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

by Annia Ciezadlo

  “No, no,” he would say, flicking away the sordid worlds of sect and ideology with an autocratic hand. “I do not dwell on such things.”

  Munir’s mother, Wardeh Loghmaji, owned Walimah. She was a fearsome southerner from Tibneen. She had married a boy from her village when she was only fourteen, and moved to Beirut, where she saw moving pictures for the first time in her life—something so marvelous, just thinking about it decades later, she clapped both hands to her face in rapture. Her husband died young; she remarried and moved to Hamra. When the war became intolerable, in the mid-1980s, she and her husband Ali moved to Ivory Coast, and later Kinshasa, which was then the capital of Zaire.

  In Africa, she started a catering business for Lebanese expatriates hungry for home cooking. She had found her calling; but in 1991, riots broke out in Kinshasa. Unpaid soldiers raided Lebanese businesses, Ali barely escaped being shot, and they lost everything except some money Wardeh tied around her waist under her clothes. The Kinshasa airport was closed, so they fled by boat to Brazzaville, where the Lebanese government airlifted them back to Beirut.

  Back in Hamra, the neighborhood was stuck in an awkward limbo between its 1970s prewar heyday and the unromantic, morning-after wreckage of the postwar. The war had torn apart more than just buildings: families had separated, marriages were canceled or postponed, and people didn’t necessarily have someone at home to cook for them. Wardeh’s own migrations had taught her the power of home cooking, and in 1994 she and two friends opened Walimah to give Ras Beirut “the feeling of a home-cooked meal.”

  I was beginning to understand the smoke-stained old sign at Chez André, that night so long ago, that commanded: NO POLITICS! Walimah was the kind of place where a Hariri loyalist could split a plate of hindbeh with a supporter of Hezbollah. There was a silent understanding that you wiped your dogmas off your shoes when you walked through the door.

  I hope that Wardeh will forgive me for pointing out that her non-Lebanese foods—the soufflés, the lasagnas—can most kindly be described as “uneven.” The wise diner did not order anything with a European name or the creation she called “Chinese chicken.” If you knew what you were doing, you studied Wardeh’s printed fortnightly menus and scheduled your life around the days she made yakhnes.

  When I thought of Lebanese food, I usually pictured meze: hummus, stuffed grape leaves, baba ghanoush. But yakhnes were part of another culinary dialect, one that most Americans had never tasted. Its apotheosis was tabeekh, from the three-letter root for “cook.” These were meals traditionally cooked at home, often in a tabkha, a handmade clay pot (these days usually a pressure cooker). Like “casserole,” the word tabkha could mean the meal or the pot it was cooked in. Tabeekh were gravies and stews, pilafs and sauces made of humbler ingredients than meze: wheat, rice, potatoes, greens, beans, lentils. It was the kind of food Umm Hassane made when we went to visit: slow food, peasant food, the cuisine of people who used what was in season and extended the little meat they had with vegetables and grains. Yakhnes and tabeekh were Lebanese soul food: akil nafis, “food with soul” (or, more literally, “food is soul”).

  For years, Beirut restaurants considered this food too plebeian to serve. Meze and mashawi were what people paid money to eat; tabeekh was what your mother and grandmother made at home. When Mohamad and I moved to Beirut, only a handful of restaurants served home cooking. Walimah was one of them. Wardeh made traditional peasant dishes like mjadara hamra, and bulgur wheat with zucchini and tomatoes, and bulgur with meat; she made freekeh, cracked green wheat, another traditional grain that most of Beirut’s restaurants neglected. She made the vegetarian “olive oil” dishes, like hindbeh, dandelions or chicory sautéed in olive oil and topped with crispy caramelized onions; eggplant stewed with tomatoes, peppers, and onions; green beans, lima beans, or okra braised with olive oil; and my favorite, the glorious foul akhdar, tender young fava beans braised whole with caramelized onions, garlic, and cilantro until they fell apart. Country people made kibbeh with pumpkin, tomato, and potato instead of meat, and she made these too, as well as more complicated dishes, like stuffed zucchini stewed in yogurt; sayadieh, fish with spiced rice and sesame seed sauce; the stuffed intestines that very few restaurants were brave enough to serve. She even made khubaizeh.

