When did you first realize that you had a personal story to tell?
I kept a diary the whole time I was in the Middle East (some days more faithfully than others). But I was always more interested in other people’s stories than my own—which is probably why I became a journalist. With Day of Honey, I realized that I had to tell my own story in order to write about the people whose lives I shared in Beirut and Baghdad. As an American woman married to a Lebanese man, I had access to a world of families and domestic life that most foreigners never get to see. Food was a window into that world: the dinner table was where I would learn new words, hear new opinions, where people would open up. Writing about meals was a way of letting readers get a glimpse of this unseen world, which I had the unique privilege of being able to see as both an insider and an outsider at the same time. Telling my own story was a way to introduce other people’s stories and points of view in a way that was more natural, and more honest, than pretending to be a fly on the wall.
Although most of your memoir takes place in the Middle East, many of the problems you face will sound familiar to American readers, from apartment hunts to in-laws. How much of Day of Honey do you think your readers will be able to relate to?
A lot, I think. America is going through a wave of foreclosures right now that is unlike anything we’ve seen since the Great Depression. There’s a big difference between losing your home in a war and losing it in a financial collapse, but there are some similarities too. You have to move, perhaps to a strange city, and re-adjust. You or your children have to start new schools, make new friends, and go through the homesickness of that lonely adjustment period. So I think that aspect of the book is something a lot of Americans will be able to relate to right now. During my teenaged years, when I was moving around a lot, I would go to the public library and stock up on books about the American civil war, or ancient Greece, or World War II, or even novels like The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Reading about people living through times of upheaval made me feel less alone—less singled out by hard times or disaster, and more in awe of people who had much bigger problems than mine. So if readers have a similar reaction to Day of Honey, that would make me very happy.
Day of Honey includes so many voices in addition to your own. Which of your relatives and friends in the Middle East will be getting a copy of the book? Has anybody objected to the way you portrayed him or her?
Everyone will get a copy, but not all of them can read it. Umm Hassane doesn’t speak any English, so we’ll have to translate or paraphrase it for her. But I think she’ll like seeing the beautiful cover photo (which was taken by my friend Barbara Massaad, the fabulous Lebanese cookbook writer). After the manuscript was finished, but before it came out, I showed it to some of my friends from Beirut and Baghdad. They loved it, but it was hard for them to read. It brought back memories of wars they had lived through. A couple of them called me in tears while they were reading it. It was a good reminder for me that words have a great deal of power, and you have to be mindful of their impact on other people.
Besides the rich data of your personal experience, what kind of research did you conduct before writing Day of Honey?
Way too much! This is probably thanks to my background as a journalist, where it’s normal do about ten times more research and reporting than what you actually end up putting in your article. If I’ve learned anything from living through these historic events in the Middle East, it’s that you have to know the history in order to understand the latest headlines coming out of the Middle East. That’s part of the reason I put so much history in Day of Honey. So in addition to the hundreds of people I interviewed in my years in the Middle East, I also spent three years researching food and Middle Eastern history. I read books about the topography of medieval Baghdad, classical Arabic food poetry, and ancient Mesopotamian beer. I went on a history bender. I read a history of salt (by the magnificently obsessive Mark Kurlansky) and a history of sugar (Sidney Mintz’s brilliant Sweetness and Power). A lot of these books are included in the bibliography; if you want to geek out on Middle Eastern food and history, it’s a good place to start.
What surprised you most about Beirut and Baghdad? How did your view of the Middle East change after living there for over six years?
We get most of our images of the Middle East from wars. A bomb goes off, the television crews go film it, and we see people jumping up and down and shouting and waving their fists. No wonder we think they hate us. But most of the ordinary people I met, with a few exceptions, didn’t hate Americans. Quite the reverse—they would often ask me, with genuine puzzlement, why we hated them. It was such a perfect reversal of the stereotype that sometimes I almost had to laugh. Many people in the Middle East are deeply angry about U.S. foreign policy. But almost everyone I met in Baghdad, Damascus, or Beirut—with a few notable exceptions—made the crucial distinction between our country’s government and its people. That’s a distinction we don’t always make with them. But I think we should. And that’s why I focused on the ordinary people whose voices are often drowned out by militants or demagogues.
Did you have culture shock on moving to the Middle East?
Baghdad was a fascinating place because it was frozen in time—under Saddam Hussein, it was cut off from the rest of the world for decades. After the American invasion, it was opened up to the rest of the world, and in a sense everyone in Iraq had culture shock. Beirut is different. It’s worldly, sophisticated, and yet traditional at the same time. In Beirut, my friends would always warn me not to be taken in by the city’s cosmopolitanism. For example, I would often be surprised to hear young people with college degrees, who were intelligent and well-traveled, and otherwise liberal, speak against interfaith marriage. And I heard this from both Christians and Muslims.
One of the hardest things was reminding myself that even though people might look familiar, sound familiar, and eat grape leaves that taste like my grandmother’s, they had completely different histories and associations than mine. People all over the world want the same things: to grow up, get an education, get married and have kids and give them a good life. But they want them in different ways. I might not agree with a Muslim woman who wants Islamic law, or a Christian man who’s opposed to interfaith marriage. But I think it’s important to understand why they might want these things, and that it doesn’t necessarily make them bad people.
What was it like being an American woman in the Middle East?
People ask me that a lot. I’d like to say that I struggled terribly, but the truth is that, for a reporter, being female was actually a tremendous competitive advantage. People find you less threatening. They’re quicker to let their guard down and reveal what they really think. They’re more likely to invite you into their homes and introduce you to their families. Being female gives you incredible access to that unseen world of private life that most Americans never glimpse. When was the last time you read a substantial article about Iraqi women’s political rights? Or a long magazine profile about someone like Dr. Salama al-Khafaji? And trust me, the Middle East is full of women as remarkable as her. I see them as the real story, and I think a lot of Americans want to read that untold story. Which is why I wrote this book.
