Dubai’s Palestinian pickle girl adds tangy twist to tradition
Jars of pickled green olives, bottles of tangy Persian cucumbers and flavoured kefir jostle for space in Dubai resident Sondos Azzam’s kitchen.
The Palestinian food artist says she’s “obsessed with fermented food” and is often referred to as “that pickle girl”.
For Azzam, who holds a masters degree in art direction from the University of the Arts London, pickling as a practice gained momentum during the Covid-19 pandemic, when she found solace in her kitchen, learning new techniques for making preserves.
“Those days I was alone in London and found myself attempting to understand fermentation as my culture was less accessible. Besides its benefits for gut health and sustainability, fermentation and preservation, for me, are a sign of familial love,” Azzam tells The National.
Growing up, her most precious childhood memories centred around visits to her grandmother’s kitchen in Jordan, which was always stacked with an assortment of seasonal mouneh (preserves) – think thick glass jars brimming with olive oil, pickles, tahini, dried apricots, figs, pickled aubergines, brined white Nabulsi cheese and labneh.
“Whenever I am fermenting, I am reminded of her kitchen, bubbling with aromas and flavours, especially yoghurt in cheese cloth being made into labneh,” she says. Her Palestinian-Lebanese grandmother would also host family lunches on Sundays, preparing mloukhieh, a green leafy vegetable dish, every week.
“She would always serve the dish, along with a salad and pickles. But even before the meal was ready, I would devour the pickles off the table. And my indulgent grandma would lovingly hand me another plate of moreish pickled treats, which was spicy and sour with a hint of pepper,” says Azzam.
Mouneh in Middle Eastern culture is a traditional ritual, geared towards increasing the longevity of food past its season. Many homes have their own fermentation technique and unique flavours.
In the summer, Azzam says her grandmother would dry herbs and greens including mloukhieh.
“In spring, it would be cheese, grape leaves, zaatar and lemon from her garden and, in autumn, it would be olives and olive oil,” she says.
Women play an integral role in the mouneh ritual, which the food artist hopes to highlight by taking the legacy forward.
Her fascination with fermentation led Azzam to conduct a series of pickling workshops at Warehouse 421 in Abu Dhabi, Jameel Arts Centre in Dubai and Sharjah Biennial last year.
She is constantly experimenting by fermenting leftover fruits and vegetables from her fridge and puts the spotlight on pickling through her workshops.
At the Sharjah Biennial, for example, Azzam led participants through a session on lemon preserves and lemon kefir.
“Interactions at workshops are my favourite part, especially knowing that people leave the session excited to experiment and indulge in fermentation. At one particular workshop, such dialogue centred around thinking of a scoby [symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast] when making kombucha and relating it to a mother figure guiding and helping the ferment to grow,” she says.
She consumes some form of pickled or preserved food daily, either at breakfast or lunch. “My mornings typically start with bread and fried eggs, topped with salted olives with slices of fermented eggplants or pickled onions,” says Azzam.
She spends most afternoons experimenting. Her current favourite ferment is flavoured kefir mixed with juices, herbs and seasonal syrups. “If I could have my way, I would have pickles all the time,” she says.
Apart from her fermentation work, Azzam reimagines Palestinian and Middle Eastern culinary delicacies through events, such as supper clubs and photography exhibitions.
In 2022, she hosted Naranga supper clubs at Myocum restaurant in Dubai. The multisensory dining experience explored the collective memory of the Yaffa orange, a strong symbol for Palestinians, questioning the fruit’s legality.
She served salad, granita, musakhan and glazed chicken, all with lashings of orange, followed by Yaffa cake for dessert.
Azzam has also tapped into her Palestinian roots at an art installation event in 2019 that revisited conversations with her father about his childhood home. Expressed through objects and smells that signify his emotional moments before leaving Palestine, it allowed the audience to understand fragmented nostalgia.
“My work attempts to excavate and examine memories of Palestine from the perspective of my family, their childhood and the rose-tinted lens of what it used to be,” says Azzam.
“While I attempt to highlight this narrative, it is difficult to find solace at a time when the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people is on public display.
“I have found peace in using my time to call attention to their struggle by spreading information and knowledge through food and art.”
Her most precious childhood memories centre around visits to her grandmother ’s kitchen in Jordan