I was already internalizing the tyranny of tea, the millions of gallons of minuscule glasses hospitality forces you to consume in the Middle East. In Beirut, tea was a sign that your meal was over; you drank your tea, shook the cup, set it down, and said, “Daymeh, inshallah”—may it always be, God willing. Here it was something more basic: a welcome.
Hospitality, whether offered by an emperor or an illiterate goatherd, is what makes us civilized. Without it, the junk that we think of as “civilization”—cars, crumpets, salmon mayonnaise in the desert—can disappear overnight. Any traffic in goods can be disrupted, by sanctions or Ali Babas or the looters of the so-called civilized world. But the old custom of hospitality to strangers, of entertaining angels, still survived.
Mohamad bought a package of Turkish cookies, puffy biscuits mortared together with a sugary pink paste. We ate them together, the chemical sweetness of the cookies dissolving into the ferric tea.
I looked at my husband. He looked at me and smiled.
This is why I’m here, I thought. We have drunk oceans of tea, and we will drink oceans more—daymeh, inshallah. But this one we are drinking right now, right here, together.
And so our honeymoon began here, with this elemental act of kindness: a small, anonymous offering in the bottomless desert night.
Chapter 6
“Iraq Has No Cuisine”
AFTERWARD, WHENEVER ANYONE asked me what Baghdad was like, I would tell them about the topiary.
Like a lot of Americans, I had a particular mental image of Baghdad, made up of a montage of Gulf War footage and old Douglas Fairbanks movies: palm trees, minarets, tanks, lots of sand. When we rolled into Baghdad under the strong October sun, I expected to see certain things. Topiary was not among them. But there it was, dark green hedges neatly trimmed into rippling, abstract carnival shapes, like Joan Miró paintings come to life. I looked out the window and thought there was another Baghdad, just like the other Lebanon, that was different from the one on TV.
The topiary lined the wealthier neighborhoods, like Mansour and Jadriyah, setting off the façades of mansions. The mansions of Baghdad! They were the real clash of civilizations, a frantic pastiche of international kitsch. Some had high vaulted entranceways, like old-fashioned banks. Some looked like toy crusader castles, with cylindrical turrets and half-moon windows. A few were built to resemble Roman ruins. Others echoed the Alhambra, but with modern accents: a massive diamond-shaped window, glazed silver-blue, or an enormous inverted pyramid resting on its point. The most ornately Orientalist houses, with arched windows and latticed balconies, flaunted the most enthusiastically Western touches. A miniature Taj Mahal with a baroque wrought-iron gate. An Ottoman villa guarded by a tall Victorian lantern. Most of them were in good repair: their owners had prospered under Saddam.
To enter Baghdad in those days was like walking into a time capsule. Whole neighborhoods looked like the set of an early James Bond movie: Soviet cars, curved white plastic chairs, abstract expressionist art. The country had spent the past several decades cut off from the rest of the world, conducting a dialogue with the past. The result was a cargo-cult fascination with idols the rest of the world had replaced long ago. After a few months in Baghdad, I was no longer surprised when people stopped in the middle of a conversation and broke into songs by The Doors or Bryan Adams.
Centuries collided. A bent-backed little donkey pulled a wooden cart past the giant gray metal elephant of an armored personnel carrier. Contractors in shiny white four-by-fours muscled farmers riding tractors to the side of the street. The poor lined up and waited a day and a half for subsidized gasoline; those who could afford the extra few dollars bought jerry cans of black-market fuel at the side of the road. Barefoot children hawked gasoline, Kleenex (or the Middle Eastern knockoff, Khaleenex), straw hats, Marlboros, and red plastic roses to people trapped in traffic.
Low-slung buildings squatted and baked under the sun, surrounded by walls, scrubby trees, the ever-present dust of a city constantly trying to keep out the desert. If Los Angeles had experienced a brief burst of oil wealth, then been sealed off from the rest of the world for several decades, it would have looked a lot like Baghdad: long highways, swollen with more cars than they had been designed for, squeezing the city like pythons. A vindictive oily smog. A city of roughly five million people, sprawling and complicated, bisected by a river; a few of its major bridges shut down; main traffic arteries closed off with tanks and checkpoints whenever there was an attack or the threat of an attack, which was several times daily, or whenever an official traveled from one military zone to another in a massive armored convoy; big bullying white Jimses full of contractors who might open fire on anyone, at any time, for any reason; and no cell phones to communicate with wives, husbands, or children waiting anxiously. All of these frustrations, which were the general conditions on a good day in Baghdad in late 2003, made for the mother of all traffic jams.
