Day of Honey: A Memoir of Food, Love, and War

by Annia Ciezadlo

  Bottéro, ever the academic, did not consider the tablets “cooking manuals” in the modern sense of the word—they were more like records of the palace cuisine and its rituals. But in the essential ways, the tablets are as unmistakably a cookbook as my mother’s dog-eared, butter-stained old copy of Fannie Farmer. The recipes (which were probably dictated to scribes by different cooks) contain instructions for a series of stews and sophisticated, tantalizing arrangements of meat and grain. Some are terse professional lists of ingredients (like those of Elizabeth David, who gives no measurements for ingredients or cooking times). Others deliver meticulous instructions broken down by individual tasks (like those of the talkative, generous Julia Child). The basic actions are the same ones we carry out in our kitchens today: split open the chicken, take out its gizzards, sear the flesh, add water. Our anonymous cooks (who were probably men) even trussed the bird’s legs with string, exactly as we do today. And they gave credit for borrowed recipes: they attributed one recipe to “the Elamites,” who lived in what is now southeastern Iran, and labeled another “Assyrian style.” The most appealing, complex recipe is for an elaborate poultry dish seasoned with onions and herbs and served in a two-part bread crust with a top and a bottom: 3,600-year-old chicken pot pie.

  But what did Enkidu eat? The tablets don’t tell us exactly, because they were written about a thousand years after the Gilgamesh era (the period when the character the epic is based on supposedly lived), which scholars believe was around 2600 or 2700 B.C. But thanks to Bottéro and other translators of ancient texts, we have a better idea than ever before, and what’s most surprising about these ancient recipes is not how strange they are but how little some things have changed.

  We know that the Mesopotamians liked stew, and as the Iraqi cookbook author Nawal Nasrallah points out in Delights from the Garden of Eden, her definitive guide to Iraqi cuisine, their vegetable and meat stews evolved into the margas that are a staple dish in Iraq to this day. We know that the ancient Mesopotamians drank a lot of beer. (They even had a beer flavored with pomegranates, which is something I wouldn’t mind trying.) They also liked cracked, parboiled, and roasted grains very similar to modern-day bulgur and freekeh. They made bread from barley, wheat, and emmer, the ancient strain of wheat better known today as farro. And we know they liked strong flavors: along with herbs and spices such as coriander and cumin, a lot of the stew recipes in Bottéro’s tablets end with some variant of “add crushed garlic, onions, and leeks”—an instruction I would remember later, when Mohamad’s mother showed me how to make her zucchini stew.

  About 3,600 years after Bottéro’s cooks dictated their recipes, give or take, I was cooking chicken stew with an Iraqi refugee named Ali Shamkhi. He was living with two Iraqi friends, also refugees, in a neighborhood on the outskirts of Beirut. The three men fed themselves and fought off homesickness by making traditional Iraqi food, occasionally calling their mothers in Iraq to get advice on recipes. Ali cooked the bird in a way I had never seen before: first he washed it under running water in his kitchen sink, whispering “Bismillah,” “in the name of God,” in respect for the meat we were about to eat. He boiled it for about five minutes in just enough water to cover the meat. Then he strained off the chicken stock from this initial boil, and—much to my distress—poured it down the drain.

  “We pour off the water from the chicken when we first boil it to take away the gamy smell,” he explained. “The chicken tastes better this way.”

  I noticed this again and again when Iraqis cooked. They would boil meat, rice, fish—even vegetables like okra—for a few minutes first. Then they would pour off the water and add a new round, sometimes even switching to a new pot, for a second cooking. Something about this practice nagged at me. I had heard of it, but where? Then I remembered: that was how the Sumerian cooks instructed their readers to prepare poultry. (Bottéro called it their “mania for washing meat after each cooking stage.”) Iraqis have been making stews this way for the past three and a half thousand years.

  After the Neolithic Revolution, but before Gilgamesh—historians don’t know exactly when, but probably well before 3,000 B.C.—people figured out that the land between the Tigris and the Euphrates would be a lot greener if they could control the mighty waters of the two rivers. They dug canals between the rivers, invented irrigation, and settled down as farmers. Suddenly they needed to keep track of things like seasons, surpluses, and seeds. And so writing followed not long after—which is probably why the goddess of grain, in ancient Mesopotamia, was also the goddess of writing and bookkeeping. (The Mesopotamians also had a goddess of beer.)

