`A BOOK of the COMMUNITY'

Newfoundlander's cookbook, Zaatari, was written with the help of 2,000 Syrian refugees

Karen E. Fisher started writing a cookbook about the food culture of Zaatari, the world's largest Syrian refugee camp, in 2016, a year after she arrived as an embedded field researcher with the UNHCR Jordan.

“If Zaatari had a guest book, I'd peg as the only Newfoundlander,” she said.

Originally from St. John's, Fisher divides her time between Zaatari Camp on the Jordanian-syrian border and Seattle, where she's a professor at the Information School, University of Washington. The purpose of her first trip to Zaatari in January 2015 was to look at how young people in the camp use mobile phones and the internet. As a design ethnographer, she has a broad skill set, which she sums up as focusing on people, information and everyday life.

Home to more than 80,000 people displaced by the Syrian civil war, Zaatari is a closed refugee camp, meaning visitors require an invitation and security clearance. Fisher describes her role there as unique. She's not on the UNHCR'S payroll and doesn't wear a uniform.

Unlike visitors, who have escorts accompanying them to approved places, she walks around Zaatari freely, meeting up with Syrians and visiting their homes. Many residents have mistaken her for a Syrian living in the camp, though “as soon as I say something (in Arabic), they know that I'm not,” she says, laughing.

More than 2,000 Syrians handwrote pages of what became Zaatari, the cookbook. The camp Facebook group served as Fisher's fact checkers, and many residents helped with the final draft.

Food photographers Alex Lau and Jason Lecras shot 80 per cent of the recipes in the camp's caravans and souks with the help of youth from Lens on Life/ Questscope, and residents took most of the photos of daily life.

“It is truly a book of the community. And the royalties are returned to Zaatari Camp, which is a wonderful problem they're going to have about how to spend the money,” says Fisher.

Food is the foundation of the book, interwoven with art, poetry and stories of all aspects of life in Zaatari Camp: a trip to the barbershop and beauty salon, wedding customs, how residents welcome newborns and celebrate Ramadan.

“You wouldn't be able to understand the food of Zaatari without understanding the culture,” says Fisher. “It's the history, it's language, it's music and definitely Islam.”

When developing the recipes for the book, Fisher first searched for mentions of the ingredients in the Qur'an. She would then look at ancient cookbooks, the oldest of which is from Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq).

“It was just fascinating to find out how these recipes have morphed. All of that is related to what we call Arab medicine, Arab healing, which is why I also have a small section of the book called `Arab Medicine with the Elders' — because it's so different. They don't have pharmacies like we see in the West. You go into the spice shop, and almost everything you need to be healthy is there.”

Advice for treating a headache includes drinking water with rosewater or peppermint chai. For insomnia, sip chai with anise or shaneena (yogurt drink).

Zaatari Camp opened in 2012 to house people fleeing from Syria. As Dominik Bartsch, UNHCR representative to Jordan, highlights in the book's foreword, a new generation of children born in the camp have never been there. Carrying on culinary traditions connects them to their homeland.

One of the reasons Fisher wanted to write the book was to document culinary traditions from southern Syria. Most Zaatari residents are from Daraa, a region in the south known as the “cradle of the revolution.”

She highlights significant regional differences between the food in Aleppo and Damascus, for example, and Daraa.

“And these are the recipes that the world did not have.”