| Contents |
Part I: Making Levantine food cultures -- When did kibbe become Lebanese? The social origins of national food culture / Graham Auman Pitts and Michel Kabalan -- Adana kebabs and Antep pistachios: place, displacement, and cuisine of the Turkish south / Samuel Dolbee and Chris Gratien -- The transformation of sugar in Syria: from luxury to everyday commodity / Sara Pekow -- Pistachios and pomegranates: vignettes from Aleppo (essay & recipes) / Antonio Tahhan -- Part II: Revisiting foodways in Israel-Palestine. Palestinian urban food venues as "contact zones" between Arabs and Jews during the British Mandate period / Dafna Hirsch -- The companion to every bite: Palestinian olive oil in the Levant / Anne Meneley -- Even in Palestine cuisine is regional (essay & recipes) / Reem Kassis -- Part III: Levantine cuisine beyond borders. Embodying Levantine cooking in East Amman, Jordan / Susan MacDougall -- Shakshūka for all seasons: Tunisian Jewish foodways at the turn of the twentieth century / Noam Sienna -- Unmaking Levantine cuisine: the Levant, the Mediterranean, and the world / Harry Kashdan -- From fine dining to street food: Egypt's food culture in transition through the eyes of La Bodega (essay & recipes) / Suzanne Zeidy -- Conclusion: writing Levantine cuisine / Anny Gaul with poetry by Zeina Azzam. |
| Abstract |
"Melding the rural and the urban with the local, regional, and global, Levantine cuisine is a mélange of ingredients, recipes, and modes of consumption rooted in the Eastern Mediterranean. Making Levantine Cuisine provides much-needed scholarly attention to the region's culinary cultures while teasing apart the tangled histories and knotted migrations of food. Akin to the region itself, the culinary repertoires that comprise Levantine cuisine endure and transform--are unified but not uniform. This book delves into the production and circulation of sugar, olive oil, and pistachios; examines the social origins of kibbe, Adana kebab, shakshuka, falafel, and shawarma; and offers a sprinkling of family recipes along the way. The histories of these ingredients and dishes, now so emblematic of the Levant, reveal the processes that codified them as national foods, the faulty binaries of Arab or Jewish and traditional or modern, and the global nature of foodways. Making Levantine Cuisine draws from personal archives and public memory to illustrate the diverse past and persistent cultural unity of a politically divided region"-- Provided by publisher. |
