Matters of taste: The universal language of food

This spring I was in Beirut for several weeks and one Saturday morning I went to the farmers’ market. It was the season of artichokes, fresh almonds and those hard unripe plums that are so good stewed with lamb. But for some reason I was taken by a bouquet of long-stemmed, leafy broccoli. It made me think of an Italian pasta dish called orchiette di crema di rapa, which calls for the brassica to be wilted down in a pot with fresh salsicce. I had my bitter green and it was not hard to find pasta shells which would work as well as orchiette, but I could not find Italian sausage. I stared at the chilled meat cabinet in one of the swankier supermarkets: American bacon, ground beef, a nasty pink lump of processed ham; none quite right. Then I noticed a tray of sujuk, fiery Armenian sausages made with fenugreek, cumin, sumac and red pepper. Sujuk, it occured to me, might just be the right sort of heat and funk to accompany the broccoli.

It was. It was really, weirdly good.

After dinner I went to bed with a full stomach and clicked on Netflix to watch the excellent series, The Mind of a Chef, which follows one chef over several episodes as he discusses foodie stuff with other chef friends, cooks and experiments. It turned out to be an episode introducing Edward Lee, an American chef I had never heard of, the son of Korean immigrants who had grown up in Brooklyn and then moved to Kentucky. He was talking about how he had evolved as a chef, how he had managed to merge his culinary influences from all over the world. I watched him combine collard greens with spicy fermented kimchi. He said he did not like the word “fusion.” “It’s American cooking,” he said. Borrowing, adapting, adding: this was how food in America has evolved.

Happily—and often with delicious consequences—any place where there are immigrants, food gets played with. Currywurst, chicken tikka masala, spaghetti bolognese, the California roll. When Japanese immigrants went to Peru they poured spicy ceviche dressing on their sashimi and created a new “Nikkei” cuisine. Was pizza invented or re-invented in Connecticut? Was a hamburger ever made in Hamburg? Italian and Armenian grandmothers may fiercely protect family recipes, but the tug between tradition and invention is not a zero-sum game. In Beirut I hung out several times with Dima Chaar, a young Syrian chef with a pixie haircut. Dima is in the process of getting her grandmother to give her all her recipes, to protect and record this heritage.

“I want to bring peace through my food, to reflect a positive image of Syria,” Dima told me passionately. But she is also an innovator, cooking Syrian food “with a twist.”

Last year she went to Italy for three weeks on a culinary road trip and was amazed that there were so many things she recognised.

“Arancini is really just rice kibbeh, Italian risotto is similar to our bulghur wheat, and the grain we call freekeh.” In Modena she visited a balsamic vinegar factory. Tasting the deep and thick older vinegars, she realised it was just like pomegranate molasses. When she mentioned this to the vingarist, he had never heard of pomegranate molasses. “The ideas are the same, only the names are different!” she told me.

She noticed, for example, that parmesan is added to almost everything in Italy. When she came home she made wholewheat gnocchi with kishek which is a kind of Levantine fermented powdered cheese that provides a similar pungency. She made a falafel pizza by smearing chickpea mush with tahini on top of a pizza dough and adding tomato and mint. “It was crispy on top and soft in the middle, maybe it was more like a manoush than a pizza. I noticed too that there are some similarities between the cuisines of Louisiana and Aleppo.” Creole food is the original mash-up: French Spanish, west African, Native American, Polish. “They use cayenne in the same way that in Aleppo we use red pepper. So I made a kind of jambalaya with sujuk, and then a sauce with cajun spices and cream.”

Earlier that evening, Dima had made Syrian tacos in different flavours: beef schwarma, Aleppo crispy chicken, or guacamole and ful medames for a street food event at The JunkYard, one of the hipster bars with a Brooklyn feel. Dima didn’t like the world fusion either. “You have to think out of the box. Cooking has no rules.”

Cooking is universal, even if individual dishes are not. The result of cooking, sitting down and eating together, is the communal habit of all humanity. I like the different and I like the familiar and I like to mix them up. It is called sharing. Because as much as we think our dishes reflect our own cultures, heritage and differences, it turns out that there’s a lot more overlap in our kitchens and at our tables than we might think.

One evening in Beirut I went to visit a Syrian refugee called Ebtisam who I had first met at the farmers’ market selling different kinds of kibbeh, bulgur wheat dough that is stuffed with lamb or any kind of spiced vegetable mixture. At one point my translator had to duck out and since we could not communicate with words I showed her pictures from my Instagram account.

“Shou? (what?)” Ebtisam asked in Arabic as I scrolled. She was puzzled by a pear tart and by a pile of shrimps with aioli. Until I got to a picture of a Cornish pasty, a semi-circle of golden pastry. Ebtisam recognised it immediately and cried delightedly, “Sambousek!”