Cookbook Survivor: Reem Assil, Arabiyya: Recipes From the Life of an Arab in Diaspora
Sunday's Child Is (Not) Bonny and Blithe
This is another new acquisition, so less a survival ordeal and more an initial how-do-you-do nice-to-meet-you experience.
Before I get into the recipes, I just want to say that this is the rare cookbook where I read many of the stories and enjoyed the way they inflect into and explain the food.
When I think about my entire cookbook collection, from some early books like Julia Child’s onward, there’s a very clear culinary history of how primarily white American gourmands and home cooks encountered various cuisines from outside the United States and even from regions of the U.S. (paralleled by how American restaurants have changed at all ends of the income scale, even fast food).
At the deepest layer of modern American cooking, with figures like Julia Child and James Beard, generally French haute cuisine was still the yardstick, still the goal for many home chefs and the cooks who wrote for them. Beard (a really complicated and contradictory figure) promoted American regional cuisines and fresh food and sort of fed into the next wave of cookbooks inspired by Alice Waters—fresh food, lighter and brighter techniques and flavors. And that’s where a lot of pantry items and dishes from cuisines outside the United States started to show up in cookbooks. I can see it in books from the 1970s and 1980s: there are ingredients described as “Oriental” or generically “Chinese” for dishes that had more specific origins or localities (including food originally cooked in diasporas), there’s “Middle Eastern” and “Mexican”. All from white chefs, generally with no specific provenance or description of where they’d learned the dish, with those recipes sitting alongside others from elsewhere.
In the next wave, white chefs began to narrate where they’d learned recipes from outside the U.S.—the cooks that had taught them, the places they’d visited, the education they’d acquired in coherently specific regional cuisines. But also a lot of diasporic chefs began to claim authority over the food they cooked. This cookbook is part of the latest wave of that development. What I really appreciate most intensely about it is that Assil has no fucks left to give about some of the common tropes that have stuck to “Middle Eastern” cuisine as a label. It’s been used in quite knowing ways to muddle where particular food and foodways come from and to create a kind of obscuring haze that particularly benefits food identified with or produced in Israel. What I dislike the most—and so does Assil—is the casual use of food and cooking as a way to perform a desire for peace and friendship between Palestinians and Israelis while stepping completely around the reasons why there is no peace. That is the cart before the horse: hospitality first requires that everyone be secure in their homes before you break bread. There are deeper generosities and considerations to attend to first before you share a meal and absolve yourself of hostility in doing so.
She also has a lot of interesting things to say about the weight of food and cooking on the person who is responsible for it—there’s also a series of burdensome tropes around the idea of food as healing and nurturing that leaves someone who feels vulnerable or wounded with nowhere to go if they see food-making as important work but don’t feel up to the emotional baggage that sits on top of it.
Anyway, Assil has shared this much: her food and her history, and invited readers, whomever they might be, to cook what she has offered with that history in mind. So I’m doing so today. The book puts baking, especially savory baking, in the forefront, so I’m going to start the day with a pistachio-cardamom sticky bun. Then at dinner, I’m going to make flatbreads and put some ground lamb, mint and feta on those, as well as some squids stuffed with bulgar wheat in a tomato sauce.