The transcultural Ottoman table

I started collecting recipes half a century ago when Jews left Egypt in a hurry in 1956 after the Suez crisis. I was at art school in London and my parents joined me. During the next couple of decades, I saw waves of relatives and family friends passing through the city. Everyone was exchanging recipes and I wrote them down. We had no cookbooks. Recipes had been passed down in families.

What I collected was a mixed bag from around the Middle East and North Africa. The Egypt we knew was a mixed cosmopolitan society. There were Armenians, Greeks, Italians, Syrians and Lebanese, as well as French and British expatriates. The royal family was an Ottoman Albanian dynasty and the aristocracy was Turkish. The Jewish community was itself a mosaic, many having come from all over the Ottoman Empire when the Suez Canal was built in 1869 and Egypt became a trading El Dorado.

My grandparents came from Aleppo and Istanbul. We spoke French at home and Italian with our nanny, and we went to an English school. But generations of my family had lived for hundreds of years in the Arab and Ottoman worlds and had spoken Arabic or Judeo Spanish at home. Entertaining and visiting had been an-all important part of our community’s life. You could tell from the food on the tables where families came from. We got to know a wide range of dishes from different countries, but there were also foods we had in common such as stuffed vine leaves, aubergine purées, cheese cigars, yoghurt with cucumber, lamb meat balls, rice pilaf, milk puddings, baclawa and konafa (kadaif). These were foods that had spread from Constantinople, now Istanbul, when it was the capital of the Ottoman Empire and were integrated in local cuisines throughout the Empire.

The Catalan writer Josep Pla famously described cooking as ‘the landscape in a saucepan’. It is true that what grows and grazes in a place ends up at the market and in saucepans, but the ghosts of the past are there too. Lebanon is a good example of how history and geography combined to create a rich and varied cuisine that is a reminder of the unique cosmopolitan character of the old Ottoman Empire. Lebanon’s cuisine is similar to that of Syria, Palestine and Jordan, countries that share a history of foreign rule dating back to the Phoenicians, Greeks and Romans. Christianity, introduced in the Byzantine era, resulted in a wide repertoire of meatless and vegetarian Lenten dishes. A Levantine Muslim style was born when Damascus was the capital of the Islamic Empire, and when the capital moved to Baghdad the Persian culinary traditions that dominated at the court spread throughout the Empire. One of the legacies in Lebanon is meat cooked in vinegar with onions and aubergines. Old Egyptian dishes such as Melokheya and falafel were adopted in the time of the Mameluks when they ruled both Syria and Egypt. The Ottoman influence was strong in the coastal cities.

The standard menu of Lebanese restaurants all over the world is set in stone with items that never change, but at home, in the cities and especially in the mountain villages, there is enormous culinary diversity. You might wonder how, in a tiny country, the cooking could be so varied, but when you visit Lebanon it becomes clear. It is a land of high mountains and three different climate zones. Roads into the previously inaccessible interior are as recent as the 1960s, and access is still difficult, so villages nestling in the mountains and valleys have remained isolated from each other, retaining the individuality of their cooking which is based on local produce. Communities have been further separated by their division into many religious and sectarian groups, most of them living in their own villages or in separate quarters in the cities – among them Shiite, Sunni and Druze Muslims, Roman Catholic Maronites, Greek Orthodox, Greek Catholic, Syrian Catholic, Armenian and Chaldean – all holding on to distinctive dishes.

The country is extremely fertile and most of the population used to live off the land. Since the Middle Ages, the land was divided into fiefs. The feudal lords lived among their peasants and built themselves palaces in the mountains. This has meant that a rich rural culinary tradition developed in the mountain villages. The special character of the Lebanese mezze was born in Zahle in the Bekaa Valley where vineyards are situated and where arak is produced. The provisions made in the summer to last over the winter – figs, apricots and tomatoes laid out on trays in the fields to dry in the sun; grains, pulses and nuts dried on rooftops; meats slowly cooked preserved in their fat; the juice of sour pomegranates boiled down to syrupy molasses; yoghurt drained to a soft cheese preserved in olive oil; fruit and vegetables made into jams and pickles; and rose and orange blossom waters – all of which are now made commercially – form the basis of Lebanese cooking and provide its distinctive flavours.

In the late nineteenth century, when Beirut became a mini cosmopolitan city and a commercial and intellectual centre, a Christian migration began from the mountains to Beirut and the coastal cities where the inhabitants were mainly Sunni Muslims and Greek Orthodox. (Christians, like other minorities, had moved high up into the mountains to ensure their survival and independence.) It is through the meeting of the Ottoman cooking of the main cities along the coast and the cooking of the mountains, between the urban rice culture and the rural burghul (bulgur) culture, that the classic Lebanese cuisine of today took shape.

Local versions of Ottoman dishes I found in the Middle East, the Balkans and North Africa were evidence of the spread of a cuisine that developed in Constantinople in the palace kitchens and the homes of the aristocracy. It was a culinary style that had drawn from Byzantine, Turkic, Mongol, Persian, Arab and other cultures within the old empire. The more elaborate Ottoman dishes have disappeared, but what remains in Istanbul and elsewhere is a reminder and reflection of the unique cosmopolitan character of the Empire where people and products moved from one part to another, and minorities kept their religion, language and culture.