MORE ABOUT TROMPOS, ROUND TABLES, AND PLACES TO EAT SHAWARMA.
Ottoman heritage in the food of the city – part 3
*This post is the continuation of a series. Read from the beginning...
Recently, I have seen a very similar scene in two different places. It's not an unusual scene, let alone in cities that are melting pots, but these two in particular caught my attention, as they have an interesting connection to the foods and ingredients that I explore in this series.
The first one is from Mo (2022), the semi-autobiographical series by Palestinian comedian Mo Amer, inspired by his life as an immigrant in Houston, Texas, and his long wait for asylum:
Nazeer (Palestinian) and Aba (Jewish) discuss the conflicts of 47-48 between their nations while playing a game of backgammon in the neighborhood's hookah lounge...
Rabin, Arafat, have you finished recording your podcast? jokes Mo, who interrupts their "peace negotiations" to let them know that he has just been unemployed, because of his pending immigration status. Both characters are something like advisers to the protagonist, whose father was tortured and murdered —by mistake— years after having emigrated, first, from Palestine to Kuwait (where Mo was born and lived the first years of his childhood) due to the Zionist occupation, and then from Kuwait to the United States, in the aftermath of the Persian Gulf War.
Discussing his situation, Mo helps himself to a plate of hummus that he prepares, like a little ritual, by ordering the ingredients in separate side dishes that he consciously puts together: hummus paste, whole chickpeas, lemon juice, and a drizzle of Palestinian olive oil, that he takes out of his back pocket, and carries permanently like some people carry salsas picantes...
Look at him, how he prepares his hummus. It's so particular. A true native. My heart is happy, says Nazeer in Arabic.
They have a new snack-cup hummus now. It’s not bad, replies Aba to provoke them (take this hummus and olive oil thing as a preamble because later I'm going to delve into this and other iconic foods and ingredients, both from Ottoman cuisine, as well as the union of the latter with Mexican).
The second scene is a bit older than the first and is not a performance, but part of a documentary on Lebanese migration to Mexico (which, not coincidentally, takes place in one of the places I recommend here):
A group of men is sitting around a restaurant table, and one of them addresses the camera...
I am at this table with three Lebanese guys, and we are three Jews, and all we get along wonderfully (well, his exact phrase was a toda madre, but somehow, every word that comes to my mind when trying to translate it, seems either not enfátic enough or too proper). We’re all in the fabrics industry —says a second dinner— What a coincidence, right? The owner here is a Lebanese Muslim, he adds. And he feeds us, Jews and Christians, concludes a third diner, between laughs.
One of the reasons why, beyond the permanent conflict that dominates our imaginary, scenes like the previous ones, where Jews, Christians, and Muslims —or people of any other religion or culture— coexist, share, laugh, and discuss their differences in peace, are more common than they seem is, in part, because they are not alien to our historical reality. During its period of splendor, the Ottoman Empire was like that, a multicultural, peaceful, and fertile nation, where, regardless of their beliefs, people could sit on a blanket outdoors, any given afternoon, share a piece of donner kebab rolled in flatbread with ghee and narrate stories, sing, or recite poems —like this one by Rumi, of which I shared a fragment in my previous post, and that I reproduce here in its entirety, in honor of our main dish:
BURNT KABOB
Last year, I admired wines. This, I'm wandering inside the red world.
Last year, I gazed at the fire. This year I'm burnt kabob.
Thirst drove me down to the water where I drank the moon's reflection.
Now I am a lion staring up totally lost in love with the thing itself.
Don't ask questions about longing. Look in my face.
Soul drunk, body ruined, these two sit helpless in a wrecked wagon. Neither knows how to fix it.
And my heart, I'd say it was more like a donkey sunk in a mudhole, struggling and miring deeper.
But listen to me: for one moment, quit being sad. Hear blessings dropping their blossoms
around you. God.
The cuisine that we generally know as cocina árabe came to Mexico mostly from Lebanon (at least initially), but with it, it brought the wealth of an ancient civilization that extends beyond its political and religious borders. There are a few important reasons why this culture and its cuisine were so easily adopted by Mexican society. But, I will tell them to you, one by one (before returning fully to the topic of trompos and tacos) in the next entry…
For now, here are three classic restaurantes árabes in Mexico City with three basic qualities in common: they are just a few blocks from each other, they all have a long tradition in this city (some longer than the others, but the three are local favorites), and they all have shawarma in their menus —which is the cooking technique around which, this essay has revolved, so far — along with many other plates and foods that I am not only going to talk about but also cook, and put together a mini-cookbook.
Now, going back to shawarma, it is important to mention that, as I had anticipated at the beginning of this essay, once this rotating technique of grilling meat arrives in Mexico, the notion of time and the order of the factors are lost because, although the relationship of both the taco árabe and the taco al pastor with the shawarma is more than obvious, there is no record —as in the aforementioned case of the city of Berlin and the adoption of the döner kebab— that before the invention of taco árabe, there existed a local version of shawarma that was closer to the original, but there is, after.
Here, the sense of time gets a bit more entangled because, despite the fact that two of the places I present here predate the existence of the al taco al pastor in the city, by at least a couple of decades, the inclusion of shawarma in their menus, is not only much more recent, it is also not shawarma in a literal sense of the word. That is to say, as much as the three options of places that I present serve the shawarma with its common accompaniments —the unskippable pita bread, the fresh vegetables, the characteristic garlic sauce, and spices— the meat is not cooked on a rotating spit, as the name “shawarma” implies. In the two first options, the texture of the meat was closer to a shish kebab, and in the third, it felt more like the meat was roasted, which —taking into account that Mexico is not a country foreign to the technology of the spinning pit— seem like unconventional decisions. If you have any theory about it, you are welcome to leave your comments… ;)
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