve found this to be a problem. Obviously I can’t ignore it, evidently this book is not quite on the same level as her Turkish cookbook, as I’ve found with that that every recipe turns out delicious and works without adjustment.
The latter is still true with this book, which is still a big deal, but evidently the recipes aren’t so consistently excellent across the board. This said I did make an error last time around - the baba ganoush recipe involving cooking aubergines directly on a gas ring is actually in this book, not the Turkish one. So there’s fun to be had!
Beyond that there are two big differences, one positive and one negative, to note between this book and Başan’s earlier work. The positive change is that the recipe pages now have smaller images of intermediate stages of cooking and also elaborate a bit more on where the dish comes from (perhaps due to the multinational nature of the book this is more necessary).
With apologies for the glare this picture of a recipe (coincidentally one I considered making) shows both how useful the intermediate images are in this cookbook but also how much less appealing they are than the images of the completed dish.
Aesthetically this is admittedly a downgrade but it’s a very practical change and, given a binary choice between the two, practicality has to win every time for me. And the book, generally, is quite nice from an aesthetic point of view anyway.
The finished meals look delicious even if the intermediate steps of cooking don’t. However, having seen what my food looks like mid-cooking I’m sure you realise that you can’t always put lipstick on a pig.
The introduction is well-laid out with good choices of photos. however I’m rather torn on the issue of the front cover. It is just pictures of food, granted good ones, and design-wise it just comes across as a little old-fashioned.
The negative change is that I found the introduction a little self-indulgent this time around - it’s far more encyclopedic both for good and for ill. The content I’ve already shown I think is high quality and interesting but overall 20% of the book is introduction which, even if the book is mostly recipes afterwards, seems a bit excessive.
Moreover, having praised the content of the introduction it would be remiss to say that alongside this interesting content on Syria’s history we do also have a page that feels the need to tell us what an onion and a tomato look like. Could have been trimmed quite a bit is what I’m saying. It also still has some recipes embedded in it. I’m still not a fan of that.
A final niggle of mine is the author also consistently referring to the region as “The Fertile Crescent”. In my head this region is centred on Iraq and usually includes not only the countries this book covers but also Egypt, Palestine/Israel, Cyprus, Iraq, Kuwait and a chunk of Iran. I have literally never heard it used to refer solely to the three countries in this book, save in the book itself. Ultimately it’s not exactly a major stain on what is, ultimately, a cookbook but it is still slightly annoying.
In the end I can’t be as effusive about this as the previous book of hers I covered, particularly given how what I chose to cover panned out, but it still contains some wonderful recipes and I would still recommend it. Just with less enthusiasm than for last post’s book.
Falastin is another book I would recommend with some degree of reservation. Many of the flaws in The Food and Cooking of Lebanon, Jordan and Syria are not present - the balance between content and introductory background is much more balanced, with only 15 pages out of 327 dedicated to the introduction (albeit with some full-page photo spreads and non-cooking content scattered occasionally through the rest of the book).
Similarly it doesn’t manage to be incoherent about what part of the world it covers, it is a Palestinian cookbook and it takes great care to be open and proud about that without treading on any toes. The inevitable politics tied in with the very land it refers to isn’t ignored and isn’t presented with any pretense of neutrality of opinion (see image below) but it’s also presented quite gently, all things considered. If you buy this cookbook you’re not buying a polemic about Palestine, you’re just buying a cookbook that chooses to acknowledge the elephant in the room.
And aesthetically it’s beautiful, providing an image of most dishes and enough space to write out each recipe in as much detail as possible. I particularly like my edition for its abstract cover, online I’ve seen some editions with photographs of food on the front which, in my view, work less well in this case.
Content-wise I’m deeply torn. These recipes, mostly, turned out beyond any reasonable expectations. They were wonderful. But, none of them held up well to reheating and if you can’t get multiple good quality servings out of a recipe that takes several hours there’s a real problem. We all have lives to fit in between cooking and, personally, there’s a very fine line between having the energy to spend several hours in the kitchen and being non-functional to the point that heating a can of baked beans is a bit much. Given that, having leftovers be significantly worse than freshly cooked food is, personally, a pretty big downside.
Another criticism I’d levy is that the recipes often seem like they’re going off the rails before coming together again at the end, making for stressful cooking sessions. I also found many of these recipes assumed ample counter space and access to quite expensive kit such as stand-mixers, which is unfortunate. Having alternative instructions for those without these luxuries would have been nice - between myself and my partner we managed to work it out but a true beginner would be in trouble.
So overall positive, but mixed reviews today, I would recommend both of these books overall, as neither are curate’s eggs. But they both enough flaws that I can’t enthusiastically evangelise about them!