"Attending a Levantine Cooking Class" by Madeleine Walker
This week, I attended a three-hour long Levantine cooking class!
The class took place at a restaurant called Beit Sitti, which means “My grandmother’s house” in Arabic. “Sitt” is often only used by people in Lebanon and Syria, whereas in Jordan, the word for “grandmother” is “jad-da.”
The restaurant was named after a grandmother and beloved cook named Maria. When she passed away twelve years ago, her family decided to keep her legacy alive by teaching her recipes to local students, many of whom are foreign exchange students or tourists looking to deepen their Levantine cultural knowledge.
The building Beit Sitti is beautifully decorated, inside and out, with photos of the family, shelves lined with spice jars, fresh flowers, and multicolored furniture. Our class took place on the open-air patio overlooking Jabal Amman, the vibrant neighborhood next door.
The class was taught by a wonderful woman who was both hilarious and a patient teacher. She explained each ingredient, had us lick spices off our hands for “quality control,” and explained the geographic and cultural significance of each dish we prepared.
In total, we made: Maqluba (pronounced “Maaloubeh” in the Jordanian dialect), Mutable, farmers salad, and Basbousa.
Maqluba likely originated in the area that now makes up Jordan, Palestine, and Israel, although it is also featured in a historical Baghdadi recipe manuscript and is easy to find in Lebanon. Most people, however, consider Maqluba to be a Palestinian dish.
One key component of Maqluba is rice; specifically, a combination of Basmati and Egyptian rice because both textures are required for the maqluba to stay intact when overturned. In addition to rice, fried vegetables and meat - often chicken or beef - make up the bulk of the meal. We used fried eggplant, potato, cauliflower, and chicken.
Mouttable, considered the bold cousin of Baba Ghanouj, is a wonderful dish similar in texture to hummus, but made of an eggplant base. It comes from the verb “tabala” which means “to add an aroma.” Mouttable is almost always composed of eggplant, tahini, sheep’s milk yogurt, and garlic. We also added paprika and olive oil for extra flavor and a smoother texture, respectively.
The Farmer’s Salad got its very original name from its regular consumption by farmers across the Levant. The dish is also referred to as “Palestinian Salad,” “Levantine Salad,” or if you live in the Levant, just “salad.” It is both simple and delicious, involving raw vegetables that are carefully diced up, but not in small enough pieces to pass as tabbouleh. At least historically, Levantine farmers would often eat this salad for lunch, using a piece of pita bread as their cutlery. While the ingredients would vary from farm to farm based on what crops were grown, the salad we made at Beit Sitti included tomatoes, cucumbers, mint, parsley, onions, salt, summac, lemon juice, olive oil, and pomegranate molasses.
The molasses was perhaps my favorite taste-test because it was like a sticky syrup of sour Warhead candy. Apparently, making pomegranate molasses is easy: all you do is boil down the pomegranate juice until it becomes a sticky, highly viscous liquid.
Lastly, we made basbousa, an Egyptian cake-like dessert made of semolina flour, rose syrup, yogurt, and the only flavor that I tasted: coconut. This was not my favorite dessert, but has an interesting history! It evolved from Revani, a Turkish dessert, that was supposedly first prepared when the Ottomans conquered Armenia.
The final products:
[Not featured: completed basbousa.]
After somehow finding time to prepare these dishes between loving jabs at each other, my two friends from Amideast and 5 other international students sat down and ate together. It was a wonderful experience that I hope to squeeze in once more before I fly home, and that I encourage anyone who is even remotely nearby to join. No experience necessary (I am living proof), history lesson and laughs included.
Madeleine Walker is a student at Georgetown University and is participating on the Amideast Summer Intensive Arabic Program in Amman, Jordan.
