Food For Thought

A Palestinian bearing good news is, well, news. So much misery occurs in the lands they and the Israelis fight over that the Palestinians’ image is inextricable from refugees, poverty, tanks and suicide bombings. Salah Jamal, however, gives a different flavor to what it means to be Palestinian. His book Arab Aroma, Recipes and Stories (Zendrera Zariquiey; 211 pages) takes readers to a place that reveals more about a culture than failed negotiations: the kitchen.

Jamal grew up in Nablus, the son of a shopkeeper, but left after the 1967 war to study medicine in England. Not yet 18, he changed his mind — to his parents’ displeasure — and headed for Barcelona. Survival and paying for his medical studies meant all sorts of jobs: distributing leaflets, playing semi-pro soccer, being a mafioso extra in a film about boxing. “One Christmas I was employed as one of the Three Kings, the black one,” laughs Jamal over a coffee in the Ateneo, Barcelona’s leading cultural forum. Jamal is now 50 and married to a Catalan. He has three children, a lucrative practice as a dermatologist in Barcelona, a second degree in history and geography, a seat on the board of the Ateneo and a professorship in cultural diversity at the Catalan University of Vic. As if that were not enough, he also gives classes in Arab cooking.

Arab Aroma is entering its sixth edition — two Catalan, four Spanish — with sales pushing 20,000, according to its publisher. Negotiations are underway for versions in English, Italian and French. The Spanish edition was named best foreign cuisine book at the 2000 Salon de Livre Gourmand in Périgueux, France.

Jamal admits it is odd for a Palestinian man to have written such a book, the kitchen being the preserve of women in his culture. To collect recipes he talked to women in many Arab countries, finding them “happy but surprised” to have such conversations. “They passed on their knowledge,” writes Jamal, “but on their faces I saw total lack of confidence in me being able to produce even a simple dish.”

Jamal persevered because he loves cooking and saw an opportunity to provide food for thought, so to speak, about Arab culture. This he does with engaging humor and scant respect for many Arab governments. He intersperses juicy recipes and equally juicy stories about growing up in Nablus and attending conferences around the world as an adult. He explains how to make falafel, tabbouleh, baba ghanoush and lesser-known dishes. At the same time, the reader picks up knowledge that is not strictly culinary. For example, that baba means coquettish and ghanoush is, roughly, dissolute — adjectives that seem unlikely for an aubergine purée but which Jamal explains in a delightful story about his aunt’s unmarried daughter. He also writes of an Algerian visiting Jerusalem who asked for couscous. In colloquial Arabic of the Middle East, unlike the Maghreb nations, cous can mean vagina. The hapless Algerian was asking for two!

Jamal gives tips on dining with an Arab, the most important being to go to the table starving: the host will lay on a huge spread and keep heaping your plate. For most Palestinians, of course, having too much to eat is a dream. One of the dishes in the book is mjadarah, or rice with lentils. These ingredients keep well, which helps to explain the dish’s popularity in a war zone — a fact, Jamal points out, recognized in United Nations food relief packages. Apart from rice and lentils, mjadarah requires only onions, salt, cumin, water and samneh, or clarified butter. Jamal says the difficulty non-Arabs have finding ingredients such as samneh, the spice mix fulful bhar or bulgur, the cut wheat essential for tabbouleh, is diminishing as more and more Arabic shops open in European cities.

This is not a political book, but Jamal can’t resist describing a conference in Libya ostensibly to rally Arab nations to the Palestinian cause. It degenerated into a fierce debate about whether macaroni was the invention of the Italians, Libya’s former colonial rulers, or was brought to Italy from China by Arabs. Writes Jamal: “Like many such conferences in Arab countries that are in principle to save Palestine, the only thing that was saved, finally, was the macaroni.”

To this end, Jamal has just cooked up a new book — as yet only in Spanish and Catalan — called Palestine: Occupation and Resistance (Flor del Viento; 106 pages). In his role as historian rather than doctor or cook, he sets out to give a brief guide to the roots of the interminable conflict there. Israelis probably won’t like it. But they should enjoy Arab Aroma, a book that could equally have been titled Make Food, Not War.