Bavel
Bavel is a book about the journey of chefs, Ori Menashe and Genevieve Gergis who are both born in the Los Angeles area, to translate their family and regional cooking into recipes that express their dual Californian/Middle Eastern identities.
Books written by restaurant chefs are often organized into “pantry” and “recipes” with the latter relying heavily on the former. I like this a lot and assume it’s because this is how restaurants pack flavour into food, by creating housemade sauces, ferments, pickles, and breads. For the meal plans I write, I love this format. Time is a great ingredient to making food delicious, and that was the original thesis for these meal plans. It does mean you have to do some more planning, but unlike, for example, Jeremy Fox’s book, On Vegetables, the pantry staples in Bavel are not overly difficult or single purpose. You’re not being asked to dehydrate carrot to make a crumble for a cavatelli. The pantry items are staple stocks and condiments that require little imagination to incorporate into your everyday cooking: harissa, marinated olives, creme fraiche, zhoug, sourdough bread, chicken stock are a few of the one’s I made.
California books often have very specific ingredients like Meyer lemon or lovage that you know the author is able to access pretty readily. In this book, these enviable ingredients are very easily substituted and I wasn’t running around the city looking for specialty items.
Some of the recipes in this book really slap you across the face, like the Smoky Harissa, but there are also some that are less assuming. On a scale of 1 to Nik Sharma, these land somewhere around a 7 in terms of flavour that you can build at home. I felt hampered by the fact that I don’t have a fire pit or even a gas grill in my kitchen. The lamb chops and especially the mushroom kebabs just weren’t the same cooked in a skillet.
This is a very different book than Falastin, Persiana, or Jerusalem. Bavel isn’t a cataloque of regional cooking. It’s the chefs’ interpretation of “Middle Eastern” food. There is something very Californian about the flavours in this book. Maybe it’s because things like morita chiles, avocado, and pepitas show up. The smoky flavours are coming from ingredients as well as preparations. The rest of my review, below, is about why this book made me think about migration, culture, and diaspora.
Technical
★★★☆☆
Interesting
★★★★☆
Good mix of recipes
★★★★★
Delicious
★★★★☆
Babaganoush with caramelized eggplants and fried curry leaves p.88
Get a flavour for this book
Yoghurt, curry leaves, turmeric, nigella, char and smoke.
If you make one recipe
The Smoked Harissa, p.109 rocked my world. I made a double batch and now I just put it on everything. It’s sweet and salty and smoky, of course with little crunchy sesame and sunflower seeds. This condiment made it’s way into the Hall of Fame.
I’ve heard the story of the Tower of Babel a lot in my life. I went to a Jewish elementary school and loved (still love) bible stories. In it, the people of the world unite to build a tower so tall it reaches heaven. God, always afraid humans will supplant him with their ingenuity, makes everyone building the tower speak different languages. They can’t cooperate with each other and the tower construction stalls. I never understood God’s vision for the world where our petty differences stop us from being greater than the sum of our parts. I think the instinct to outgrow God is a beautiful one: individually we are not much but the collective, working harmoniously, can achieve self-determination and doesn’t require faith to sustain it. In this book, Ori Menashe and Genvieve Gergis write that “over time [the myth of the Tower of Babel] has evolved, for many, to become a metaphor for the myriad of cultural, spiritual, and political differences that divide us. To us, the term “Bavel” represents a world—and more specifically, a Middle East—before this separation.”
I picked up a cookbook a couple decades back about cooking along latitudes. Central America, it posited, and Southeast Asia can be plotted along the globe at the same latitude. As they are equidistant from the equator, the ingredients native to both areas can be used interchangeably in cooking. Both Mexican and Thai cooking use lime, garlic, chili and cilantro in many dishes. This book suggested elote might benefit from dried shrimp, or nopales could find their way into a green mango salad. I think the Asian Taco Industrial Complex would agree. The book made some sense. Some climates favour some plants (citrus) over others (wild rice). Latitudinal congruities seem more likely than longitudinal ones. It’s a fine cookbook idea, maybe a bit 90s, to analyse cooking and food on climate and geography. But it’s also boring compared to the more interesting story of how culture is formed through food: the historical human pathways that have transported people and culture around the world, colonial agriculture that prioritized some crops over others, trade routes that found new homes and zealots for foods like tea and spice, the wars and boundaries redrawn around people in search of perfect (and profitable) bites and sips.
Tomato and Whipped Feta with Smoked Harissa
p.109
I’m going to talk about this sauce for a long time to come. Let me first say I hate smoky food. I have turned up my nose at many a Romesco. It’s the flavour of smoke in your clothes the day after a campfire which maybe just had some bad association but to me there’s a sogginess to it that I hate. All that being said, I literally ate this with a spoon. It was tremendously satisfying to eat and to make. I just want this for you. Please make it and love it like I do.
