Falastin: A Cookbook

“This is a beautiful book and I want to cook every single recipe in it.” —Nigella Lawson “Sami Tamimi and Tara Wigley’s beautiful Falastin is a love letter to Palestine—its warm and hospitable people and its bright and mouthwatering cuisine. A cookbook should make you dream, it should invite you to an expanding table, and, more important, it should make you drop everything and head straight to the kitchen. This book does all that. One day I hope to visit Sami’s homeland; but until then, with Sami as my host and Tara as my guide, I’ll let the scents and flavors of the Palestinian kitchen take me there as I pull up extra seats at my table to share this colorful and soulful food with family and friends.” —Naz Deravian, author of Bottom of the Pot “A stunning collection of recipes and stories that showcase the best of Palestinian culture. I want to eat everything in this book” —Yasmin Khan, author of Zaitoun and The Saffron Tales “ Falastin is not a political book; it’s a people book. But most of all, it’s a cookbook that translates the rich culinary history of traditional Palestine into healthy, vibrant food for the twenty-first-century table.” —177 Milk Street “[A] celebration of Palestinian cooking . . . Adding to the overall connection between words and stomach are elegant photographs and additional instructions. . . . The temptation to try [all the recipes] is almost overwhelming. Expect enthusiastic demand from home cooks and foodie readers.” — Booklist (starred review) “[An] expert dive into the food of Palestine. The dishes overflow with bold flavors. . . . Like the best cookbooks, this one opens a window to expand both palates and minds.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review) Sami Tamimi was born and raised in Jerusalem and immersed in food since childhood. He started his career as commis-chef in a Jerusalem hotel and worked his way up, through many restaurants and ethnic traditions, to become head chef of Lilith, one of the top restaurants in Tel Aviv in the 1990s. In 2002 he partnered with Noam Bar and Yotam Ottolenghi to set up Ottolenghi in Notting Hill. The company now has four stores and two restaurants, NOPI and ROVI, all in central London. As the executive head chef, Sami is involved in developing and nurturing young kitchen talents and creating new dishes and innovative menus. Alongside Yotam Ottolenghi, Sami Tamimi is the co-author of two bestselling cookbooks, Ottolenghi: The Cookbook and Jerusalem: A Cookbook . Tara Wigley spent a decade working in publishing before going to cooking school in Ireland. She has developed, tested, and written recipes for Ottolenghi's weekly column in the Guardian magazine and monthly New York Times columns, as well as for his cookbooks. For Falastin , Tara travelled with Tamimi in Palestine and ate her body weight in chickpeas and tahini. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Introduction This is a book about Palestine—its food, its produce, its history, its future, its people and their voices. It is a book about the common themes that all these elements share, and how Palestine weaves narrative and cooking into the fabric of its identity. The two go hand in hand. Recipes are like stories: events brought to life and shared in the making and telling. They are passed from one person to the next, and in that movement, some details change, others come to the fore, while others will be left by the wayside. And stories are like recipes: a series of individual experiences blended together to create a whole. Where stories and recipes intersect is the nexus, the point, of this book. Rather than telling “a” story or “the” story of Palestine, then, we’re telling lots of stories. These come in the form of both our recipes and the profiles of some of the people and places we’ve met along the way.First, however, an outline of what is at the heart of this book: the story of Falastin , the place and its people; the story of Falastin, our book; and the story of Sami, your host, and Tara, your guide. Falastin: the place and people There is no letter “P” in the Arabic language so “Falastin” is, on the one hand, simply the way “Falastinians” refer to themselves. On the other hand, though—and in the Middle East there is always an “on the other hand”—the word is a big one, going far beyond a straightforward label. It is about geography, history, language, land, identity, and culture. Ask a Palestinian what the word “Falastin” means to them: the answer will rarely be short and will often end with the word “home.”For us, for the purposes of our book, “Falastin” is about all of these things. Geographically, it refers to a small piece of land at the easternmost corner of the Mediterranean Sea where Palestinians have been living for many centuries. This statement is complicated by the fact that this land is also home to other peoples, Israelis; something of which we are very mindful. Our aim with Falastin is to tread the fine line between paying heed to the situation on one hand and remembering, at the same time, that our book is first and foremost a celebration of the food and people of Palestine.As well as being a geographical label, “Falastin” is also about identity. For us, it embraces all those who identify as Palestinian, wherever in the world they’re now living. The Palestinian story, post 1948 and with the creation of Israel, could be seen as one of relocation. There are as many different stories as to why a Palestinian is now living where they are living as there are Palestinians. And with more than 12 million Palestinians worldwide, that’s a lot.There are those who’ve chosen to live abroad and those who have had no choice but to live abroad. There are those who have been displaced closer to home and those who are still living where their parents and grandparents lived before them. Some have known nothing but