And then we came to the Tigris, where everything changed. The river threads through the heart of Iraq and splits the capital city in half, a long, supple line of water fringed by trees. The unrelenting squareness would have been oppressive without the river and the date palms: tall, generous towers that soared upward until they exploded, arcing green in every direction. Trees that mimicked the graceful spray of a fountain.
I spent seven and a half months in Iraq, stretched out over fifteen months, most of them with Mohamad. A short period in a long war; a honeymoon of sorts. A time in which many things were possible, until they weren’t.
The big newspapers rented mansions. Freelancers and smaller papers like Newsday set up shop in hotels, a cavalcade of them, ranging from the shabby to the terrifying. All of them were in the Red Zone, which was anything outside the fortified U.S. military compound called the Green Zone. We drove directly to the Hamra Hotel in Jadriyah, a quiet residential neighborhood.
The Hamra consisted of two big, blocky Bauhaus-inspired buildings with a courtyard in between. A man sold carpets and jewelry in the vestibule of the main entrance. A sign on the door said: PLEASE NOTES: ALL GUNS MUST BE LEFT AT SECURITY DESK.
Mohamad and I dumped our dusty bags on the bed and headed downstairs to the restaurant. Through the lobby, past the café with its orange chairs, we came to the courtyard between the buildings. There was a swimming pool—the famous Hamra pool, a shimmering blue—and around it a galaxy of white plastic tables and chairs. We hadn’t eaten anything since Jordan but cookies and tea, and we were ravenous. I ordered fattoush, the salad I had loved in Beirut; hummus; and chicken tikka, the local name for what they called shish taouk in Beirut.
With fattoush, the secret ingredient is the assembly, the tightly choreographed contrast of opposing elements. You have to keep the ingredients separate until the last possible minute, so the bread doesn’t soak up too much liquid; it should provide a crisp, crunchy counterpoint to the soft lettuce and the juicy tomatoes. The tangy dressing binds the different elements together. Sometimes the souring agent is lemon juice or pomegranate molasses or both. Sometimes it’s sumac, the maroon powder that tastes like a thousand lemons bursting open in your mouth. In Lebanon, fattoush usually comes with a light dusting of sumac—enough to “open your appetite,” as people say in Lebanon, but not enough to make your taste buds run screaming.
This fattoush was different. Someone had strafed it with so much sumac that eating it was like sucking on a bottle of citric acid. The bread was heavy and soul-crushingly soggy. It wanted to dissolve into waterlogged slime, but it was impregnated with rancid frying oil that kept it stiff. The iceberg lettuce had gone transparent from its long bath in the dressing, whitish and shriveled, the way your fingers get when you soak in the tub for too long. It recoiled limply, chewy and stringy as a bowl of rubber bands. The tomatoes were grainy, staring resentfully up from their sumac bath at the bottom of the plate as if to say: eat me if you dare.
Defeated by the fattoush, I turned to the hummus. It looked like hummus always does: a round plate
of beige paste, dimpled in the middle, dusted with more of the inescapable sumac. It was paler than any hummus I’d known, a little stiffer than usual and weirdly translucent, like edible beige Noxzema. But hummus is hummus—what could go wrong? Tearing off a piece of bread, I dug in.
In Buffalo I had briefly worked on a house-painting crew, and although I had never actually tasted the various pastes I had smeared into walls, this hummus reminded me of grout. Somehow it managed to be slimy and chalky at the same time. It was nothing but canned chickpea paste with water—a lot of water—blended in. (Adding one ice cube to hummus gives it a light, creamy texture; adding more than one is a trick some restaurants pull to save money.) No tahini, no garlic, no lemon juice. No olive oil. And it had been sitting in the kitchen for a long, long time.
I looked at Mohamad.
“I should have warned you,” he said, smiling a tight, rueful little smile. “The food here’s pretty bad.”
