When people ask me what is your favorite cuisine? I never know what to say. There are so many different cuisines in the world, and so many different things I like about each one, that I can't even choose between regions of México. But if I had to choose just one, today I would say that you are my favorite, Palestinian cuisine.
On the one hand, because, together with your neighbor Syrian gastronomy, you are the one that best combines all the things I like about all of the cuisines that surround your fragmented geography —from the Levant to the Middle East and North Africa (including reminiscences of Buddhist cuisine), and through Turkey, bordering the Black Sea, to Mediterranean Europe, until meeting Africa again through the Strait of Gibraltar— but also because, beyond your wonderful flavors and your boundless borders, you share many of the noble things I admire most about Mexican cuisine, along with other successful flavor coincidences, such as the use of acid and heat.
It is true that it is not difficult to trace your influence and that of your sister and neighboring cuisines in Mexican, all you have to do is look at a colonial map and follow a couple of routes: that of the religious missions and that of the Manila galleon. What is not so obvious to decipher, however, is how the Mexican influence traveled back to you. And I am not only referring to the assimilation of Mesoamerican ingredients into Eurasian-African cuisines in general, but also to the rooting of similar uses and customs around them, even among cultures that have never been in contact. Such is the case of your shared love with Mexican cuisine for chili and lemon, so recurrent in your Gazan dishes, usually brightened by the herbaceous note of dill, which in the Mexican version is starred by cilantro. Author Laila El-Haddad reflects on this tasteful rootedness in The Gaza Kitchen:
Hot chiles and dill: the Gazan combination par excellence. How Gazans developed this love affair with the chile pepper is a culinary mystery for the ages. Whereas Lebanese cooks tolerate no spicy heat at all and cooks from other parts of Palestine and the greater region use spice in moderation, Gazan cooks (specifically those from Gaza City itself, as opposed to rural areas) make you sweat, whether using a local variety of fresh hot green chile peppers—generally crushed in a mortar with lemon and salt—or else ground red chile peppers conserved in oil and sold as a condiment and ingredient called filfil mat’hoon.
Ubiquitous dishes such as tabeekh bamia, okra stew with lamb, and mulukhiyya, green mallow soup, are served with a blaze of hot green chile and dill seed in lemon juice, cutting the dark, rich tastes with their brightness. Green chiles are ground with meat to make kufta and mashed in clay mortars to make dagga, Gaza’s distinctive hot tomato salad.
The same peppers, ripened to fiery redness, are sun-dried for winter use in dishes such as maftool, a Gazan variety of couscous, perfuming the grains as they steam. In the summer, fields of bright red peppers—ripe for pickling and grinding—blanket what little remains of Gaza’s seaside farmlands.
In fact, chile peppers play a nutritionally important role in Gaza. They grow fast and require little irrigation, making them a viable local product and very inexpensive in the market. For many of the poorest Gazans, nutritionally rich red chile provides some of the vitamins, iron, and potassium to which they do not otherwise have access, given the inflated prices of irrigated fruits and vegetables. Indeed, lunch for many schoolchildren in Gaza is a filfil mat’hoon sandwich.
That is, at first glance, it seems that this attachment to heat is a simple coincidence between cultures that have little to do with each other, but you and I know better, that the filfil mat'hoon sandwich is a chili taco —and vice versa— and that eating and bearing heat is an act of resistance.
I see you as an exemplary cocinera because you do not treat yourself as a commodity —or as a simple physiological act— but as a ritual from beginning to end, as a kind of communion among human beings, and with nature and the cosmos, whose practice favors craftsmanship, ancestral wisdom, and human bonds over individual ego, frivolity, elitism and the disproportionate sense of technical superiority that accompanies "haute cuisine".
I respect you because you give each ingredient its place and make them shine equally and as a whole, like a big family that, in turn, gathers other families around it, not only to enjoy your generosity and the delights of your table, but also at the time of its preparation.... Like when mothers and daughters, grandmothers, sisters, cousins, aunts, neighbors, and friends get together to prepare maftūl and spend whole days talking, singing, crying, and laughing as they shake their big sieves, from which pearls of bulgur wheat rain down, before being steamed and perfumed with lemon and spices. Or when preparing any other jewel of your beautiful repertoire, because your tastes, smells, and textures are love over a slow fire. You are the perfect soul food.
I love you because you are medicine, because you are a witch, a midwife, and a nurse, and because you heal with olive oil from your backyard. But perhaps most of all, I admire you because despite colonial greed and capitalist plunder —which turns everything alive into dead and everything green into plastic and cement— you have never lost your connection to Mother Earth, to your milpa, to your people, to your past, to your spirit... And no matter how many times they try to tear out your roots, you will always manage to grow back, because you are memory and your tastes are indelible.
*If you are interested in learning more about the Palestinian cuisine, here are some of my favorite documentaries that you can find on YouTube...
ABOUT MAFTŪL
A small introduction to the star dish of this post (which I do my best to reproduce below) and one of the most symbolic of Palestinian cuisine, particularly from the cuisine of the Gaza Strip....
