Allan, Donald Aspinwall. 1974august. Flavors
of Lebanon. Gourmet 34:24--26, 58-61. [Excerpted from article.]
One of the most irritating aspects of having to work for a living is the necessity
to get back from lunch. This odious requirement is bad not only for gastronomy,
digestion, and romance, but I'm sure it must affect the economy, too, in a
country where so much of the working day falls during what rightfully should
be nap-time. Lebanon suffers no such handicap. Many offices close for the
day by two o'clock, and the others are shuttered during the hours of greatest
heat so that the Lebanese can go home for their meal and a snooze. Thousands
of years of civilization in this verdant corner of the eastern Mediterranean
have not gone for nothing: They have given birth to the alphabet and Arabic
numerals, without which the menu as we know it would be a poor thing indeed.
And they have produced the lingering Lebanese lunch.Beirut is the banking,
commercial, shipping, journalistic, and spying capital of the Middle East,
with representatives of these activities present from every corner of the
earth and restaurants to cater to their every whim. Depending on my mood when
two o'clock strikes, I can stroll to the Hotel Saint Georges' terrace, with
its glorious view of bay and mountains, and tuck into oysters flown in from
France-so fresh that they quiver at the first drop of lemon juice. Or I can
join the Italian colony at Quo vadis, where milk-fed veal for the osso
buco is also supplied by air. Homesick Japanese businessmen are cheered
by imported delicacies at the Tokyo; and whoever has a craving for Spanish
paella, Bombay curry, Hungarian goulash, Chinese spring rolls, Viennese Sachertorte,
or simply English ale on draft can satisfy his desire in a twinkling. but
the real way to make the most of the no-return lunch is to abandon oneself
to the pleasures of Lebanon's own cuisine.Can a country only half the size
of New Jersey have a distinctive cuisine all its own? "Maloum!" (certainly)
say the trenchermen of Lebanon. Neighboring nations, each claiming to be the
source and/or supreme interpreter of the eastern Mediterranean's rich culinary
Lebanese cookery author George Rayess. "Be relaxed and merry when eating,"
he counsels. "Food is of no benefit when the nervous system is upset."The
Lebanese have always found a special relaxation and merriment at table. Richly
adorned serving dishes that belonged to their ancestors, the Phoenicians,
have been discovered at Tyre, Sidon, and Jubayl (Byblos), ports from which
great mariners and traders sailed to barter throughout the Mediterranean and
beyond, as far a sea as Britain. Their ships carried timbers from the cedars
of Mount Lebanon, royal purple Tyrian dye made from sea snails, and wine from
the plains near Baalbek, the monumental shrine east of the mountains.Lebanon
itself is tiny: It consists of a north-south coastal strip just over a hundred
miles long and a fertile inland valley. Between the two is the Lebanon range,
whose peaks rise almost straight from the sea to ten thousand feet. A succession
of invaders has coveted this land at the crossroads of Europe, Asia, and Africa.
Egyptians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Western European Crusaders,
Turks, and the French had all held sway until the Republic of Lebanon emerged
with independence in 1941 (though French troops remained for several years
more). From each occupant the Phoenician-Lebanese have, as good traders, taken
more than they have given. In the process they have survived as the true cosmopolites
of the Levant.All this borrowing has spiced the culinary traditions of Lebanon,
but the decisive factor in establishing Lebanese cuisine has been nature.
