Making Levantine Cuisine: Modern Foodways of the Eastern Mediterranean

by Anny Gaul (Editor), Graham Auman Pitts (Editor), Vicki Valosik (Editor)

Melding the rural and the urban with the local, regional, and global, Levantine cuisine is a mélange of ingredients, recipes, and modes of consumption rooted in the Eastern Mediterranean. Making Levantine Cuisine provides much-needed scholarly attention to the region’s culinary cultures while teasing apart the tangled histories and knotted migrations of food. Akin to the region itself, the culinary repertoires that comprise Levantine cuisine endure and transform―are unified but not uniform. This book delves into the production and circulation of sugar, olive oil, and pistachios; examines the social origins of kibbe, Adana kebab, shakshuka, falafel, and shawarma; and offers a sprinkling of family recipes along the way. The histories of these ingredients and dishes, now so emblematic of the Levant, reveal the processes that codified them as national foods, the faulty binaries of Arab or Jewish and traditional or modern, and the global nature of foodways. Making Levantine Cuisine draws from personal archives and public memory to illustrate the diverse past and persistent cultural unity of a politically divided region.

Genres: Food, Cookbooks

288 pages, Hardcover

Published January 4, 2022

Reviews

[Korcan Derinsu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yemeğin kimlik ve tarihle olan bağını harika örneklerle gösteren, odağına aldığı Doğu Akdeniz mutfağı üzerinden bölgenin yemek alışkanlıklarının nasıl şekillendiğini ve günümüzde nasıl yeniden yorumlandığını çarpıcı bir şekilde anlatan çok başarılı bir kitap. Tariflerin ardındaki hikâyeler, coğrafyanın kültürel mirasını ve çatışmalarını da gözler önüne seriyor. En çok bu yaklaşımını sevdim. Akademik yönü ağır basmasına rağmen akıcı dili ve içeriğin derinliği sayesinde zevkle okudum. Meraklısına tavsiye ederim.

[Haley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Trying something new this year and starting to write reviews...

I really appreciated the equal weight and space that the editors of this volume devoted to personal reflections on food, to family recipes, and to poetry, alongside the scholarly research. Some of the chapters slogged and were a bit repetitive — though that may just be the nature of academic articles (summarizing their own argument many times over). In particular, I appreciated the chapter on Palestinian olive oil and olive harvest. Some parts that stood out: the exploration of Israeli efforts to plant pine trees as "an arboreal means of staking claims to land, as surrogate colonists. Pine trees grow quickly but are short-lived, in contrast to olive trees. While olives bear fruit, pine trees do not. While olive trees are part of orchards, European pine trees are used to establish Israeli nature reserves, which both co-opt Palestinian land and often exclude Palestinians from it." Also, the description of how international standards and demand for "extra virgin" olive oil have impacted Palestinian farmers. To make extra virgin olive oil, farmers must collectively press all of their olives at the end of each day (to ensure the acidity level of the olives does not go up over time). In essence, they are forced to pool olives rather than wait on their own full harvest, which would maintain the distinct taste from their own land and trees, even as "the importance of tasting the product of Palestinians' own land and trees has become highly charged as their land, and/or access to it, disappears."

[Karen · Rating 5 out of 5]

First book I have read of this scholarly genre, fascinating, well curated. Each essay individually hits home yet adds to the body of the work in it's entirety. Validating for this Palestinian American who has such strong food memories and ties to a land she has never seen, but can smell and taste in her sleep.

[Ajk · Rating 5 out of 5]

The rare page-turner edited academic collection of articles. Just an incredibly thoughtful mix of articles that includes recipes, scholarly work, really the whole she-bang.

I'm biased probably, but the article on Aleppo/Damascus/Antep peppers and pistachios was my favorite. There's really no skips, though. It was well edited and full of interesting ways of understanding, complexifying (?) and thinking about Levantine food.