Classic dishes and personal favourites

Anissa Helou’s 300-recipe exploration of the varied cuisines of the Islamic world traverses continents

When it comes to exploring the cultural significance of cuisine, there’s no substitute for going to the source. “You have to talk to the home cooks, you have to see the street vendors cook their food, you have to talk to chefs, you have to taste it in situ,” says Anissa Helou.

One of the world’s foremost authorities on the cuisines of North Africa, the Mediterranean and the Middle East, Helou conducted exhaustive fieldwork for her ninth cookbook, Feast: Food of the Islamic World (Ecco, 2018). From India to Indonesia, and Senegal to Zanzibar, she travelled extensively, documenting traditional dishes along the way.

“I didn’t visit everywhere I wanted to go because of some parts being quite … risky, especially for a woman on her own,” she says. “I would have liked to go to Mali, Burkina Faso and Afghanistan for instance.”

The award-winning chef was born in Beirut, Lebanon to a Syrian father and Lebanese mother. She hasn’t been back to Syria for nearly a decade, she says, but when she returns to Lebanon, the nature of the food she eats is inherently different from the Lebanese food she eats at home in London, England.

“Thedishesarethesame but the ingredients are different,” says Helou. “You lose a little bit of the real flavour of the dishes outside of their own countries.”

Feast’s 300 recipes traverse continents – Africa, Asia, Europe and Oceania – illustrating the fact that “the Muslim world today follows the same arc as the Islamic empires of the past when Islam was a power to be reckoned with and great civilizations that ruled quite a huge part of the world.”

The 529-page tome is rich with tales of Helou’s journeys and Kristin Perers’s resplendent food photography, which is reminiscent of the Old Masters. The culinary traditions depicted within are vast and diverse: “I could have spent my whole life cataloguing the food of the Islamic world,” Helou says.

She chose to focus on classic dishes and personal favourites, and devoted chapters to the two staples of the Islamic world – bread and rice – as well as essential types of foods (cooking whole animals, seafood, spices, fresh produce and sweets).

In identifying the three preeminent culinary traditions that have shaped the foodways of the Muslim world – Abbasid, Ottoman and Mughal – Helou provides context for understanding the common threads that run throughout the varied cuisines of Islamic regions.

“The Muslim dynasties were among the first civilized dynasties. They had huge empires, whether the seat was in Damascus or Baghdad; or in Cairo or India. You had beautiful civilizations, culture, poetry, food that belongs to that religion,” says Helou.

“I’m hoping that the readers will open up to a part of the world that they might associate with negative thoughts. And (that) they would open up to discovering really interesting and beautiful food, and fascinating culture and civilizations.”

Recipes excerpted from Feast: Food of the Islamic World by Anissa Helou, published by Ecco 2018.