life in a refugee camp and have never seen the nearby coast, and others have traveled the world freely and have now chosen to return. And then there are those who’ve never actually been to the country itself but who still strongly identify as Palestinian, through the stories and memories passed down from their Palestinian family.The people of Palestine go by several different names, depending on whom you ask. Some favor “Palestinian,” others prefer “the people of the north,” “Arabs of the Negev,” “Arab refugees,” or “48ers.” “Arab-Israeli,” “Israeli Arab,” and “Palestinian-Israeli” are also used. For us, the words “Falastin” and “Falastinian” are inclusive, managing to incorporate all these various words at the same time as somehow transcending their often loaded meanings. Falastin: our book Falastin is a new kind of Palestinian cookbook: a contemporary collection of more than 110 recipes we hope you’ll cook, eat, love, and make your own. It’s the culmination of Sami’s lifetime obsession with Middle Eastern food and cooking—born and raised in East Jerusalem, relocated to London in his late twenties, and a founding member of Ottolenghi—and Tara’s decade-long obsession with Middle Eastern food and home cooking—raised in London and adopted into the Ottolenghi family.The recipes come, therefore, from all sorts of places. Some are those Sami grew up with and which will always remind him of home. His father’s easy za’atar eggs, for example, or his mother’s buttermilk fattoush. Others are those most Palestinians grew up on: classics such as chicken musakhan or the upside-down rice cake, maqlubeh. One recipe—that for hummus—remains untouched from when Sami first published it in his second cookbook, Jerusalem . After all, there are some things that can’t be played around with or improved upon.We haven’t felt bound by a set list of “traditional Palestinian dishes,” though. We’d rather shine a new light on an old classic than re-create it verbatim. Doing this—“playing around”—is a risk, we know, because loyalty to the way a dish is cooked is not, of course, just about the dish. It’s about tradition and identity and being able to own these things through food. The process has not always been easy for Sami. Like a lot of Palestinian chefs working today, he keenly feels this tension—between a sense of loyalty to the way a dish is traditionally cooked and the desire to move it forward so as to keep it fresh and relevant.If Jerusalem was Sami and Yotam’s joint effort to celebrate the food of their hometown and bring it to a wider audience, then Falastin is Sami and Tara’s focus on the food of Palestine. Speaking in general terms about “Middle Eastern food” is rather like saying “European food,” or “Italian food”: it does not pay heed to all the distinct people, produce, and dishes that distinguish one country from another within a region. It doesn’t allow for the importance of sumac in a dish such as chicken musakhan to shine, for example, or reveal how many Gazan dishes have the trio of dill, garlic, and chile shaping them. It doesn’t tell us anything about the red tahini of Gaza or the white salty cheese of Nablus or Akka. Keeping our focus exclusively on Palestine allows us to explore not only the food of this land and people but the regional differences within.At the same time that it explores the regions of Palestine, the purposexa0of Falastin is to be full of recipes that work for and delight the home cook today. We really want you to cook from the recipes in our book—to find them practical and doable as well as delicious. This means you’ll find fewer recipes for stuffed vegetables in Falastin than you would in a “traditional” Palestinian cookbook, fewer recipes for celebratory dishes that take half a day to prepare, less call for hard-to-find kishek or jameed, the fermented discs of yogurt and wheat in which to bake a leg of lamb. Loyalty to the Palestinian pantry, though—and a reliance on the ground allspice and cumin, olive oil, pulses, grains, za’atar, sumac, lemons, yogurt, dill, garlic, and green chiles that fill it—is unwavering. Our recipes feel distinctly Palestinian, even when they are presented in a slightly new light. Luckily, for those living outside the Middle East, the Palestinian pantry is also one that can be easily sourced and put together from mainstream stores and websites.As well as our recipes, another way to get to know the country is through its people. When talking about Palestine in general terms, conversation can quickly become political and difficult. The day-to-day frustrations for a Palestinian trying to go about their business, when heard by those who don’t need to carry an ID card with them or require a permit to travel around their country, are easy not to comprehend. For most Palestinians in the West Bank, the reality of checkpoints, a separation wall, and the complicated systems and differing rules surrounding Areas A, B, and C (see page 130 for more on this) makes, frankly, for a pretty grim picture.Focus, though—travel around the country meeting and eating with people—and the picture painted is a different one. The link between the land and the produce and the people who grow, farm, and make it is strong. Meet someone who explains how they make their labneh or yogurt from the milk of their own sheep or goat, for example, or smell the fresh za’atar leaves on a small farm holding on a sunny spring afternoon, and the outlook is clearly brighter. How things are seen depends on who is looking and through what lens. For all the differing points of view, the reality of someone’s story—the story they live with day in, day out—cannot be denied. This is why we want to tell the story of Falastin through profiles as well as recipes. These are not our stories. They’re not even always our views. They are, however, stories we’ve been moved to tell from people whom we’ve met. Read more