GENERATIONS OF FOOD TRADITIONS
3 generations of women treasure and share Lebanese family recipes
Like so many little girls of a certain age, Philomina Susa grew up cooking alongside her mother, Haseba George.
And like so many women of any age, Mrs. Susa, 87, thinks back on those early days in the kitchen with bittersweet memories when Mother’s Day approaches.
Haseba emigrated from Abdilly in Northern Lebanon with her husband and their oldest daughter, Alice, to Barnesboro, a small mining town in Cambria County, in her early 20s. She became a widow not long after their fourth child was born in the late 1930s.
Haseba — who had Parkinson’s disease her entire life, and lost a young son and her husband — ran a grocery store with her husband before moving to Uniontown after his death. Teaching her daughters to make the foods of her native land served two purposes: It paved the way for eventually sharing the responsibility for family meals, and it kept the family’s Lebanese traditions close to the heart.
Along with mastering the puffy flatbreads known as pita, Mrs. Susa and her sister became well-schooled in some of the best-known dishes of the Lebanese canon. Favorites include lentil soup, a thick and tangy spreadable yogurt cheese known as lebnah, and tabouli, a Middle Eastern salad of finely chopped fresh herbs, tomatoes, green onions and cracked bulgur wheat. They also rolled countless warak enab, also known as dolmas. They made the stuffed grape leaves with fresh-picked leaves from a grape arbor in their backyard.
Lebanese cuisine focuses on fresh ingredients, whole grains and plenty of herbs and spices.
“Everything came from the garden,” recalls Mrs. Susa, who to this day still cooks up a storm in her Mount Pleasant kitchen with ingredients from her own garden. On holidays and other big occasions, her daughter, Jeanie Lucas, and granddaughter, Natalie Lucas of New Stanton, are at her side.
Mother’s Day is about celebrating mom and the traditions and memories we hold dear. So this year for the holiday, Mrs. Susa and her daughter and granddaughter will share some favorite Lebanese recipes handed down over the generations with a wider audience. At 1 p.m. Saturday, they’ll guest host the “Baking With Lucy” show live on Facebook.
The virtual cooking show hosted by Mary Ellen Raneri got its start in March 2020, when the retired schoolteacher began livestreaming her mother, Lucy Pollock, cooking in their Unity Township kitchen. People felt isolated during the early days of the pandemic lockdown, and watching 97-year-old Lucy recreate the
Italian dishes she grew up with and other old- fashioned recipes — with homespun commentary — offered a welcome and heartfelt connection.
It quickly went viral, drawing thousands of viewers from all across the world and an appearance on “Today” with Jenna Bush. So many became such devoted fans that Mrs. Raneri and her husband, Phil, decided to keep the show going after Lucy’s death at age 98 last November from a lung infection caused by COVID-19. The couple also hosts an informal “coffee chat” live on Facebook each Wednesday.
Viewers love anything that has to do with family and/or culinary tradition, Mrs. Raneri says. So when she started thinking about doing something special for Mother’s Day that involved mothers and daughters, she immediately thought of Mrs. Susa and her daughter, Jeanie.
She’s been good friends with Ms. Lucas since 2012, when her father, Michael Pollock, was terminally ill and she served as his health ombudsman. Her brother Vince also happens to live across the street.
Before she retired in the 1990s, Mrs. Susa made a living cooking for retired priests of the Greensburg Diocese at St. Joseph’s Hall ( now called Christ Our Shepherd Center) and the State Police who were in training there. After getting to know her daughter, Mrs. Raneri had the pleasure of eating some of her food at parties and other occasions. “So I knew she could cook,” she says, and also was generous about sharing recipes. “She’s always willing to explain things and is upfront on ingredients.”
Both women grew up in households where meals were inextricably tied to family, recipes were simple but prepared with love and the women who cooked them learned to do so by watching their mothers.
It wasn’t a given Mrs. Susa would follow in her mother’s culinary footsteps. The first time she made stuffed grape leaves for her husband, Richard, who is of Slovak descent, he complained she was trying to poison him.
“But now he fights for them,” Mrs. Susa says with a laugh. The retired Rolling Rock beer bottler also loves the family recipe for koosa, a stuffed summer squash dish made with Lebanese zucchini they buy in Erie.
Far too often, the two women agreed, recipes aren’t written down from one generation to the next. Shows like “Baking With Lucy” keep them from being lost.
Truth be told, while she grew up watching her mother in the kitchen, Ms. Lucas didn’t actually prepare any of her family’s Lebanese recipes until after she was married. Cooking always seemed like such a chore when she was growing up. Besides, Mrs. Susa is the type of cook who insists on doing everything herself, and almost never asks for help. “So I didn’t know to be interested.”
“I was with my mother in the kitchen watching her and handing her something if she asked, but it was watch and learn,” she says. “This was just the way our mothers were. They are the matriarchs.”
Her 27-year-old daughter, on the other hand, started early. Some of her first memories are of cracking eggs at her mother’s side, or baking cakes and making pizza with her sito ( grandma). “Whatever I wanted to make, she said ‘yes.’”
At 6, she was tasked with washing the salt off the hundreds of canned grape leaves the family used in their marathon cooking sessions and also cutting off the stems. By age 10, she was helping to roll the many trays of meat-stuffed grape leaves they prepared for Christmas and for other holidays.
Now a bank analyst, Natalie Lucas has spent many happy hours with her sito making kibbeh, a classic Levantine dish that combines cracked wheat, beef, onions and spices. She’s also a whiz at making the Eastern European stuffed pockets of dough known as pagach that come from her grandfather’s side of the family.
Her mother acknowledges that some viewers might be surprised to see them make tabouli with just a few sprigs of parsley instead of the handfuls used by other Lebanese cooks. Mrs. Susa also always puts a pat of butter in her stuffed grape leaves and serves the cigarshaped snacks in tomato paste and water instead of with the more traditional lemon.
But that’s how it goes with family recipes. You do what you like and what you’re used to.
“It’s all about how you were raised,” Ms. Lucas says.
She tears up more than once when she talks about how much she treasures cooking with her mom.
“She’s just so big on tradition, and not everyone is,” Ms. Lucas says.
“She’s still in charge,” Natalie Lucas says of her grandmother with a laugh. “But she’s passing the baton.”
The family wasn’t able to gather last year for Mother’s Day because of COVID-19. So on Sunday, being fully vaccinated, they’re celebrating with a meal at Ferrante’s Lakeview in Greensburg instead of cooking out on the patio like they usually do.
Mrs. Raneri says she hopes the special Mother’s Day episode of “Baking With Lucy” brings viewers back to that warm, cozy feeling of being in the kitchen, eating family dishes made together.
“It brings back memories,” Mrs. Raneri says. “They like it when they’re making something they had when they were kids.”