Oyster mushroom kebabs and lovage puree
p.
This was the first recipe I saw in the cookbook that I was absolutely dying to make. In fact, my husband doesn’t love mushrooms but I thrust it on him anyway. Mistake. I couldn’t find lovage. Instead I used celery leaves. I don’t own a grill, so I seared these in a skillet. It was not good. I might give this another go, but ordered from the restaurant. I wouldn’t try to make it again at home.
I’m whatever the opposite of an expert is on the subject, to be really clear. I do, however, have a chip on my shoulder about Vermont maple syrup, which I allege is the inferior maple syrup. But, let’s be honest, how could that be true? I’ve been sugaring off 20 minutes north of Montreal and Burlington, Vermont is 1 hour south. The only distinction between the two is the Canada/US border. All the maple syrup argument reveals is that the food predates the border. This is true as well, I assume, of Pollo Pepian: chicken braised in a pumpkin seed gravy, claimed by both Mexico and Guatemala. Before that border existed, Mayan nations lived from modern day Mexico to El Salvador. Pepian is a Mayan dish, and is a tie that binds families and nations who happened to live on either side of a colonial border when the line was drawn. Native Land starts to give us insight about who to thank for both Quebec and Vermont maple syrup: likely the Anishinaabe.
It’s common to talk about food in terms of geography, but it lends too much credit to borders, and not enough to how people move across the world, how they influence each other. We express our culture to each other by sharing food. As much as we claim we are from countries, humans move around the globe in waves of migration as we seek out better lives and environments. My great-grandmother migrated to Canada from Russia to escape the pogroms. She and other Jewish immigrants brought food with them that was often theirs, but also not. Blintzes, for example, are something I’ve eaten in Jewish delis. Let’s be honest, it’s a crepe, and takes it’s name from Russian. I’ve said it before on this website but falafel is something I thought was Jewish food well into my 20s. My uncle likes to say that Jews eat kosher so as to ensure they always eat with other Jews, to build community in countries where they’re not from. How is this possible when modern day Jewish food so clearly takes its influence from the myriad countries where Jews found themselves at different periods in history. Surely we were sharing food with other people, invited into non-Jewish homes? How did we learn the recipes to adapt, make pareve, substitute the pork lard?
In me it begs the question: why do we cling to nationalistic categories for the food we love? Maple syrup aside, I will go to bat for Montreal bagels, but I didn’t have to care while I lived a short drive from Fairmount bagel. Now, in Toronto, it’s imperative I take offence to a Tim Horton’s billboard advertising Montreal bagels with a picture of what is clearly a New York style bagel. Maybe it’s homesickness and a need for others to know “I’m not from here.” Or, when someone says “what’s the difference anyway?” I need them to understand there is a difference, one of these things describes me, comforts me, makes me feel like I belong somewhere while the other is a mediocre bagel. This is an instinct to differentiate, but it’s also an instinct to share a piece of who I am and also where my people came from and what we’ve built in this country. I am striving to create a visibility to that migration, that you could know that my ancestors were pushed out of their homes out of fear of death and arrived in Canada hoping to find peace. And they made bagels, goddamnit, which are not inherently of this place, but became synonymous with it. If you’re not in Montreal eating bagels then you’re lining up for a smoked meat sandwich, you’re welcome. Are they Canadian bagels? I don’t think so. They’re not Russian either. They belong to something more amorphous; they’re a product of migration and a historical moment and how a community decided to rise to it.
Maybe the problem with the book on cooking to latitudes is that it misses the point of what binds us by pointing to ingredients and calling them “place”. Bavel imagines what a Middle Eastern chef would do with a duck, when duck is not something you find in the region. Or how to elevate an American peach cobbler with French financiers and a Baharat spice blend. It becomes clearer through these recipes how the myth of the Tower of Babel inspired this cooking, to unite us on what we’re all trying to communicate, not different languages we all speak.
Lamb chops with green sauce
p.
Now this is a sauce! It has lemon and vinegar, making it very sour and tangy. Another very versatile sauce
Turmeric Chicken Stock
p.49
This is a beautiful fragrant stock. It’s a good addition to your stock repertoire if you’re in the market.
Turmeric chicken
p.195
In the book, these chickens are hung to cook over a fire. Turmeric is a perfect partner to smoke so I think this is probably excellent on a grill or over a fire. In the oven, it was just ok.
Ori’s Breakfast
p.142
I have to insist you make this. It’s a beautiful alternative to yoghurt for breakfast. Lay down a spread of labneh and top with nigella seeds, honey, and pistachios.