By Mayukh Sen
It hadn’t crossed Anissa Helou’s mind to write a cookbook until she found herself at a dinner party in London with a table of people who, like her, were born in Lebanon and now lived far from home, discussing the paucity of Lebanese cookbooks.
This was in the summer of 1992. Back then, Ms. Helou was working as an art consultant.
But the conversation struck her. She realized that an entire generation of Lebanese people who had been uprooted by the country’s civil war, which lasted from 1975 to 1990, had also lost access to the food of their homeland.
She issued a corrective in the form of her first cookbook, “Lebanese Cuisine,” published in 1994. To her surprise, it was shortlisted for the André Simon award, which honors British food and drink books.
“I was a nonentity then,” Ms. Helou said. “Nobody knew me.”
Ms. Helou, 66, is far from a nonentity now — a chef, a cooking teacher and a rather prolific cookbook writer. She wrote eight more books after “Lebanese Cuisine,” covering topics as wide-ranging as Mediterranean street food and offal.
Her ninth cookbook, “Feast: Food of the Islamic World,” was published by Ecco at the end of May. At over 500 pages, the book is backbreaking in size. In it, Ms. Helou traces a line from Islam’s advent in 610 to the glories of the Mughal dynasty. The book’s 300 recipes span continents, traveling to far-flung parts of the world where Islam spread, from Xinjiang to Zanzibar.
Different treatments for deceptively similar dishes reveal the expansiveness of the foodways throughout North Africa, the Middle East and far beyond. In Morocco, she writes, rice pudding is typically milk-based and flavored with orange blossom water. The rice pudding of Turkey, though, usually involves no milk at all, and it’s laced with saffron.
“Feast” was born out of a sense of disturbance she had felt since 2013, she said, when she saw Muslims vilified in the news coverage surrounding the Arab Spring and the rise of ISIS. “Through this book, I wanted to open up a world that people might not know, but in a positive and approachable way,” she said.
Ms. Helou is not Muslim, but she spent the first two decades of her life in the predominantly Muslim part of Beirut. Though her Syrian father and Lebanese mother raised Ms. Helou and her four siblings as Christians, she wasn’t particularly religious.
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Categories: Arab World, Asia, Islam, Lebanon, The Muslim Times
chinese always dublicate things, cheaper but not efficient. but when it comes to foods they are playing with human lives, crap minded people. i encountered several fake eggs thats why im here yelling.persian tea
For plain banananana bread, I would always add some freshly grated nutmeg. Unfortunately, I tend to measure spices using the ‘until it be enow’ scale rather than by volume or weight, so it’s hard to specify how much.digital marketing
I start my rice with no water at all, just a little bit of warmed oil or butter (depends on what I’m making) on the bottom of the pan. I pour the measured rice in the pot and stir until every grain is coated and glistening.darren wogman
Hi, I start my rice with no water at all, just a little bit of warmed oil or butter (depends on what I’m making) on the bottom of the pan. I pour the measured rice in the pot and stir until every grain is coated and glistening.darren wogman