TASTE HISTORY

Ahla w' sahla (welcome) to our website.

We hope you enjoy your visit and, more importantly, our easy to prepare variety of traditional Lebanese foods. Your taste buds are about to embark on a journey through history, experiencing recipes as old as Lebanon itself.

Our family and its cooking traditions originate in the picturesque mountain village of Syr el Dannieh. Our recipes have been passed on from generation to generation, all the way down to our mother who now resides in Sydney, Australia. Under her close guidance, we cook and prepare all of our foods with the same pride, diligence and respect that her mother (our grandmother) epitomised, back in Lebanon.

IN THE BEGINNING...

Our family comes from a town in the north of Lebanon called Syr (or Sir). Syr is located in the Dannieh (Dinnieh) region and is commonly referred to in its full name Syr el Dannieh. Syr is located 110km north of Beirut, 30km east of Tripoli and sits at an altitude that ranges between 900m to 1200m.

Syr is considered as the central village of the Dannieh region, it is famous for Al Zhalan cave close by in the Qattine area and its ancient mills. Syr is well known for its abundance of water which is provided by the springs, and its fertile orchids which still live in our father’s tales of when he was young.

There are 3 main springs in Syr. Firstly, the spring of Syr, the spring of Sukar (sugar) and the spring of Leseem. At one point Syr had 5 ancient mills all hydraulically powered by the fast flowing springs and used by the locals to grind their flour and bulghur.

The era in which our parents lived and grew up in Syr can be compared to pheasant farmers in the middle ages, there were a couple of the village’s donkeys; which were like the area’s removalists. There were no power, no supermarkets and the closest hospital or doctor was in Tripoli, a 20-30 minutes ride away in an overcrowded taxi, which almost certainly had more people than seat belts.

Most families had their own plots of land on which they grew food to provide for themselves all year long. But some families worked other people’s land to reap one quarter or sometimes a third of the total land’s output to feed themselves.

Nearly all cooking was done over a fire. Including bread, which was homemade on a “soj” (an upside down wok shaped dome) usually outside, used even when heavy snow fell during the winter months.

The summer and autumn months where hard work. During these months a lot of different foods and food ingredients needed to be prepared for the year especially when the cold, arduous winter months came. One of these tasks was to make their year supply of flour and bulghur.

Our parents tell of how they would get over 100 kg of wheat – most of it grown themselves, and over a few days in the middle of summer they would boil and strain the wheat, repeat this at least 4 times, let it dry and then take it to one of the villages mills and grind it to make enough flour and bulghur to last the rest of the year.

Another important task carried out in the summer months was to collect all the ripe excess pears, apricots, apple and plums and turn them into jams. They would also dry out white figs to last them through the winter.

At the end of summer, or the beginning of autumn, when the goat’s milk is full of cream, they would make their year’s supply of Keshik, which is a porridge-like substance where bulghur is soaked in yogurt for a few days and then left to dry in the sun. This is then grounded finely leaving a power-like residue for storage.

All yogurt, cheeses and butter were homemade and all entirely made from goats’ milk.

One of the things lacking in Syr, which is essential for Lebanese cooking, was pomegranate, which is used to make pomegranate molasses. Instead, our family used to make molasses out of ripe grapes for sweet molasses and the unripe grapes would make bitter molasses.

In the winter months, when there wasn’t much work to be done on the land, the men would go and work in the major cities. Our father, and most of our uncles and older relatives, worked in Tripoli. They worked at a cold storage facility and exporting business, where he and our uncles helped pack and store a lot of Lebanon’s excess fruits which were exported to Jordan, Syria, Qatar and other Arab countries. At the time Lebanon was regarded as the 'fruit bowl of the Middle East'.

Our parents’ diet growing up seldom included meat. Meat was consumed as little as once a month or sometimes as much as once a week. This coincides with a wide range of vegetarian versions of kibbeh and other vegetarian dishes that our mother also makes regularly.

Lamb and goat were the main meats eaten. When they did eat meat it would be bought in a large amount on a Sunday and they would take the best part and make kibbeh nayee (raw meat dish) for the day, and the rest of the meat would be used the next day to make other meat dishes to last a few days, as there was no refrigeration.

Our mother tells us that lentils were also a prominent part of their diet because of their convenience to store and easiness to cook, same as bulghur. Rice was also rare and a lot the Lebanese dishes that included rice like M’jadra (lentil dish) and Kuosa (stuffed zucchinis) meant that rice had to be substituted with bulghur.

Bulghur was the staple cereal and was used in a lot of dishes that they cooked, like the previously mention kibbeh recipes. If you add bulghur to any pounded meat or vegetable with the right spices, it could take up the name kibbeh. Also, the diet varied with the seasons and preserved foods were an essential part of their diet and allowed them to eat the excess during the winter months, which were bitterly cold and accompanied by lots of snow fall.