I was embarrassed. I had read an armful of books about sanctions and Saddam. But still, this was something I had not expected. The Middle East was not a region I had ever associated with inferior food.
“Is it all this bad? Or just here?”
Of all the foreigners in Baghdad, Mohamad was one of the few who didn’t disparage Iraqi food. He pulled off a piece of the football-shaped baguette, troweled up some of the joint compound, and put it into his mouth. He chewed on the stuff and considered the question.
“Iraqis,” he said, “have really good bread.”
War destroys supply lines. It disrupts the natural order of ingredients and labor. It forces people to concentrate more on sustenance than on taste. It seemed crazy, even criminal, to come to a war-torn country, to a people crushed between occupation and insurgency, and expect a decent meal.
But I knew from Mohamad and other Lebanese that food was one of the few things that had kept people going during their grim and endless war; that eating good meals, in the company of people they loved, helped them endure what was happening. How did Iraqis manage without that?
It wasn’t just the Hamra. At the Hunting Club, the playground of the country’s petro-elite, they served wads of gristly meat buzzing with a nimbus of lethargic flies. Other upscale restaurants weren’t much better. The menu never varied: meat. Meat kebabs, fried meat, boiled meat. Meat with rice, meat with bread, meat with meat. All of it larded with the dripping white globs of fat that Iraqis adored but everyone else loathed.
It wasn’t the war. Iraqi food, everyone said, was just plain awful, even before the invasion. Some speculated it was genetic; others cultural. Most assumed it was endemic to the place. An American journalist who spent years in Baghdad described Iraqi food as “a war on your taste buds.”
As the war dragged on, Iraqi cuisine became a standing joke among the contractors, aid workers, war correspondents, and other outsiders flocking to Baghdad. People laughed about going on the “Iraqi Atkins.” Vegetarians nibbled piously on pasta and hummus. A few converted back to carnivorism out of sheer desperation. Iraqi food, everyone joked, was the real weapon of mass destruction.
The harshest critics were other Middle Easterners: Syrians, Iranians, Lebanese. In Iran, when people want a derogatory term for Arabs, they reach for the ancient epithet “lizard-eaters”—a Persian slur, centuries old, against the traditional Bedouin diet. “The Iraqis have never had good food,” maintained Rebecca, a Lebanese friend of ours who was working as a translator in Baghdad. “My father used to travel here on business before the first Gulf War, and it was the same way then. Their restaurants were terrible. All the Lebanese would bring their own food!” She added something I would hear a lot in Lebanon: “We’ve always had the best food.”
Much later, another journalist I knew summed up the prevailing opinion. After years in Baghdad, she had a rare sensitivity and compassion for Iraqis. But she had no sympathy for their food. “How can you write about Iraqi cuisine?” she asked, with an incredulous laugh, when I told her I was writing this book. “Iraq has no cuisine!”
I wondered. In New York I often heard people expound with serene authority on the blandness of midwestern food. According to these urban sophisticates (many of them transplants from the hinterlands themselves), we Hoosiers subsisted on potato-chip casserole. Our cuisine consisted of opening cans; our spices were salt and pepper. We had souls of Wonder Bread.
Yet I’d grown up eating persimmon pudding, a traditional southern Indiana recipe perfumed with cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, and cloves. My mother cooked morels from the mossy flanks of the dark wet woods. She took me to the Porthole Inn for peppery fried catfish, served with hush puppies, crisp little balls of cornmeal with melting soft insides. Chicken trucked in before dawn to Hays Market by farmers from the countryside—birds that tasted more like bluegrass and wild chicory and wet earth, more like chicken, than the shrink-wrapped little cadavers from Perdue. Cornbread so sweet it could make you swoon. Apple butter so rich it should have been sued. Real midwestern food tasted like foxfire and sassafras, primeval forests, and wild spicy meadows of black-eyed Susans and Queen Anne’s lace.
So when East Coasters held forth on our bland midwestern cuisine, I would just nod and keep my mouth shut. You go right ahead and say that, I’d think to myself. More persimmon pudding for me.
What if Iraq was the same way?
