Large Image
Share This
Description
When I left Lebanon for England more than thirty years ago, all I brought from Beirut were a few over elaborate dresses and a doorstopper of an old Arabic cookbook, which was anything but. It contained the one element of my Lebanese culture that was essential - the scents and flavours of my childhood and early youth, which brightened what would otherwise have been a bleak landscape of boredom and war. In London, it was how I first communicated with my new world when my English was still halting and sparse. It gave me a power that helped me deal with all the challenges I faced. Later, it gave me a livelihood, too, as I turned what had been a hobby and a pleasure into a job that freed me from the constraint of offices and institutional hierarchies. I named my company after my second daughter, Samara. The small blue van I used for weddings and parties had and still has a cooking pot as a logo - and on its side, I perhaps unwisely engraved what we offer at Samara cuisine, including Shishas and Bellydancers - something that still stops traffic more than fifteen years later. And all through those years, I nursed the ambition of putting down all I knew of my beloved Lebanese food in a book, which would contain my favourite recipes and some of the stories and memories with which I associated them. This, finally, is that book. I am not trying to re-invent the dishes of my birthplace, but rather to present the best of what Lebanon has to offer through recipes that I have honed over decades of practice, first in Beirut and now for many years in London. I am very traditional about food - I prefer simplicity above all. I want to be reminded of the air high in the mountains above Beirut when I grill spiced meat and the little fish restaurants on rickety platforms into the Mediterranean beneath the Casino du Liban when I cook a sea bass. My aim with this book is to provide a concise guide to all that's good in Lebanese food, but also to give a scent and a taste of world in which I grew up - a Lebanon in its prime, of which I had the briefest glimpse before it was all but extinguished by war. Even now - as the lights are literally out across the country because of economic collapse - comfort and pleasure can still be found in the unchanging, addictive panoply of flavours in a well made mezze. Here, in this book, you can find those pleasures waiting for you - it's taken me half a lifetime to get it right. Now, it's your turn to share this distillation of a cuisine that is truly one of the wonders of the world.
Tag This Book
This Book Has Been Tagged
Our Recommendation
Notify Me When The Price...
Log In to track this book on eReaderIQ.