ANCIENT CUISINE, MODERN FLAVOURS
Lebanese cook highlights Middle Eastern vegetarian fare
Salma Hage hooked me with her baba ganoush — smooth, garlicky and definitely moreish. She reeled me in with her other meze classics: fava bean and mint falafel; sweet potato kibbeh; and beets with labneh (a tart, strained yogurt cheese).
The Lebanese cook focuses entirely on the meatless in her second book, The Middle Eastern Vegetarian Cookbook (Phaidon, 2016). Hage is not strictly vegetarian herself, but was inspired to explore a meat-free diet by her son and grandson, who are.
The brightness of fresh herbs, grains such as high-protein freekeh, the prevalence of lentils, beans and other legumes and dishes that highlight the versatile and substantial eggplant make Middle Eastern cooking a natural fit for today’s plant-based diets.
Hage says that in a sense, writing a collection of vegetarian recipes was a return to the food of her childhood. The eldest of 12 children, she was often called upon to cook for the family.
“It brought back old memories of the food we used to eat years ago and I’m making it now for my family — for my son and my grandson,” Hage says. “In Lebanon some years ago, we weren’t vegetarian by choice. We didn’t have enough money to buy meat. So we used the cheapest things: aubergines (eggplants), beans, cucumbers, tomatoes. Whatever we grew, we cooked with it.”
Hage is from Mazarat Tiffah, a village in northern Lebanon’s Kadisha Valley. The first dish she cooked, as a nine-year-old, was the Lebanese staple m’juderah: lentils, rice and crispy onions. A meal that just happens to be vegan kicked off her love of cooking.
Many mezzes — or small dishes — are vegetarian or vegan by nature: hummus, muhammara (a Syrian walnut-red bell pepper dip), baba ganoush, tabbouleh and falafel.
Hage offers these time-honoured recipes as well as variations, such as butternut hummus and bulgur falafel (recipe follows). Others, she adapted from meat dishes.
Now retired, Hage worked as a cook in England for over 30 years. “I like to cook. I like to feed people. I like to see people happy. And that’s what I do now when I cook for my family,” she says.