  Bread was the heart of this agrarian revolution. In Akkadian cuneiform, the Semitic language of Bottéro’s tablets, bread was synonymous with food: the word for eating, akâlu, was the symbol for bread going into the symbol for mouth. Babylonian clay tablets from around 2,000 B.C. list at least three hundred kinds of bread, all with different ingredients, flavors, and cooking methods. They made loaves shaped like human hands and even women’s breasts—a sly reference to bread as the essential, original food.

  The Mesopotamians baked a lot of their bread in a tinuru, a cylindrical clay oven with an open top and diabolically hot radiant heat inside. They rolled the dough into little round pats and left them for the gluten to relax. Then they flattened them into pancakes and slapped them onto the oven’s scorching inside walls, where they bubbled into chewy flatbreads.

  Thousands of years later, Iraqis still make bread exactly this way at neighborhood bakeries. The Akkadian word for eating, that little bread-in-mouth ideogram, survives to this day as the Arabic verb akala, “to eat,” and the closely related noun akil, “food.” (The three-letter root AKL becomes food, eat, dish.) The Akkadian tinuru lives on as the Arabic tanoor, the Iranian tanura, and the South Asian tandoor. Next time you order chicken tandoori at an Indian restaurant, chew on this: you are speaking a word that human mouths have been pronouncing, in one form or another, for at least four thousand years.

  Chapter 8

  The Movement of Democratic Lovers

  OUR ROOM AT the Hamra had a real kitchen, so on our second day in Baghdad, I went looking for groceries. I ended up in souq al-ajanib, the “foreigners’ market,” in which the only foreigner I ever saw was myself. It became one of my favorite places in Baghdad and I went there often, especially when I needed the consolation of produce. Romaine avalanched off the backs of trucks. Handwoven baskets overflowed with dark purple figs, wrinkled and soft as a baby’s balls. Eggplants gleamed like giant obsidian teardrops. In dark storefronts, bananas dangled from the ceiling on hairy strings like bait from some giant jungle spider. And the tomatoes: deep, wet, and red, piled in bloody pyramids like the heads of Hulagu’s victims. On that first visit I bought tomatoes and oily black olives imported from Turkey, and that night, instead of eating downstairs in the restaurant, Mohamad and I dined on pasta puttanesca.

  Puttanesca is my favorite pasta sauce. Like a good friend, it is flexible and forgiving; reliable, constant, yet also willing to evolve. And like a good friend, it can be there for you in about twenty minutes when you really need it. And then there is the name: “the pasta of prostitutes.” Legend has it puttanesca was invented by working girls who needed a sauce they could whip up and wolf down between clients. These food origin myths are almost always apocryphal, but they flavor the dish. The name gives puttanesca a residual taste of sex—this, it says, is a sauce for working women.

  There were a few desperate moments when I was pitting the olives with a blunt paring knife. I cursed myself for leaving the Leatherman in Beirut and wondered if I had come all the way to Iraq only to become some kind of demented housewife. But then I remembered the spackle they were serving downstairs and suddenly making puttanesca in Baghdad didn’t seem so irrational.

  We pushed our computers and sheaves of printouts and Iraqi newspapers to one side of the table. We opened a bottle of Massaya, an excellent Lebanese wine that you could get in Baghdad, and sat
down to eat.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” said Mohamad.

  A few days later, Mohamad and I went to visit the Institute for War & Peace Reporting, a nonprofit group that trains independent reporters in post-conflict zones—which Iraq, at that point, was supposed to be.

  I sat in on a class taught by Maggy and Hiwa, journalists that Mohamad knew from his previous stints in Baghdad. The students bombarded them with questions. They were all eager to write real stories, not the propaganda they had been raised on, and tell the world what was happening in Iraq. Most of the students were in their twenties, but there were also a couple of retired military officers, older men who had wasted their youth fighting wars they did not believe in and wanted to begin a new life. What they wanted was so much, but it seemed possible at the time—to cross decades in the space of one summer, to vault over the past thirty-five years in a single, exuberant leap.

