A Writer Describes Palestinian Cuisine, and the World Around It.
Yasmin Khan’s new cookbook, “Zaitoun,” documents her travels in the West Bank and Gaza, and the beauty of the food she encountered there.
'In November 2016, when the cookbook author Yasmin Khan returned to her home in London after the olive harvest in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, she faced a problem: No matter how strenuously she tried, she could not write.
Her manuscript for a book on Palestinian cooking was due the next spring. But images of the Israeli military checkpoints and soldiers she’d seen throughout her travels in the West Bank and Gaza crowded her head. As a writer, she felt uncharacteristically timid, fighting an impulse to self-censor before her words reached the page.
“I felt really disturbed by what I saw,” she recalled recently in New York. “I also felt, ‘What on earth am I doing, writing a cookbook? Isn’t this really frivolous?’”
She worked through the impasse by revisiting the writing of Anthony Bourdain, whose bracing words energized her. She gave herself a pep talk: “Stop trying to sanitize, or make something pretty, when it’s painful.”
She described her work as “culinary anthropology,” using food as a medium to foster cultural understanding. “I am very interested in portraying the sum of life’s experience through food,” she said. “That means conveying the challenging bits as well as the joyous sections.”
Ms. Khan, 37, saw great beauty during two separate research trips for the book. She was enchanted by the quality of the produce. The cauliflower grew larger than any she’d seen in her life. “I’d say they’re as big as my head,” she said, with a laugh. “But I don’t think my head is big enough.”
The heads of cauliflower at the Whole Foods Market near her sister’s apartment in Brooklyn are comparatively puny. Ms. Khan chopped them into tiny florets, leaves intact, and roasted them in the oven, planting the florets gently into a bowl of soup she had made that morning from roasted cauliflower blitzed with garlic, potato and turmeric.
Palestinian food can be sorted into three categories, she explained: There is the bread- and meat-based cooking of the West Bank, which includes East Jerusalem and stretches to the Jordan River. The food of the Galilee, which sits inside Israel and includes cities like Nazareth, closely resembles Levantine cuisine, with its tabbouleh and kibbeh. The cooking of the Gaza Strip, a dense patch bordering Egypt, is largely fish-based and fiery. Among Gaza’s most treasured dishes is zibdiyit gambari, a tomato stew spiced with jalapeños and speckled with dill. The stew is thick with heat, the shrimp cooked just until their gray bodies turn flush. . .
Recipes: Roasted Cauliflower Soup | Spicy Shrimp and Tomato Stew (Zibdiyit Gambari) | Roast Chicken With Sumac and Red Onions (Mussakhan)
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/04/dining/yasmin-khan-zaitoun-palestinian-cookbook.html
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