  Because they were from nearby villages, Wardeh’s yakhnes tasted a lot like Umm Hassane’s. The basic formula had not changed since the ancients: a stock made of chicken, lamb, or beef, and then an armful of vegetables—spinach, zucchini, green beans, cauliflower—finished with a burst of flavor from the cilantro-garlic pesto that you added at the end, which never failed to remind me of the Sumerians and their last-minute mixture of garlic and leeks.

  That first time we ate at Walimah, Mohamad and I sat out on the balcony. We had bamieh, okra stew, made with tomatoes, beef, and flavored with garlic and cilantro.

  “This tastes just like my mom’s!” he said, with a sudden look of wonder, as if it were a magic trick.

  He had a way of exclaiming with pleasure and surprise when he ate something he recognized. His tone of appreciation seemed to imply that I was somehow responsible, as if I had made it myself, even if all I had done was open a can of spaghetti sauce or sit there eating it with him. Sharing his excitement at this discovery, that day on the balcony at Walimah, was as good as cooking him a four-course meal: We had not found a home, but we had found home cooking, and for the time being, that would have to do.

  Our perpetual apartment hunt became a standing joke among our friends. When people heard we were living in a hotel, they imagined us reclining on satin sheets while servants bore delicacies to our bedside. “A hotel, that must be great,” they would say with envy. “Room service—you don’t even have to cook!”

  Even if I wanted it, room service was out. The Berkeley was far from luxurious. It was more like the small furnished apartments that students lived in than the grand tourist hotel it had once aspired to be. It consecrated these lost ambitions in a four-page room service menu, written in elegant cursive on cream-colored stock and larded with items like Chicken à la King and Steak Florentine with Potato Purée. If you ordered any of them, the staff would regretfully inform you that this particular item had just run out.

  What the Berkeley had, in reality, was: bread, labneh, olives, and eggs. It was cheaper just to go to the corner store for that, which is what we did. But I wanted to cook. The more the Iraq war leaked into Lebanon and poisoned our lives, the further our hopes of settling down slipped out of reach, the more I felt that food was the only thing I could know for sure. It was the only reliable substance binding one part of life to another, the only tangible connection between who I was and where I lived.

  I became obsessed with food. I mail-ordered back issues of obscure British food journals featuring treatises with titles like Notes for a Study of Sectarian Cookery in Lebanon. I stalked nutrition professors. I attended lectures on the development of Lebanon’s agricultural sector and took voluminous notes. I tracked down the Food Heritage Foundation, a cabal of artists, college professors, and restaurateurs (Wardeh was a member) that preserved rural Lebanese recipes. At parties I cornered people and frightened them with interrogations about the years of hunger, the great World War I famine that killed as many Lebanese, in proportion to population, as the Irish potato blight.

  I joined Lebanon’s Slow Food Movement, and when some of its members founded a farmers’ market in Beirut, I was there every week. Souk El Tayeb (“The Tasty Market” or “The Good Market”) started out as a handful of farmers and small producers selling fruit, vegetables, and mouneh in the parking lot across from Smith’s grocery store. Later it moved to Saifi Village, where it became one of Beirut’s trendiest destinations. Lebanon’s elite would drive Land Rovers to the souq, then line up to buy sandwiches made with kishk al-fuqara—“the kishk of the poor,” a cheese made from wheat by people too poor to afford milk.

  Many of my Lebanese friends had mixed feelings about the souq. But I liked the farme
rs and producers, I liked the food, and I felt that Lebanon’s rich had worse ways to spend their money than subsidizing small farmers. The kishk of nostalgia fed their hunger to belong, to connect to a lost agrarian past, and I couldn’t criticize them for that; I was looking for much the same thing. I spent most of my time talking to the farmers and producers anyway, which is how I met Ali Fahs.

  A wiry, gap-toothed farmer with a limp and a leathery smile, Ali made every kind of mouneh: fig jam jeweled with sesame seeds, spices mixed with rose petals, soft balls of labneh suspended in olive oil as thick and sweet as dark green honey. Ali decided I was all right when I told him, as a joke, that my husband was Metawali. When he heard that Mohamad was a Bazzi, he intoned, “The Bazzis, they are very rich.” It wasn’t true, I protested, but Ali had already decided that we would go into business together—the Bazzi family coffers would supply the capital, and he would provide the mouneh.