It’s clear in the memoir that your Greek- and Polish-American heritage influenced both your point of view and your palate. Have you considered writing more about the experiences and recipes of your life before the Middle East?
Yes, absolutely. I never started out thinking, “I want to go cover wars in the Middle East.” I began my career as a journalist writing for a tiny community-based newspaper in upstate New York. We covered everything from housing scandals and local government to parking tickets. I went to journalism school because I wanted to keep doing that kind of reporting—about city politics, small-time corruption, and the daily struggles of ordinary people against the forces of bureaucracy and greed. These are stories you can find anywhere, all over the world, including here in the USA. I could write a whol
e book just about my grandparents, never mind the extraordinary people I’ve met over the years. I’ll keep writing these kinds of stories as long as people want to read them.
How do you describe your varied writing career—do you identify yourself as a memoirist, a journalist, a food writer, a war correspondent, or something else?
All of the above.
In the mouth-watering recipes you provide at the end of your book, you encourage the reader, “Invent your own” (p. 339). How much have you strayed from tradition in these Middle Eastern recipes? What do you find rewarding about inventing your own versions?
I like to improvise. When I’m cooking for myself, I’ll try anything. But I’ve changed the recipes in Day of Honey only very slightly from the originals—enough to make them a little more familiar, and to suggest variations. For example, Umm Hassane doesn’t put carrot and celery in her chicken stock, only onions. And people in Lebanon, with some exceptions, don’t use nearly as much spice or hot pepper as we’re accustomed to in the United States. But I kept alterations to a minimum—far, far less than I would normally do at home—because I wanted readers to taste the flavors that I write about in the book.
But while these are mostly Umm Hassane’s traditional recipes, I think it’s important to note that no tradition is set in stone. There is no one “Lebanese” version of mjadara: Umm Hassane’s mjadara is different from Aunt Khadija’s, which is different from Batoul’s, and that’s just the variation within one family. People from two different parts of Lebanon will disagree passionately over the true, correct, and “traditional” way to make kibbeh nayeh—and each may say the other is wrong, but in fact they’re both correct. I was sitting at a table once with some friends in Beirut, and I asked them what their definition of mjadara was. There were five of us at the table, and each one of us had a completely different version. It was a perfect illustration of the old saying about four Lebanese having five opinions—equally true with politics or food.
You chronicle all sorts of flavors in Day of Honey, from delectable meze to celebratory pudding. Of the recipes you provide to readers, which do you make most often?
Fattoush. I make it all the time. I change it according to what’s in season, what’s in my pantry, and how I feel that day. In the spring I might throw in shaved fennel or red bell peppers. In the winter I make it with pomegranate seeds instead of tomatoes. Or maybe avocado. Just don’t tell Umm Hassane!
* I like the Cortas brand. Look for it in the “ethnic food” section of your supermarket, in Arabic or Greek groceries, or online.
** Hard to find but worth seeking out for its oily, lemony crunch. You can find purslane in farmers’ markets, in ethnic groceries (often under the Spanish name “verdolaga”), or in your own backyard, where it may be growing as a weed. You can also substitute watercress, mâche, lamb’s quarters, sorrel, pea shoots, or whatever wild edible greens grow in your area.
* I strongly suggest one not buy already ground meat. This is easy in Lebanon, where the butcher will grind the meat in front of you and add whatever you want. In America, where we’re not always lucky enough to have butchers, there’s a cheap, simple alternative—buy a good cut of meat and grind it yourself in a food processor. Here’s how it works:
1. Buy whatever cut of meat you prefer (I recommend beef chuck or lamb shoulder). Cut out any gristle or bits of bone. You can keep a little fat if you like, or you can keep your meatballs lean and mean—this is the beauty of grinding your own meat.
2. Chop the meat into small enough chunks for your food processor to digest. Pulse it a few times in the bowl of the processor, just enough so it sticks together. Grind it a little more finely if you want a denser, fine-grained meatball, or leave it chunky if that’s how you like it.
3. That’s it. You’re done. Just be sure to thoroughly clean your food processor and anything else that touched the raw meat.
* The single most important secret to good foul is good beans. The fava beans should be tiny, a little larger than dried kidney beans, and a light warm brownish-beige in color. (The red-skinned ones are old; you can cook them, but they take longer and don’t taste as good.) The chickpeas should be the smallest ones you can find.
* Approximately ⅔ cup dried. For cooking method, see the recipe for foul mdamas.
* When Arab home cooks make freekeh, they almost always use roasted green wheat that has been parboiled and cracked—not the roasted whole green wheat berries often labeled as “freekeh” in the U.S. This recipe requires the cracked kind. The best place to get it is a Middle Eastern grocery store, but you can also order it online (look for freek, farik, frik, frick, fareek, freekeh, fareekeh, and any other spellings you can think of).
* Most of the bulgur wheat available in supermarkets is the pale gold kind. The dark brown bulgur (usually imported from Lebanon or Syria) has a higher nutritional value and a heartier taste that suits this dish better. You can find it at Middle Eastern grocery stores or online.
* Mlukhieh is available at Middle Eastern grocery stores and online as mlukhieh, melokhiya, melokhia, malikiya, or a variety of other spellings; you may also find it as Jew’s mallow, jute, and sometimes nalta jute or tossa jute. It is known in the Philippines as saluyot.
* If you’re not serving it over rice, you may want to use less stock.
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Day of Honey: A Memoir of Food, Love, and War Page 45
