Arto der Haroutunian - Middle Eastern Cookery

One of the most heartening memories of my childhood is Sunday lunch, when all the members of our family, as well as guests (mostly young students from the Middle East), sat around our large table and consumed in delight and with gasps of rapture the product of my mothers work. For not only was my mother a remarkable cook but also, being thousands of miles away from home, we were in a vast culinary desert devoid of such familiar vegetables as aubergines and okra; spices such as cumin, sumac and allspice; the honey-soaked, rosewater-scented desserts of our childhood.

We ate. We argued loudly and vociferously. We drank our thick black coffee and nibbled a piece of rahat-lokum , a box of which someone or other had just received from home. Then, thanking the Lord for his bounteous generosity we settled comfortably into our large, Victorian armchairs and, almost in whispers, talked of home, of the sun-drenched streets of Aleppo or Baghdad, the rich souks of Alexandria or the fragrance-inflamed bazaars of Tehran. Someone would then sing The song of the immigrant far away from his village and loved one. Someone else would hungrily describe how to peel and eat a watermelonYou know, with white goats cheese, some warm lavash bread with a sprig of fresh tarragon tucked nicely in the centre and all washed down with a glass of cool sous all of us lolled in nostalgic euphoria and dreamt of home.

Home to us all was the Middle East, not the political entity of today with its strong regional, national and social differences. In those days (the late forties) we were, regardless of our ethnic origins, still Orientals or Levantines, a people who were just waking from centuries of slumber and ignorance, a people who had been mistreated by foreigners, be they Turks, French or English, for their own selfish interests.

In our new environments, temporary for most, permanent for few, we tried hard to emulate the past. Customs were kept, rudiments of our mother tongue were inculcated into our minds and traditions punctiliously adhered to. Lent was strictly kept and for forty days no meats, poultry or fish passed our lipsat least at home. For us children school meals (however tasteless they were) were our salvation. I remember how I relished the school pork chops and steak and kidney piesespecially during Lent.

Over the years changes did take place not only in our domestic lives but up and down the land. More immigrants arrived from India, Pakistan, South East Asia, Cyprus and the West Indies. They too soon settled down, opened their ethnic restaurants, shops and emporiums thus enriching the country with their diverse cultures and adding spice to the eating habits of the nativesparticularly important for one such as I who likes his food!

My early childhood was spent in Aleppo, Syria. My fathers family originated from Cilicia (Southern Turkey) and my mothers from Armenia. The Aleppo of my childhood was a medium-sized cosmopolitan city soaked in history, rich in commerce and perhaps the most enlightened region of the Levant. In our street lived Armenians, Assyrians, Greeks, Christian Arabs, a well off Turkish family with vast cotton fields and indisputably ugly slanted eyes and not forgetting Jacob the Jew, a carpet dealer and close friend of my father. We all spoke our ethnic tongues, with a little spattering of Arabic. We ate, prayed and lived our lives as had our ancestors for centuries.

This is how my preface should have started: The search and collection of authentic recipes from the Middle East by Yours Truly, an exile approaching middle age and in search of his roots. Well, my roots were my family to whom I turned in earnest, but with some difficulty. For although my family originated in Armenia and Turkey we had, over the years, like the sands of desert, scattered all over the east and beyond. So I got in touch with my aunt in Baghdad, my cousins in Kuwait, my sister in Tehran, with other cousins in Egypt, friends of cousins in Cyprus and Ankara, material cousins in Yerevan and Tiblisi and numerous other friends of friends ad infinitum. Finally all those kind people I encountered who had inadvertently dropped in to have a meal in one of our restaurants and who, throughout their meal (and often well after), were subjected to a culinary inquisition of the fiercest kind. My thanks to all those people, with special thanks to the young Saudi Arabian doctor who literally fell into my clutches and had to spend an extra day in a wet and windy Manchester one December until I was satisfied that I had squeezed the last drop of culinary blood from him. But most of all thanks to my mother who was a source of inspiration and infinite information.

The result then is this book, a collection of recipes from all over the Middle East regardless of political and geographical boundaries. By which statement I mean the food of the people of the Middle East: Arabs, Armenians, Assyrians, Azerbaijanians, Copts, Georgians, Kurds, Jews, Lazes, Palestinians, Persians, Turkomans, Turks and all the other minorities who, far too often, are forgotten or ignored by the cataloguers and generalizers of human achievements. For it is my opinion that the true sources of most cultures are best found amongst the indigenous minorities; e.g. the true Egyptian is the Copt, he is not only directly descended from the Ancient Egyptians, but also still retains much of his forefathers culture undiluted by later arrived, desert-oriented Muslim Arabs.

I have also included proverbs, anecdotes, songs and stories of the famous Nasrudin Hodja and Boloz-Mugoush all of which, directly or indirectly, relate to food and all emanating from the rich and varied cultures of the peoples of the Middle East, to whose glorious past and brighter future this book is dedicated.

All the recipes give the right amount of ingredients to feed four people unless I have stated otherwise.

Arto der Haroutunian