  “This market, it needs a big mind,” Ali told me, taking me aside one Saturday morning. “And you can make a big money.”

  “How?”

  He looked left to right, frowning away possible eavesdroppers, and weighed whether to divulge his trade secrets. “You find the thing that nobody has, and you charge a big price,” he said, holding up a forefinger. “For example, sea plants; nobody here has them.” Crinkling into a triumphant smile, he leaned over, tapped his bony chest, and revealed, “But I have them.” He held up a jar of dark green pickled samphire leaves: hashishet al-bahar, hashish-of-the-sea.

  Ali spoke a jagged, improvisational English and French, both languages that he had taught himself during his years of toiling in big industrial kitchens in Saudi Arabia. His dream was to sell enough mouneh to move to California and open a gas station.

  “Last night, I had a dream,” he told me another Saturday morning. “I was in California. I had a gas station; it was all mine. It was so beautiful.”

  Why California? “Because it is the basket of America,” he sighed. “Just like Lebanon is the basket of the Middle East.”

  Ali Fahs was right: Lebanon was a garden, and the souq was my downfall. The mini-fridge at the Berkeley could fit only about two six-packs’ worth of food, but I would see a pale-green bunch of zaatar, with its uncanny rose-petal scent and its delicate silvery sheen, and like a junkie, I would start rationalizing: I would cook it right away. I would make fatayer stuffed with zaatar. I would dry it out so it wouldn’t have to go into the fridge. A farmer’s wife gave me her recipe for fennel frond soufflé, and I headed home clutching a feathery green cloud of the liquorice-scented greens; I was all the way back at the Berkeley when I remembered that we didn’t have an oven.

  The more rootless I felt, the more I cooked. I spent hours in the little dollhouse kitchen, hunched over the two tiny electric burners, assembling pathologically elaborate meals: duck’s breast with stewed fava beans and freekeh, my variation on a Paula Wolfert recipe—the toasted green wheat soaking up the rich sauce, studded with tender pistachio-green buttons I’d spent an hour podding and peeling. Omelets of garlic, fennel, spinach, and feta. Salmon crusted with roasted fennel and coriander seeds, poached in a carrot-fennel reduction, served atop a ragout of baby string beans and zucchini. Chicken breasts stuffed with ground pistachios and coriander and smothered in avocado sauce. Roasted cherries with toasted green almonds.

  These ornate concoctions were a substitute for something else, something just out of reach. Umm Hassane would have said I wanted a baby, but what I wanted was much simpler: I wanted dinner with friends, and not in a restaurant. I wanted to invite friends over and serve them food—my food, made with my hands. I wanted a time and place where people who loved each other sat around a table and conversed. Breaking bread was the oldest and best excuse for such an occasion. It was how you created your own tribe, a microcosm of the world you want to live in.

  But you can’t invite people to dinner in a hotel room: We didn’t even have a table, let alone chairs to seat guests. The sole armchair was permanently loaded with papers and communications equipment. And Mohamad refused to eat what he called my “fancy food.” He never tried anything I made, and when I tried to tempt him, he would wrinkle his face in disgust and recoil.

  It took me months to realize that it wasn’t my food he loathed. It was the unexpected, anything unpredictable and new. As Lebanon changed he had good reasons for wanting to cling to what he knew—like in the story I’d heard at Aunt Khadija’s house, about the time he had wanted eggs boiled in his special pot during the civil war. This was his way of handling stress. Frenzied, compulsive cooking was mine.

  So at the Berkeley, I dined alone, imagining guests who would never come. I would cut the duck breast and fan it out on the plate, drizzle over the sauce, and arrange it all on the plate just so, as if I were back at one of the restaurants where I used to wait tables. I would pour a solitary glass of wine, sit down, and watch TV, because Mohamad would have long since retreated into the bedroom in a storm of protests over the smell of cooking, which he hated.

  In late fall 2005, Sheikh Fatih and Dr. Salama came to Beirut for a conference. It was their first trip to Lebanon in years, and they were like giddy tourists. They videotaped everything with a tiny camcorder. They marveled at signs advertising laser hair removal, at people walking on the Corniche, at people simply walking the streets at all. It was their first trip out of Iraq in years, and showing the two of them around Beirut, I kept thinking of the moment in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy opens the door of her black-and-white Kansas farmhouse and gets the candy-colored Technicolor of Oz.

