Peace through Gastronomy

Interesting review from the New York times Magazine on Middle Eastern cooking books written by Oriental Jews. Makes me long for an alternative reality than the one we live where Arabs and Jews got along. Politics aside, it is not that far-fetched, the rift is not personal or cultural. If one applies Brillat-Savarin's axiom, then Poopa Dweck is first and foremost a Syrian as much as Roden is Egyptian.

Culinary Orientalism
By Jon Fasman
NYT Magazine, December 9, 2007

Tell me what you eat,” wrote the 19th-century French gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, “and I shall tell you what you are.” In other words, an understanding of a community’s cuisine entails an understanding of the community itself. Of late, the cookbook industry seems to have made — perhaps unwittingly — a case that understanding Middle Eastern cuisine is the path to resolving the world’s geopolitical crises.

Consider Claudia Roden’s “Arabesque,” a cookbook that takes in the variant cuisines of Turkey, Morocco and Lebanon. In a review in Slate, Michael Lukas, an American living in Turkey, points out that “Arabesque” is not just — is not even primarily — an excellent cookbook: by socially, politically and historically contextualizing the three cuisines, he argues, Roden has also written an effective primer on the diversity of the Middle East. Lukas even goes so far as to suggest that the late scholar and activist Edward Said (the author of “Orientalism,” an influential critique of traditional scholarship about the Middle East) might have recommended Roden’s book as a reliable guide to the region.

Poopa Dweck has done something similar to Roden’s feat in “Aromas of Aleppo,” a Syrian-Jewish cookbook that was published in August. Like Roden, Dweck traces her roots back to the all-but-vanished Jewish communities of the Levant. Aleppian Jewish cuisine, she argues — like the cuisine of any community — reflects and defines the community’s history. The Syrian Jews’ version of the classic Arab dish laham b’ajeen, for instance, gets its bite from tamarind, which they use far more than most other communities in the Middle East. Add together a few hundred such small differences and you have a subcommunity.

Dweck says that “the Europeans built a wall around themselves. We didn’t. My mother was shoulder to shoulder with Arabs in the market. We learned all our recipes from them.” A message of hope? Sure, but underneath that, an understanding of the need to understand.

(Photo by Yasmina)