The language of Baklava
Diana Abu-Jaber was born in Syracuse, New York, to an American mother and a Jordanian father.
The Language of Baklava, her first memoir, published in 2015, won the Northwest Booksellers’ Award and has been translated into many languages. “I called my first memoir The
Language of Baklava because I was fascinated by the idea of food being a form of conversation — between the cook and the eater. I was thinking about the way my father relied on his cooking as a way of explaining himself to his American daughters. Mealtimes were also an opportunity for him to tell us stories about his childhood and homeland. When we ate his falafel, his mansaf, his baklava, he said, we were tasting our history,” she says.
She recalls: “One year when I was teaching at Iowa State University; it was one of my first teaching jobs and my parents had come to visit. We made baklava, brought it to a faculty party, and my colleagues fell on it and devoured it. It was like a scene out of Like Water For Chocolate. People were saying they didn’t know baklava could taste like that. One of the professors was Lebanese-American, and he kept going back for more because, he said, he didn’t know when he would ever get to have that taste again.”
Diana confesses being a bit of a baklava traditionalist, “I adore the special combination of walnuts, phyllo, and syrup and feel sort of discombobulated with even the mildest changes — pistachios instead of walnuts, say, or honey instead of sugar syrup. That said, I did recently have baklava with chocolate shavings mixed into the sweet walnut filling: I thought it was amazing.”
Baklava: layers of phyllo pastry with walnuts, pistachio, sesame and homemade syrup served with vanilla ice cream. Each tray is a labour of love, patience and hard work. Chef Dimitris Fatisis, Mythos Kouzina & Grill, JLT shares his recipe (see right).