  Dr. Salama needed a nightgown, so we went to the ABC mall in Ashrafieh. Somehow we ended up at women’secret, a European lingerie store where half-naked mannequins were strapped into panties and push-up bras that would have made Frederick of Hollywood blush. But in the jungle of thongs and garter belts, everybody seemed to be staring at the Iraqi woman in the black full-body abaya.

  We walked around the store, trailed by a bewildered saleslady, until Dr. Salama stopped in front of a mulberry-pink satin brassiere. She reached up one of her strong, clever hands—in Iraq, she was known for doing her own dental extractions, with no male assistant, and religious women came to her for this—and stroked the pink silk. “It is very beautiful,” she said with quiet reverence, as if we were at the Louvre discussing a Renaissance painting. The bottle-blonde saleslady stood at attention behind her, batting her eyelash extensions in polite shock.

  After shopping, we went to the Bristol Hotel’s pâtisserie for ice cream. I got chocolate. She ordered a scoop of lemon sorbet. She looked down at the pale buttery-lemon orb for a moment before eating it. Her face looked tired, but she was smiling.

  “This ice cream,” she said quietly, “it is very beautiful.”

  Everything was beautiful; earlier that day, seeing my hair in a ponytail, she had exclaimed, “You are wearing your hair, Annia, in a way which is so beautiful!”

  In the year and a half since we’d seen Dr. Salama, she had survived several more assassination attempts. In one of them, the attackers had shot her husband in the leg, hand, and abdomen. He ordered her to abandon her political career; she refused, and they were headed for divorce. She had clashed repeatedly with the ruling Shiite political parties. She and her children were living in lockdown.

  “I have learned to appreciate things that are beautiful,” she said, so softly that I had to lean forward to hear her. “I have a plant in my yard, and one day it blossomed. And I said to my daughter, ‘Look at this flower. Such a small, delicate thing. We should learn to appreciate such things when we have them.’”

  While Dr. Salama and I ate ice cream, Mohamad and Sheikh Fatih were sitting in the Bristol’s lobby. Were they hungry? asked Mohamad. We could take them to restaurants, cafés, anything they wanted: sushi, meze, French, Italian—Beirut had it all. There was even a Spanish restaurant. But the Sheikh wanted something else.

  “While we are here, we only want one thing,” he said. “It would be an hon
or for us to have a meal prepared by Annia’s hands.”

  It was like a fable from The Arabian Nights: the holy man, traveling in a foreign land, requesting the one favor we cannot grant him.

  “Well,” said Mohamad (somewhat sheepishly, he confessed later), “the problem is, we’re having a hard time finding an apartment. So we still live in a hotel.”

  “A hotel?” inquired Sheikh Fatih, in polite puzzlement.

  “But we’re going to get an apartment soon,” Mohamad added hastily.

  “Of course, I was only joking,” said Sheikh Fatih. “I only meant that we would love to eat Annia’s food. It does not have to be now. We will do it whenever we can.”

  We had eaten so often at Sheikh Fatih’s home in Baghdad. When would we have a chance to pay back his hospitality?

  “Next time you’re in Beirut, God willing,” said Mohamad, breaking into the flowery formal Arabic he hardly ever used, “Annia will cook you a feast!”

  In February 2006, Sunni extremists bombed the Askari Shrine, the tomb of two Shiite imams, in the northern Iraqi city of Samarra. The bombing, and the reprisals that followed, accelerated the sectarian conflict that was a civil war in everything but name only. On February 23, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah held a massive rally in dahiyeh, ostensibly to protest the Samarra bombing. He blamed the United States for the conflagration in Iraq and dared it to disarm Hezbollah. Sunnis and Shiites should not blame each other, he noted. But Beirut was even more tense than before.

  The next week, Mohamad finally got fed up with all my cooking. He convinced the Berkeley’s handyman to install a fan in the wall above the four-foot-high bar that set off the kitchen from the rest of the tiny living room where we filed stories, watched the news, and did practically everything except sleep.