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.

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.