Extremely varied conditions of temperature, rainfall, altitude, and soil encompassed
in a small space have made little Lebanon an agricultural phenomenon. Where
else can one find sweet dates and crisp apples growing within a few miles
of each other? For an explanation, follow the route a fisherman might take
in order to deliver lanoustes caught at Jubayl to the demanding chef
at Baalbek's Palmyra Hotel.The fisherman moors his boat and crates his catch
in the walled Crusaders' harbor, where stones from ancient temples are jumbled
together with Frankish masonry. he walks past data palms and banana plantations
along the shore to the main road, where he flags a service (a fixed-route
taxi that picks up and discharges passengers along its way), puts his catch
in the trunk, and then leans back to sniff the blossoms as the taxi heads
for the hills through citrus groves. Shaded by the branches of silvery olive
and green fig, the road zigzags up the mountainside, and as the taxi climbs,
it passes almond, hazelnut, walnut, and apricot trees. At a cool, five thousand
feet- but still only a few miles from the sea as the crow flies- our fisherman
can see apple and pear orchards layered against the mountain wall in strip
after strip of laboriously constructed rock terraces. Next come forests where
pine nuts, so important in Lebanese recipes, are harvested.Most of the country's
rain falls on the Mediterranean side of the mountains and on the peaks; the
road down the eastern slope leads to a drier landscape where shepherds graze
flocks in the foothills. Beyond the hills spreads the flat farmland of the
Bika Valley, with Baalbek near its center. Wheat as been grown here since
the dawn of agriculture; now the patchwork of fields marks the cultivation
of almost any vegetable you can name, as well as dairy and poultry farms and
acres of vineyards. A little more than two hours after beaching his boat,
our fisherman could be haggling over his catch in Baalbek, having passed through
at least five distinct growing zones.In a country as small as Lebanon, fishermen
and farmers rarely travel such a distance to market their produce. Heads of
lettuce grown on the outskirts of Beirut are not cut. They are sold with clumps
of moist earth clinging to their roots to keep them "alive." Oranges and mandarins
come with their stems and still-soft leaves. Never have I seen such snowy
cauliflowers, such glossy eggplants, such spotless new potatoes, such squeaky-fresh
leaves of chard, or such ruby radishes as those artistically displayed in
the outdoor markets and roadside produce stands of Lebanon. This horn of plenty
has actually become a subject for snapshots and postcards. And if a housewife
hasn't time to go to market, the market comes to her on the barrows of vendors
who cry their wares through the streets. From my balcony I can watch the boat
of my friend Ezzedine, the fisherman, who in a few hours will be ringing my
bell to show me what he has caught.Perhaps it is the presence of so much attractive
food at every turning that stimulates Lebanese appetites. Whatever the reason
may be, the Lebanese are always nibbling. Small boys in the business district
are forever darting in and out of traffic with trays of coffee and pastries.
And the most typical Lebanese cooking is displayed in a mosaic of morsels
in saucers - the local hors-d'oeuvre varies called a mezze.
The mezze can be a meal in itself or the overture to a feast.The concept
of leisurely lunching is enhanced by the mezze. You can start with
three or four items, must to see how hungry you are. Then, dish by dish, or
dozen by dozen, you can order more saucers until the table is entirely covered.
You talk, you nibble, you sip wine or arak, you tear off triangles
of the puffy, hollow rounds of Arab flatbread to use as scoops, you stretch
the old boarding house reach to spear a tidbit that catches your fancy. Because
few of the dishes are served hot, there is no hurry. The sun can slip halfway
down the western sky before you consider whether or not to go on to a main
course or two. The owner of a Beirut restaurant once told me that he could
serve a mezze of a hundred different dishes. I have looked a good three
dozen in the eye as the first course in a meal of pasha-size proportions.
The ingredients of the mezze are equally at home and appreciated in
a mountain village farmhouse, at a Lebanese government reception, a seaside
tavern, or the buffet of an elegant Beirut hostess. You can scarcely escape
them, yet you never tire of them.A basic mezze will include, at minimum,
black olives in peppery oil; scallions, radishes, sticks of raw carrots and
cucumbers, whole green peppers, and tomato sections; crisp hearts of undressed
romaine to be crunched like celery; pistachio nuts; pickled turnips and gherkins;
labne (thick strained yogurt with a spoonful of olive oil in the center);
goat cheese and cheese balls mixed with wild thyme, or cigar-shaped tubes
of flaky pastry with melted cheese inside; and the four pillars of Lebanese
hors d'oeuvre cooking: homos bi tahini, tabbouleh, baba ghanouj, and
kibbe. is a puree of chick-peas thinned with taratour
sauce, a tangy mixture of tahini (runny sesame seed puree) blended
with garlic, lemon juice and water. Tabbouleh is a crunchy salad of
minced parsley, onions, tomatoes, and mint leaves mixed with bulgur
and dressed with lemon juice and oil. Bulgur is made from the nutlike
kernels of wheat that have been boiled so that they will swell, dried, and
cracked into small bits. They need only be soaked in water to swell again
before being used in the salad - and many other Lebanese recipes. Baba
ghanouj is a light, smoky flavored dipping sauce of whipped eggplant and
taratour; and kibbe is the lean meat of lamb pounded in a special
large stone mortar to a spreadable smoothness and mixed with bulgur,
a basic preparation that can be eaten raw like steak tartare or cooked in
many ways and shapes - meatballs, grilled kebabs, baked loaves, baseball-size
hollow globes. Golden olive oil and gemlike pomegranate seeds often decorate
hommos and baba ghanouj, which are swirled into saucers rather
than being spooned.These four items, I think, can be called Lebanese, although
they are popular everywhere in the Middle East and may not have been actually
invented here. Many of the other mezze items are either common to the
Mediterranean and Arab lands or are acknowledged borrowings. The stuffed vine
leaves, the little filled pastries of Turkish origin called sambousseks
and boureks, the delectable Egyptian red fool beans (eaten for
breakfast like porridge by many Middle Easterners), the plump prawns of the
Persian Gulf off Kuwait - all are to be found in other parts of the region.