The food foreigners were eating in Iraq—which was not necessarily the same thing as Iraqi food—tasted bad. But was it bad because Iraqis were uncivilized, lizard-eating Bedouins who had never mastered the culinary arts? Or was there something else going on?
Once you asked that question, the whole equation changed. It might be arrogant to expect good food from people beaten down by decades of war, sanctions, and dictatorship. But it was also arrogant not to. Saying a country had no cuisine seemed like saying it had no culture, no civil society. That hideous meal at the Hamra was a challenge, a riddle. This was the Fertile Crescent, where civilization and agriculture began. It had to have a cuisine, and I suspected that cuisine would be good. I decided to go out and find it.
Chapter 7
Becoming Human
A LONG TIME AGO, in a country far away, there is a king named Gilgamesh. He’s brave and handsome. He’s two-thirds god and one-third human. He builds the metropolis of Uruk, with its great wall, the biggest city the world has ever seen. When a terrible flood destroys the city, he builds it back again.
But gradually Gilgamesh starts to go bad. He takes the young men from their fathers and destroys them. He demands to sleep with brides on their wedding night. “He struts his power over us like a wild bull,” people start to grumble. The people of Uruk appeal to the gods for help.
The gods go to Aruru, the goddess who started all the trouble by creating Gilgamesh and the entire human race. “You have do something about this guy,” they tell her. “Make us a man who can kick his ass.”
Aruru sighs, closes her eyes, wonders why she didn’t take up archery instead. Then she washes her hands, pinches off a piece of clay, and molds it into a guy who can kick the mighty ass of Gilgamesh.
Enkidu is shaggy, long-haired, and twice as tall as a normal man. He lives in the wilderness outside the city walls. He strides around naked, drinking at the watering hole with the animals and eating grass with the gazelles.
One day a hunter sees Enkidu crouched at the watering hole. The wild man looks up. Their eyes meet. Suddenly the hunter realizes this hairy savage is the animal rights activist who has been wrenching his traps out of their holes, filling in his pits, and untying wild animals from his snares. The hunter is so terrified that he runs all the way back to the city, straight to Gilgamesh, and pants, “You gotta do something about this guy.”
The mighty Gilgamesh, just like the gods before him, immediately runs to a woman. And what a woman! Shamhat—part priestess, part prostitute. She works the temple of Inanna, the goddess of love and war. Shamhat knows exactly how to handle this wild man: she goes straight to the watering hole and takes off all her c
lothes. When Enkidu sees that, he immediately forgets about his animal friends.
Shamhat brings him out of his state of nature with the world’s two oldest and most effective civilizing influences: first she sleeps with him until he is “sated with her charms.” This takes exactly six days and seven nights.
And then (they must be pretty hungry by this point) she takes him to get some food and beer. He stares at it and squints: What is this stuff?
Enkidu knew nothing about eating bread for food,
and of drinking beer he had not been taught.
The harlot spoke to Enkidu, saying:
“Eat the food, Enkidu, it is the way one lives.
Drink the beer, as is the custom of the land.”
Enkidu ate the food until he was sated,
he drank the beer—seven jugs!—and became expansive and sang with joy!
He was elated and his face glowed.
He splashed his shaggy body with water,
and rubbed himself with oil, and turned into a human.
If you’re anything like me, the first thing you think after hearing this ancient Mesopotamian epic of food and sex and civilization is: So what did they eat?
In the beginning was the word. With the word came the ability to say I’m hungry. So not long after the word came the recipe.
Until the 1980s, scholars believed the oldest cookbook in the world was De re coquinaria (“On the Subject of Cooking”), a collection of Roman recipes believed to be compiled in the late fourth or early fifth centuries but attributed to the first-century Roman gourmand Apicius.
Then a French historian named Jean Bottéro began to painstakingly translate three cracked clay tablets, originally from southern Mesopotamia, at Yale University’s Babylonian Collection. Most historians believed that the tablets contained pharmaceutical formulas. But when Bottéro started translating the wedge-shaped cuneiform writing, he discovered that the tablets held a collection of about 40 recipes dating back to around 1600 B.C.—making them not just the first Iraqi recipes or the first Middle Eastern recipes, but the first recipes, that we know of, in the history of the world.
Day of Honey: A Memoir of Food, Love, and War Page 8
