Curated playlist
Levantine cuisine
- TahiniTahini is a paste of ground sesame seeds, and sesame shows up in one of the oldest records of food culture. A cuneiform document written 4,000 years ago describes a custom of serving the gods sesame wine. The paste itself is a later story,…
- PitaPita is a round, yeast-raised wheat flatbread, and its most familiar form keeps a hollow space hidden inside. The bread belongs to a wide family that is common around the Mediterranean, across the Middle East and in the lands next to them.…
- GyrosGyros is a Greek dish of meat cooked on a vertical rotisserie, shaved into thin slices and wrapped in pita bread. It is a staple street meal in Greece and Cyprus, and it is sold far beyond them. Yet the name on the menu has a curious past.…
- HummusHummus once filled a single dish that weighed approximately 10,450 kilograms. Three hundred cooks in the village of al-Fanar, near Beirut, prepared it. The result was more than double the weight of the previous Israeli-Arab record, and it…
- KebabKebab is not one dish. In the Syrian city of Aleppo alone, cooks are said to make at least twenty-six versions of it. Some are cooked with cherries, some with aubergine, some with chili, parsley and pine nuts, and one style is made with…
- BulgurBulgur is a cracked wheat food, and in parts of the Middle East people eat it by the sack. A 2007 study in the Journal of Food Engineering measured how much. In south-eastern Turkey, the average person ate about 25 kilograms of bulgur…
- TzatzikiTzatziki, spelled τζατζίκι in Greek, is a cold dish that travels under at least three names: tzatziki, cacık and tarator. In some kitchens it is a dip, in others a soup, in others a sauce. It belongs to the cuisines of Southeastern Europe…
- DolmaDolma first shows up in writing in a 16th-century Persian book called Mâddet ol-Hayât, and the author treats it as a curiosity from abroad. Cabbage dolmeh, the book says, is commonly prepared in the land of the Rûm, meaning Turkey, but is…
- HalvaHalva is spelled at least four ways in English: halva, halvah, halwa and halua. The spelling is the easy part. Behind it sits a confection spread across North Africa, East Africa, Eastern Europe, the Balkans, West Asia, Central Asia and…
- Za'atarZa'atar, pronounced ZAH-tar, has a long record in the ground. In the tomb of Tutankhamun, dated to the 14th century BCE, researchers found plant remains identified as Thymbra spicata. That herb is one of several still sold under the name…
- MoussakaMoussaka is a dish built on aubergine or potato, often with ground meat, and it turns up across the Balkans and the Middle East. Ask for it in two neighbouring countries and you may get two plates that have almost nothing in common. Some…