But the quality of Lebanese ingredients and cooks seems to make such a difference
that it is common throughout the Arab world for the best local restaurant
to have a name like "The Byblos" or to be advertised with the cedars of Lebanon
symbol.Seasoning is another Lebanese hallmark. Mounds of parsley, mint, thyme,
and rosemary from the mountains, saffron, sumac, dried red peppers, coriander
in powdered seed and green leaf, cinnamon, oregano, cloves, sesame seeds,
basil, allspice, and cardamom are heaped in the souks of Lebanese towns
and cities. Arak is a proper accompaniment to the mezze, and
there is a ritual about mixing it: One must pour the clear liquor into a small
glass, add water in a proportion not to exceed one-half the total, and put
in ice as the mixture turns milky. It is considered very bad form to pour
arak and water over ice, though I have often done so without being
able to detect any difference. Arak is a colorless eau-de-vie,
distilled, preferably from grapes, and flavored with aniseed - a close cousin
of Turkish raki, Greek ouzo, and French pastis, but with
its own special dry character. Mezze enthusiasts order a bottle of
arak before getting down to the food, and waiters are ready with small
bottles in the event that some members of a group prefer the good Lebanese
beer (brewed by a Dutch company) or the even better wine.The Lebanese do not
claim to have invented arak, but they insist theirs is the best. Nor
do they claim to have invented wine - just almost. Their boast is that Zahle,
a Bika Valley town, is the birthplace of Noah. And Noah, once the ark had
grounded on Ararat, lost no time in planting a vineyard, presumably from roots
brought from Lebanon. Today's Lebanese vines may not go back to the flood,
but their lineage can be traced at least to the Crusades. In any case, they
have all benefited from the importation of various French and American strains.
Perfectly decent red and rose wines from Ksara, Kefraya, and Musar can be
had for less than a dollar, even in these devalued days; the better whites
cost a bit more, and in fact one can spend five or six dollars on bottles
with vintage labels. The trouble is that these appellations are quite unreliable,
and quality even varies from bottle to bottle in the same case.Zahle is renowned
throughout the Middle East for the restaurants that line the narrow ravine
and riverbed that divide the town. They are all simple, open-air pavilions,
which serve a similar array of mezze, with hardly any demarcation to
indicate where one property ends and which waiter belongs where. Epic lingering
lunches have been accomplished by enthusiasts working their way up Zahle's
ravine, having a few dishes of mezze and a glass of arak in
each establishment. One specialty here is a tiny roasted fig-pecking bird.
Only the feet and beaks are removed, for the bones are hardly more resistant
than those of a sardine, and the birds are popped down in a couple of bites.As
elsewhere in the Middle East, lamb is the favorite meat. Roasting a lamb or
kid is the central point of any joyful celebration. Toward the end of Ramadan,
the Moslem fast, live sheep may even be seen on the balconies of Beirut apartments.
Families with traditions rooted in the desert fatten and slaughter at home,
and in the evenings a familiar terrace and rooftop sight is the housewife
or cook bending low to fan the coals of a charcoal brazier with a turkey wing.
In the dusk, entire neighborhoods are bathed in the aroma of sizzling lahm
mashwi, the local shish kebab, or kafta, lamb meatballs. A torn
round of Arab bread catches the drippings and becomes a "plate" to be eaten
wrapped around the meat. Every part of the lamb, from cheeks and tongue to
trotters, finds its way to the table in some delicious form. But forget all
you've heard about the honored guest being offered an eye: The honored guest
wants the tenderest pieces of leg, like everyone else. His greatest hazard
lies in not being able to eat enough to satisfy his host, for the amount of
consumption is equated with the amount of affection the guest is willing to
show.The methods of preparing lamb and mutton seem endless. An unusual variation
is laban umo (yoghurt "mother's style"), which is made by boiling cubes
of lamb with small onions and a cinnamon stick, then simmering them in a sauce
of yoghurt and beaten eggs that has been brought to a boil while being stirred
clockwise. (Stirring in the same direction is deemed vital to prevent curdling.)
Sautˇed garlic and ground coriander are added just before serving. Incidentally,
Lebanese cooks use garlic liberally, but because it is always fresh it is
much less powerful. They prepare an excellent sauce for charcoal-broiled chicken
by mashing several cloves of fresh garlic with salt and a tablespoon of lemon
juice and beating in a half cup of olive oil. Kibbe is the supremely
Lebanese contribution to lamb cookery. Traditionally it is prepared by pounding
lean meat from the leg with salt in a stone mortar called a jorn. The
jorn is put on the ground and the pounder squats beside it, maintaining
an insistent rhythm that can be heard from one house to the next in the villages.
