An American’s Search Through Teta’s Kitchen
People’s relation to food may take them to different places, but with Hannah, it quite literally took her back to her roots. I initially offered to meet Hannah in person and do an interview over chai. Hannah sent me a sweet reply: “Sure, but you would have to fly to Jordan for this chai!”
Hannah moved to Jordan six months ago and started working for an NGO, providing humanitarian assistance to the influx of refugees in the region. It’s a demanding job – that much I gathered from the initial job description – but it also requires a thorough understanding of the socio-politics and cultures of the region, an understanding that she partially attributed to her upbringing. Even so, Hannah was also quick to point out that she was not always so familiar with her heritage.
Hannah highlighted this bit of her past through a story she has told many people, and she laughed as she shared it with me.
Hannah woke up one morning – she clearly remembers she was in 2nd grade – to onions being sautéed downstairs, the fragrance saturating her room, soon followed by fried garlic, rice, lentils, and finally, gassy cabbage. She rushed downstairs to find her parents and Teta (“Grandma”) in the kitchen, her father staring at Teta intently, who just started the daylong process of stuffing and rolling the boiled cabbage. She knew the answer already, but she wanted to make sure. “Dad, what are we having for dinner tonight?” she asked even before eating her breakfast.
“Lebanese food,” her father replied.
All Hannah could do at that point was cry. “Not again!”
Hannah’s dislike for Lebanese food was not like a simple childhood aversion to vegetables. It was linked to her identity. The daughter of a Lebanese father and an American mother, she knew there was something ‘off’ about her, but couldn’t really pinpoint it. And so, like many children who experience multi ethnic identity crises before they develop the capacity to reconcile them, Hannah severed ties with the language, customs, and culinary traditions of her father’s homeland.
Teta, as Hannah called her grandmother on her father’s side, visited for several months at a time when Hannah was young, cooking up dishes that Hannah’s father enjoyed as a child. While her older sister took an immediate liking to Teta’s food, it took Hannah many years to actually eat Lebanese food, let alone like it. However, she emphasized that her gradual introduction to Lebanese food productively paced her exposure to other aspects of her heritage as well.
As we continued to talk about her stay in Jordan and her visits to Lebanon, she mentioned that the particular dish Teta cooked on that traumatic morning, called mahshi malfouf, is in fact one of her favorite foods now. A former vegetarian, Hannah enjoys the heartiness of the dish, as well its link to Teta. Her Teta also introduced her to another one of Hannah’s favorites, mujadara. Hannah points out that her mom now makes a better version of the dish! Preparing these dishes is time-consuming, often taking the whole day and requiring the whole family’s assistance, but all of that effort is worth it. With every bite comes a bit of history and family memory.
I asked her if she makes the dishes herself now. “Not yet, but my father makes them. In fact, he knows how to make many amazing Lebanese dishes. Whenever my friends come to visit, I make sure my father makes us these dishes.”
After decades of living in America, Hannah’s father decided to move into the same middle-eastern “neighborhood” as his daughter. “Food helped me in my search for identity, to reconnect with my family,” Hannah remarked as we concluded the interview. She wasn’t just speaking about herself though. Hannah’s search for her roots and Teta’s morning-boiled cabbages ultimately led her and her father to reconnect in a region he had left so many years ago.
Abdul-Kadar (AK) Rahim is a marketer and product developer with a healthy obsession with all-things culinary. He is part of NooshTube’s creative team, collaborating on content and marketing. Though brought up on the East Coast, he has a tendency to roam around the world, collecting stories and recipes along the way.