  “Before, we couldn’t say anything,” said a thin, passionate young Communist named Salaam. “So now we are trying to say everything at once—just talking about food, or anything.” Salaam was the first Communist I had ever met who praised George W. Bush, but he would not be the last.

  After class, I sat outside at a picnic table talking to the students for a long time. There was a muscular twenty-one-year-old named Ali with a slow, crook-toothed smile. He was driving from Babylon and back every day—a four-hour commute—just to take the classes.

  “He’s a warrior!” said a girl with pale, delicate features and sandy blond hair. She sat on the picnic table and tipped her tiny round chin in the air looking from Ali to me with a fierce expression.

  For a split second I was angry at being interrupted. But then I decided I liked her fearlessness: how she planted herself on the table and presented her opinion as though I should have asked for it.

  Her name was Roaa. I hired her as my translator. But like most translators, she ended up being much more.

  In 1951, an Iraqi sociologist named Ali al-Wardi delivered a famous speech at Baghdad University. Revisiting Ibn Khaldun, the fourteenth-century philosopher who divided civilization into nomads and urbanites, Wardi outlined two coexisting tendencies in Iraqi society: badawah, or bedouinism, and hadarah, or settled civilization, which he equated with urbanism and modernity. “The traditional Ibn Khaldun view is that there are two kinds of people: the city dwellers and the nomads, always in conflict,” Faleh Jabar, a prominent Iraqi sociologist and author, told me. “Ali al-Wardi reverses this: he puts both sides in the same person, the same character. He transforms it into a kind of psychological struggle—a schizophrenia, if you like.” This struggle, Wardi argued, defined the history and character of Iraq—and, by extension, the entire Middle East.

  By the mid-twentieth century, Iraq was one of the most modern countries in the region. Despite the religious and ethnic divisions in Iraqi society, Baghdad had a thriving civic life: a museum of ancient art, a museum of modern art, a symphony orchestra. Its hospitals and universities attracted students from all over the Middle East. The Bauhaus architect Walter Gropius designed a library for Baghdad University whose towering arches, Iraqis told me decades later, symbolized an open mind. In 1948, Iraq became the first Arab country to grant women the right to vote. Eleven years later, the government appointed the Arab world’s first female cabinet minister. That same year, a personal status law prohibited child marriage and strengthened Iraqi women’s rights to divorce, inheritance, and child custody. The literacy rate soared: “Cairo writes, Beirut publishes, and Baghdad reads,” went the well-known saying. If Beirut was the Paris of the Middle East, then Baghdad could claim to be its London or its Berlin.

  But there were still deep divisions among Iraqis, which the Baath Party exploited when it seized power in 1963 and again in 1968. A secular movement that emphasized pan-Arab identity, the Baath channeled the revolutionary fervor sweeping through the region. The party conducted bloody purges of writers, intellectuals, artists, and professors, and even among its own ranks. The few remaining Iraqi Jews were “Zionist agents.” Iraqi Shiites were Persian infiltrators. Iraqi Communists were Russian spies. Show trials, followed by public executions, reinforced the old proverb: me and my cousin against the outsider—or else.

  The main power broker in this new regime was Saddam Hussein. He was a man of the rural tribes, from a class the urban elites dismissed as “those who eat with five,” meaning the five fingers of their hands, the Bedouin way. But the Bedouin way won in the end. (Ibn Khaldun, who always did like to side with winners, would probably have blamed the bourgeois silverware.)

  By the mid-1970s, the Iraqi president was mostly a figurehead: his cousin Saddam, who headed an elaborate web of intelligence networks, was effectively running the country. Saddam supervised the nationalization of Iraq’s oil assets, seizing them from foreign companies just as prices began to rise during the oil crisis; oil revenues went from $1 billion to $8 billion in just over two years. Much of this new revenue went toward weapons and the military. But there was enough left over to build highways, hospitals, and water filtration plants, and to fund agricultural and industrial projects. In the 1970s, Iraq’s economic and social development, as measured by the World Bank, ranked with European countries like Czechoslovakia and Greece.

  But Saddam had already begun to wall off Iraq from the outside world. “Teach the child to beware of the foreigner,” he instructed in a speech, published in 1977, to employees of the Ministry of Education, “for the latter is a pair of eyes for his country and some of them are saboteurs of the revolution.” Giving your business or even your child a foreign name was suspect. Meeting a “foreigner” was enough to get you interrogated. When Saddam finally became president in 1979, he purged the Baath Party once again and filled top government posts with loyal tribesmen, his cousins and uncles and brothers-in-law.

  That same year, an Islamic revolution ousted the tyrannical shah of Iran and brought the Shiite Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to power. In 1980, alarmed by the ripples among Iraq’s Shiite majority, Saddam invaded neighboring Iran. Western countries, including the United States, and their Arab allies lavished him with aid, weapons, and intelligence support throughout the Iran-Iraq War.

  The eight-year war killed at least a million people in total, drained Iraq’s oil wealth, and left it billions of dollars in debt to other countries, including its neighbor Kuwait. The tiny desert kingdom refused to forgive Iraq’s debt; Saddam invaded in August 1990, and the oil-rich American ally Saudi Arabia worried that it would be next. The United Nations Security Council isolated Iraq and imposed sanctions that prevented Saddam from exporting his oil.

  In January 1991, a large U.S.-led force drove Iraqi troops out of Kuwait and rolled into southern Iraq. President George H. W. Bush urged Iraqis to rise up against Saddam, and they did: rebellions flared in the southern Shiite heartland and the mostly Kurdish north. But Bush and his advisers feared that if Saddam’s Sunni-led regime fell, the Shiite majority would take power—and align itself with Iran. The U.S. military allowed Saddam to crush the rebels using helicopter gunships. Once the regime put down the uprisings, it executed tens of thousands of Iraqis, mostly Kurdish and Shiite rebels. By the end of Saddam’s reign, his regime had executed at least several hundred thousand of its own citizens.

  U.N. sanctions remained in place until the U.S. invasion in 2003. Throughout the 1990s, up to half a million pounds of raw sewage poured into the Tigris every day, because Iraq was banned from importing the chemicals and equipment needed for water filtration plants. With no oil exports and little economic activity, Iraq’s currency collapsed. Food prices shot up: by August 1995, wheat flour cost 400 times the prewar price. Peoples’ salaries became almost worthless. Middle-class families had a hard time affording basic food staples like eggs and milk. Meat became a luxury. In 1988, 7 percent of Baghdad’s children had shown signs of childhood obesity; by the mid-1990s, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children were dying from a lethal combination of malnutrition, tainted water, and inf
ectious disease.

  By the mid-1990s, researchers for the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimated that 567,000 children under the age of five had died as a result of sanctions. (Later estimates put the number closer to a quarter million—still very high.) In a 1996 television interview on 60 Minutes, CBS correspondent Lesley Stahl asked Madeleine Albright, then the American ambassador to the United Nations, if isolating Saddam’s regime was worth so many deaths. “I think this is a very hard choice,” said Albright, in a comment that she later came to regret, “but the price—we think the price is worth it.” By 2003, most Americans had forgotten Albright’s remark. Many Iraqis had not.

  Sanctions did little to hurt Saddam and his cronies: his inner circle managed to get whatever they needed, thanks to oil smuggling and hoards of cash. He turned the U.N.’s oil-for-food program, meant to feed impoverished Iraqis, into a lucrative kickback scheme. But by plunging average Iraqis into poverty, sanctions had made them even more dependent on the regime: a schoolteacher earning $10 a month was not going to imperil her food rations by criticizing Saddam. Iraq had become, as the Iraqi writer Kanan Makiya described it in his 1993 book Cruelty and Silence, a giant prison. During that era, Iraq’s educated middle class began to sell its books—one more link with the outside world—in order to buy food. In Wardi’s historic struggle, there was no doubt which side had won.

  Roaa was born in Baghdad in 1980, the year the Iran-Iraq War began. Like other young Iraqis, she learned how to fire a Kalashnikov in grade school. The teachers instructed the children to call their president “Uncle Saddam,” and at the beginning of every class, she shouted with all the other students, “Long live the great Saddam!”