Lebanese cookbooks say that it is also possible to grind the meat several
times and then grind it together with onions that have also been ground. Soaked
and drained bulgur is kneaded into the resulting paste, and during
the process one is instructed to dip the hands frequently in ice water to
keep the mixture moist and smooth. Ground allspice or a pinch of red pepper
is worked in if the meat is to be eaten raw (,I.kibbe naye), garnished with
raw onions and olive oil, but generally this routine is only the first step.
Kibbe bissanieh ("in a tray"), for example, is cooked with a middle
layer of grouped lamb sautˇed with onions, pine nuts and cinnamon. If the
kibbe is to be baked rather than sautˇed the top layer is often scored
in cross-hatching and dotted with butter. Kibbe mishwiye is molded
over the back of a ladle, filled with a lump of cinnamon-seasoned lard or
lamb's caul pounded with onions and sumac powder, and sealed with another
piece of kibbe. It is then broiled over charcoal. Smaller balls are
made by molding the kibbe over a finger, and these are then broiled,
sauteed, or boiled and simmered with rice and yoghurt. The meat, onion, and
pine-nut stuffing, with rice added, is often used to fill cored hollow zucchini,
cabbage leaves, or green peppers, and spicier blends go into ropes of lamb
sausages.The old Al-Ajami Restuarant in Beirut is a good place to sample hard-to-prepare
Lebanese dishes in their classic forms. A narrow pedestrian street literally
runs through the restaurant, which is on the fringe of the cloth souk,
a warren of arched-over alleys. The kitchen opens onto this passage so that
passersby find it torture not to stop and sample at least a round of Arab
bread filled with shawarma, marinated roast lamb sliced from the spit,
or a refreshing sandwich of paper-thin bread rolled around scallions and creamy
yoghurt. The restaurant is open almost around the clock to accommodate a mixed
crowd of night workers from the produce market, newspapermen, and revelers
from the roaring nightclub district. Some diners eat at tables in the street,
others ii beautifully decorated Damascus-style rooms with lacquered ceilings
and marble mosaic tables where water tinkles from a fountain. Everyone inspects
the kitchen before ordering, and while one party is attacking a mound of mough-rabia,
Lebanon's chicken and lamb couscous, another may be breakfasting in the austere
Arab style on black olives, white akkawe cheese, yoghurt with olive
oil, and sweet tea.Beirut claims to be the Paris of the Middle East, and a
counterpart of the lingering lunch and afternoon snooze is a revival of life
after sundown, which reaches a peak long past midnight. Most of the nighclubbers
are visitors from their favorite Lebanese entertainment is a movie followed
by a visit to a pastry shop. And what pastries! Dripping with honey and scented
syrups, studded with nuggets of pistachio nuts, walnuts and almonds, heaped
with whipped cream, these delights are offered by the score on trays displayed
in fashionable Hamra Street and in the ancient coffee shops of the Bourj,
the old town. Coffee, the "wine of Arabia," may be either the foamy, sweet
Turkish demitasse or the cardamom-seed-flavored Arab blend, which is slightly
more bitter. Men playing tric-trac(backgammon), moving their counters
with computerlike speed, consume quarts of it while they puff on hubble-bubbles
provided by the cafes.Since Lebanon is almost evenly divided among various
Moslem sects and Christian denominations there is always a holiday to celebrate
with a feast. These occasions feature the same mezze dishes and entrees
one finds in the best Arab-style restaurant-such as the Yilidizlar or Le Grenier
in Beirut-for all Lebanese food is home cooking, really. One hostess may be
famed for her t'hall (spleen stuffed with garlic, ground red peppers,
and coriander), another for her way with the delicious Sultan Ibrahim fish,
but all will tend to serve buffets of at least a dozen dishes.My own favorite
celebration is an escape to simplicity: a picnic high on Mount Lebanon. In
spring and early summer the roadsides and fields strewn with wild versions
of the flowers that the Crusaders took back to Europe and introduced in their
gardens: anemones, gladiolus, irises, tulips, peonies, hyacinths, hollyhocks,
rock roses, and dozens more. Hilltops are often surmounted with the columns
of a Roman temple or a Crusader fortress. At Afqa a river shoots from the
mouth of a cave in a mountain of rock and cascades past a temple dedicated
to Adonis. According to legend, Adonis was killed here by a boar and his drops
of blood became scarlet anemones.At Anjar we cook freshly caught brook trout
with the arches of a Umayyad palace for a background; at Jubayl we swim and
pick bits of Phoenician pottery and iridescent glass out of the cliff below
the ruins. The past and the present merge in a continuum of five thousand
years. We have time - and we don't have to get back from lunch.The following
Lebanese recipes are for lingering lunches - or dinners - at home:
