Beirut: In February 2013, Ebtisam Masto fled Syria with her six children. They crossed the border to Lebanon and headed for the capital, Beirut, where Masto’s husband, Mohammed, had been working to support his family since before the civil war began.
When they arrived, Masto registered the family with the UN refugee agency in the city. There she heard about a cooking programme for women that was run by the Catholic charity Caritas.
Masto, who was scared, insecure and on the verge of clinical depression, signed up. “I wanted to do something with my life,” she told me.
On the first day, Masto found herself with more than 30 women crowded into an unprepossessing room with a single stove and a sink. They looked each other up and down.
Almost all, except a couple of Lebanese women, were Syrian refugees: sophisticates from Damascus and Aleppo, Kurds from the north, housewives from tiny villages in the northwest.
Some were Christian and some were Muslim, some were veiled and some not, some were pro-regime and others had lost sons fighting it.
An atmosphere of wariness pervaded the room. Designed with the help of Kamal Mouzawak, a suave entrepreneur who has done much to promote traditional Lebanese food over the past decade, the course aimed to teach women how to use their home-cooking skills — which they took for granted as a domestic chore — to find jobs in catering.
More importantly, Mouzawak told me, the course was a chance to get the women together, to give them a place to share their stories and recipes, to empower them.
For Syrians, food is an especially important part of national identity.
Syrian cuisine has evolved over thousands of years of conquests, trading and migrations, shaped and blended by dozens of peoples: Arab, Kurdish, Druze, Armenian, Circassian, Assyrian, Alawite, Turkish, Turkmen, Palestinian, Ismaili, Greek, Jewish, Yazidi.
The Syrian table is an expression of a multicultural country and a way of living together that is being destroyed by civil war.
Six million Syrians have fled their homeland since 2011.
Lebanon has more than a million registered Syrian refugees, although most people agree that the total number is much higher.
Even in exile, many Syrians talk about food with the same pride, fervour and obsession with terroir as the French do.
Quite often, when I was talking to Syrians in Lebanon, they would grumble about the inferiority of Lebanese vegetables, the blandness of the imported Australian lamb and the lack of variety of the restaurant food.
Even in exile, many Syrians talk about food with the same pride, fervour and obsession with terroir as the French do. “The fat — the fat of Syrian lamb!” recalled Magdy Sharshafji, an Assyrian businessman who left Aleppo after the war began. I met him one night in Loris, the fancy restaurant he had opened in Beirut. He ordered a dish of the famous Aleppan cherry kebab for me to try.
“I can tell you the difference where the sheep has lived, whether it is from Aleppo or Hama, just by the smell of the fat!”
He grinned, remembering, and then held up his empty palms as a gesture of nostalgia and sadness for a world, a life, a culture that may be lost to him forever.
In Sharshafji’s hometown of Aleppo, the cuisine is known for its pepperiness because it was an old Spice Road hub: a crossroads where elaborate Ottoman dishes mixed with sweet and sour recipes brought by Chinese caravans, and the combination of meat and fruit beloved by the Persians. A famous Aleppan dish is kibbeh made with quince, cooked with fresh pomegranate juice.
“In Lebanon we have maybe six or eight different kinds of kibbeh. In Syria they have endless variations,” Anissa Helou, a Lebanese food writer, told me.
She laid out the regional variety of Syrian food: “In Damascus, the dishes are heartier, more straightforward; street food. And, of course, Damascus is the kingdom of baklava.
On the coast you have fish, and close to Jordan, in the desert you have mansaf [a traditional Bedouin dish of meat cooked in fermented dried yoghurt].”
Dima Chaar, a young Syrian chef, bright and pretty with a pixie haircut, told me that when she grew up in Damascus, cooking was “a time for talking and gossip”.
As we sat on a restaurant terrace late one evening after her shift, Chaar described a dish her grandmother used to make: lamb cutlets seasoned with a whole head of garlic and dried mint, cooked in lemon juice and water.
“She used to put ghee [clarified butter] in is as well, to make it richer — we used to cook it on Fridays when everyone would gather.”
Chaar still travels back and forth between Beirut and Damascus. She visits her grandmother and writes down her old recipes.
“Nowadays,” she said, “women are no longer cooking the complicated stuff. There aren’t large families to feed any more. Their sons are killed or have left, they no longer celebrate.”
Chaar drew deeply on a pull of apple-flavoured shisha.
“I think most of us feel that we are lost. I wanted to stay in Lebanon rather than follow my family to Montreal. Yes, I think I hoped to go back to Syria. But after five years, honestly, now I am just living day by day.”
Once, when talking to refugees in one of the camps in the Bekaa Valley, I asked a group of women if they made pickles and jams. The young chef Dima Chaar had told me that preparing mouneh (pickles) was a communal activity, part of the social fabric of Syria.
“My mother used to get together with her neighbours in Damascus,” she said. “In artichoke season for example, my dad would go to the market and buy kilos of artichokes and then all the women would gather and clean them and cook them and prepare them, making preserves or freezing. Mounie is the tradition of preserving.
“My favourite mouneh recipe is for lemon baladi — preserved lemons. I would go with my mum to the market to buy the lemons, the big ones. They had to have quite thick skins. Then you scoop the flesh out and leave them out at room temperature for three or four days until the skin blooms with a little white mould. Then you rub this off with a damp cloth and stuff the lemons with walnuts, red chilli paste and smashed garlic mixed with a little olive oil. Then you put them in a jar and fill the jar with olive oil. I used to keep the oil and use it to dress salads.”
Twenty or more refugee women in the Bekaa Valley sat around me in a big circle. Almost every one of them had a baby or a small child on their lap. Many of them had been living in tents for five years, since the beginning of the war. Mouneh? They shrugged. No, not really.
Making pickles is a statement of colony, it embodies the idea of a future of planning and looking forward: in six months, we will be here, in the same place.
“We just live day to day,” one of the women said. “We buy what we need and we eat it.”
I put the same question to a young Syrian chef from Damascus named Sam, who had been living in Beirut for two years.
Sam was a tubby, jolly fellow, but he became reflective as he thought of the past. “In Damascus when I was younger, I lived with a friend who had a coffee shop in the old city. We used to go the market and buy all the vegetables and make pickles together. I love to cook, he loved to cook. We would gather together six or seven of us, after the coffee shop closed, and eat what we had made that day. We would drink and listen to music — one of my friends played the oud ...” Sam stopped.
His chest heaved. His smile went to a flat line, his lips compressed with the effort of remembering. “I have been here two years and I haven’t bought a single piece of furniture. I tell myself this is only temporary. I have not made pickles. It’s a thing that you do at home, and here it’s not home.”