FOOD, IDENTITY Y POLITICS
By suppressing the story behind the dishes, we are using food as a weapon of oppression, says Mirna Bamieh, creator of Palestine Hosting Society, a living art project whose primary goal is to serve as a platform for the reconstruction of Palestinian identity through food.....
BANQUETE CASERO EN CISJORDANIA…
What I particularly liked about this one is how its protagonist transmits —without filters— the generosity of the Palestinian family that receives, feeds and pampers him without ever having seen him before. It reminded me of the kindness of the Mexican countryside, the hospitality of their families, and their wonderful backyard banquets (don't miss Trump and Arafat).
*More videos on the complete playlist.
RECIPES
Well, I was feeling emboldened and I ventured to make maftūl from scratch, one of the dishes —not only of Palestinian cuisine but of all the cuisines I know so far— that I have the greatest respect for, for reasons that go beyond its laborious preparation process (because the reality is that I love to complicate my life in the kitchen, and sometimes, the bigger the challenge, the better). First, because maftūl is a typical dish of a culture to which I do not belong, whose preparation is learned, traditionally, by family inheritance —from mother to daughter, or grandmother to daughter, usually— and it is not easy to reproduce correctly without an experienced guide. In my case, the best long-distance guide I was able to find was the book of Laila El-Haddad (the one I have mentioned most often in this series and for very good reasons, believe me, I am an expert in cookbooks and this one is a must in any collection that prides itself of being good). And, it's not that I believe that people are not free to cook whatever they want, but, for me, dishes —especially those that have a strong symbolic significance for a particular group of people, as is the case of this one in the Palestinian culture— are like living beings with history, and I cannot but feel responsible for transmitting them to you as close to the original as I can.
Having said that, flours are the first complex element, because the processing of these is different in Mexico and the Levant, and, the truth is that —unless you have the fortune to have a good local supplier of organic flour or you want to spend a lot of money on imported flours, it is not easy to get good wheat flours in México (it is not our forte like corn, let's face it).
So, what I did was the following: I used about 60 percent commercial wheat flour, and for the other 40 percent, I used some organic wheat berries I had in the cupboard, which I cooked, dehydrated, and grounded to make bulgur (although a bit rudimentary). But, if you don't want to go through as much work as I did, my advice is to use a combination of fine wheat flour —whichever you prefer— and combine it with semolina, which is not so hard to find. In México you can find it in some specialty grocery stores (in the recipe I add some recommendations, both in Mexico and abroad).
And, if you really want to make your life easier, buy couscous, which is not exactly the same, nor is it made with the same love, but it is the closest thing there is. In Northern Gaza, the maftūl granules are much coarser than the version I prepared and is known as mogharabiya (or "of Maghrebi origin"). You can also get the latter in specialty stores.
In fact, the result of my maftūl, to my perception, was even more compact than the small version. That's due to another minimal and repairable difficulty of making maftūl: the instruments. As you can see in some of videos of the playlist I shared above, in Palestine, a special flat strainer called kurbala is used to make maftūl. I used a normal strainer and everything was fine, but I feel that the holes were not wide enough, so I recommend that you use a strainer with a good separation between the grids.
Now, I confess, not only had I never prepared maftūl before, I had never tried it either. Which means, I can't be completely sure that I've done it right (🤭). What I can tell you is that I rarely (if ever) shed a tear after tasting a dish made by me. I don't even know how to put into words how brilliant this food is, so let's start by describing its composition....
On the one hand, we have the maftūl itself (which gets the same name however it's served since there are different versions of broths to go with it), that is, the freshly made and steamed-scented bulgur wheat pearls that, halfway through the cooking process, are seasoned with a mixture called —for good reason, I may say, as it not only injects life into the dish but launches it straight to the stars (to the extent that I had to restrain myself from devouring it all before serving it with the broth): aroosit il maftūl or "the wife of maftūl."
On the other hand, we have the vegetable stew —or yakhni— which is the name of the version I prepared here. The latter also carries a good dose of spices very different from those in the maftūl, and anyone would think that that much mixture could confuse the individual flavors, but no, on the contrary, the result is absolutely amazing and perfect, it is an explosion of flavors that I think I had not experienced since mole. It blew my mind and infused a warm and loving sensation in my whole body, like a maternal embrace.
Maftūl is generally served with chicken or lamb, but to tell you the truth, the animal protein is not essential, it can perfectly be made vegan. That's how generous it is.
Well, so, here are the ingredients, instructions, and video. Any questions, tips, or thoughts about it, drop them in here...
*And yes, there are three recipes in the title of this post, not one, but this recipe is already complex enough for me to overwhelm you with more, and also, for making endless posts, is that I end up taking too long to send you new things (and because I need an assistant, if someone’s interested… I do not offer salary —at least for now— because the income of this newsletter still does not allow it, but I do promise a ton of culinary learning, entertainment, laughter, and tasty benefits). So, to take with a little more ease: today maftūl, and the dagga and shattas (red and green) on the weekend.
Have a nice week, talk to you soon. 😘