Flavours from Syria

Humble and delicious Middle Eastern dishes

‘I feel like my mission is to present a more beautiful picture of Syria, so that people would think about it in a different way,’ says Itab Azzam. The coauthor of Syr ia: Recipes f rom Home g rew up in Hauran, on the countr y’s border wit h Jordan; she remembers rose water, olives pressed into fragrant oil, and sweet pomegranate molasses. Today, she s ays, many people only know about Syria because of the war. ‘They only know t he disaster.’ Wit h Dina Mousawi, an Iraqi whose family fled Baghdad during the Iraq War, she has sought to tell the tales of women who still feed their families amid the destruction. ‘We wanted those stories to reach as many people as possible,’ Azzam says.

The pair didn’t set out to write a cookbook; the idea came during a theatre project with Syrian women in Beirut. They were invited into the women’ s homes, where food was offered up along with tales of culinary traditions. They met Ahlam, who rescued a pot of boiled chicken during a barrage of explosions, and Nasreen, who, while in a German refugee camp, made Aleppian semolina pudding with only a kettle.

The resulting recipes depict a country with a rich history of spice traders and bread-scented markets, and a people who live through adversity by gathering often the most humble of ingredients to assemble the finest spread of meze.

Syria: Recipes from Home, by Itab Azzam and Dina Mousawi, is published by Trapeze (£25)