She’s teaching the world about Islamic food
Anissa Helou’s “Feast: Food of the Islamic World” is a gigantic book, so heavy you have to lift it with two hands, the result of a staggering amount of research in many countries and long hours in the kitchen testing other cooks’ vaguely written recipes. Helou already knew some of these cuisines well. She was raised in Lebanon and as a girl, traveled often to Syria, where her father’s family is from. The book won a James Beard Award in 2019 and the same year was listed on the New Yorker’s “Best Cookbooks of the Century So Far.”
On Jan. 30 in Abu Dhabi, Helou was presented with the Foodics Icon Award 2023 for her dedication to teaching Islamic food to the rest of the world. The award was given by the World’s 50 Best Restaurants group. “If hummus, tahini and za’atar are now available in supermarkets across the world,” the organization wrote, “it is in part thanks to Helou’s tireless efforts.” The 50 Best group started a Middle East and North Africa category (the acronym is MENA) last year.
Helou, 71, was at her place in Trapani, in western Sicily, when we spoke on the phone. She owns a piece of land there and is thinking of restoring an old ruin to turn it into a laboratory kitchen for a cooking school. She’s taught cooking in Spain, Morocco, the United States, and the United Arab Emirates, was recently on the show “MasterChef Italia,” and had a supper club in her London loft.
She was going from the island to the UAE for the award with a stop in Saudi Arabia. Last year, she wrote “Saudi Feast” for the Culinary Arts Commission of Saudi Arabia, a book of regional recipes from home cooks around the country.
Americans familiar with traditional dishes and spices from the Middle East and North Africa, who are not from there, credit Jerusalem-born authors Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi and their “Ottolenghi: The Cookbook,” which came out in 2008 and became a bestseller.
But more than a decade earlier, Helou wrote her first of 10 books about her homeland and surrounding regions. “Lebanese Cuisine” (1994) offered all the recipes from her mother’s table. “Street Café Morocco” (1998), “Mediterranean Street Food” (2002), “Modern Mezze” (2007), “Levant” (2013), and others followed. In the last three decades, she has watched as Middle Eastern food became fashionable in the west.
“Feast,” with an Yotam Ottolenghi blurb on the front cover, and beautiful photographs (some by the author), begins with an introduction to Islamic history and culture through the table, tracing it across North Africa to Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, India, and Central Asia.
In the book, she offers several recipes for a single dish, so you can see how it differs. A dish called “fatteh,” an Arabic word that means “to break up,” is always made with pita or another kind of bread. We see an eggplant version from Saudi Arabia with toasted pita rounds on the bottom of the dish, another from Saudi Arabia with meat and pancakes, a Lebanese dish with chickpeas and chunks of lamb, Egypt’s with sheep’s trotters and rice, Syria’s with lamb, stuffed eggplant, and a yogurt-tahini sauce.
The World’s 50 Best Restaurants is the organization that introduced the world, through its awards, to Noma in Denmark, Il Bulli in Spain, The Fat Duck in England, Osteria Francescana in Italy, among others.
Helou was raised in Beirut and had no interest in the kitchen growing up. “The cooking was always done by my mother and grandmother. My grandmother was an even better cook,” she says. She loved the food but she thought cooking was a waste of time. At age 21, she left Lebanon and moved to London. “I was fluent in Arabic and French, fluent in English.” Now, she says, because of her place in Sicily, “I get by in Italian. My grammar isn’t perfect, but I no longer sit in silence at dinner parties.”
In London, she studied interior design, then took the famous Sotheby’s Works of Art course. She was hired by the art house afterwards and became their representative in the Middle East. She had an antique shop in Paris and consulted clients on Islamic art, Victorian paintings, jewelry, and Arts and Crafts furniture. She was based in Kuwait for eight years as an art consultant to members of the royal family.
The change from the world of art and antiques to food writing was gradual. “I was wanting to convert from art to writing about art,” she says. She met someone who was also from Lebanon and she realized that there was a whole young generation who had fled her country, who wanted to know the food they were raised on. “Why don’t I write down my mother’s recipes,” she thought. “I can pass them on to all the people displaced by the Lebanese war. Most of the diaspora loved it and gave [the book] to other people.”
Another big influence in her life was an aunt in Syria, who lived in the countryside. “Everything was growing there, from fruits to vegetables to grains,” says Helou. “There wasn’t a single shop in that hamlet. Everything was made at home: yogurt, drying of fruits, jams. My aunt and cousins did everything. It was an extraordinary place.” The little hamlet has been turned into a resort. “We loved my aunt and we loved the place,” she says.
Now she’s working on a book about Lebanese regional cuisines. Though tiny, there are many religious and ethnic communities — predominately Muslim (Sunni, Shia, Alawites), Druze, Jews, Ismailis, Christians (Maronites, Greek Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Armenian Apostolic) — all of whom have their own specialties and variations.
“It’s a very interesting country,” she says. You can taste a dish in the south of Lebanon, and “the way they make it is completely different than the way they make it in the mountains.”
Helou calls herself “an orphan of two countries,” and so it’s important for her to preserve the dishes of these cultures. “There’s so much food knowledge.”
“Food is a great unifier,” she says. “Everyone loves to eat. Some people like me live to eat, most people enjoy eating and sitting around the table. Wherever there is food, there is communication, on the whole friendly communication.”
When she was part of the art world, she says, she traveled and took glamorous trips. “But I didn’t talk to people I didn’t know.” When she was writing a book on street food, she says, she talked to vendors, chefs, and cooks from Egypt to Morocco.
“If you look at food from a cultural point of view,” she says, “you learn a lot about a country and its people.”