Here is an article on the Mezze Book, published in the Daily Star.
November 29 2013.
By Beckie Strum
BEIRUT:
Barbara Abdeni Massaad took an unorthodox approach to her most recent
cookbook, “Mezze: A Labor of Love,” by replacing photographs of the
well-known dips, salads and finger foods with colorful illustrations.
“If a single image could define our unique culture and heritage,”
Massaad writes, “it would certainly depict an over sized table groaning
with small, colorful plates of food, surrounded by happy people caught
in the act of socializing and sharing a meal.”
Massaad and “Mezze” illustrator Pascale Hares launched the book
Thursday evening at Falamanki restaurant in Sodeco, with women lined up
from the minute the two sat down to sign copies of the guide to
Lebanon’s most iconic foods.
This is Massaad’s third English-language Lebanese cookbook. She’s
written on traditional baked goods in “Man’oushe: Inside the Street
Corner Lebanese Bakery,” and preserves in “Mouneh: Preserving Foods for
the Lebanese Pantry.”
The whimsical illustrations – kibbeh akras with eyelashes and smiles,
a young woman sleeping in a pile of okra, silly speech bubbles
containing local slang – in a way reflect Massaad’s approach to teaching
mezze.
Rather than preach the correct way to make each dish, every recipe
comes with a caveat or two: You can replace this for that, she writes;
or in the south, they do it this way; and of course, some use
pomegranate molasses instead of lemon juice.
The pictures offer abstract representations of the food and the
genial spirit in which it’s eaten without obliging readers to duplicate
from a photograph. The words together with the pictures accommodate the
varying nature of mezze and strip the ego out of Lebanese cooking – the
arrogance that proclaims one regional variation to be the real one.
For her fattoush recipe, for example, Massaad says the beauty of the
salad is that it can be made from whatever vegetables are available and
in season. She invites cooks to fry or bake their Arabic bread for the
croutons.
Wherever she can, she offers people options and tries to incorporate as many variations as she can.
The raw meat section contains seven different recipes, all of which
she says can be made with lamb, beef or goat. And the topping options on
her hummus read like the fine print in a car owner’s manual: beef
tenderloin, lamb tenderloin, basterma, sujuk, fried pine nuts, awarma,
more chickpeas and on and on.
That’s not to say Massaad doesn’t divulge her favorites. She explains
her affinity for muhammara, a red pepper and walnut dip from Aleppo,
and her love of kibbeh orfalieh, which originated in Turkey.
And though accommodating of regional tastes, when it comes to flavor
she urges readers to heed her advice. For example, she insists eggplant
should never be cooked in the oven to make baba ghannouj – chargrill it
on the stove top and remove the seeds, which can produce a bitterness.
Mezze also defies the standard recipe design that separates the
ingredients from the method in tidy uniform layout. Thus, she puts
emphasis on thoroughly reading her words, which are littered with
crucial tips that will make the difference between passable and superb
mezze.
She predicts the nuanced challenges her readers might face and
divulges tips that only seasoned cooks have learned – the kind of advice
for which those of us who don’t have Lebanese tetas crave.
So what are some of these secrets? To make hummus smooth, for
example, most big producers have heavy machinery to give it that buttery
consistency. To do it at home, Massaad suggests pulverizing the
chickpeas first in the food processor and then moving them to the
blender, where the other ingredients are added.
Similarly, did you know that at Sahyoun, arguably Beirut’s most
famous falafel makers, the owners use only fava beans? Massaad offers a
recipe that mixes fava beans and chickpeas.
The book is realistic and reflects what one actually finds on the
table. She includes Lebanese-style French fries, which are not age-old
local fare but are part and parcel of today’s mezze spread. She also
incorporates Armenian mezze that were brought to Lebanon relatively
recently, but which she says are here to stay.
Massaad gives a nod to chefs that have remained true to their
heritage while moving recipes forward. And she presents the lessons
she’s learned not as a monologue on mezze done right, but as a dialogue
in which she invites readers to participate – readers that she knows
will come with their own culinary baggage.
“Food preparation is never about a strict set of rules,” she writes.
“Cooking is personal, meaning that the character and personality of the
cook should be evident in the final outcome.”
 |
| Falamanki Book Launch / Beckie Strum |
Read more:
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/Culture/Lifestyle/2013/Nov-29/239443-mezze-a-comprehensive-invitation-to-try-your-hand-at-lebanese-cooking.ashx#ixzz2mOI7KLox
