14 hours ago
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My family takes food very seriously. So seriously that when my mother’s family left Iraq in 1971, limited to 20kg of luggage each, they found room for not one but two rolling pins. The truth is that, having used the rolling pins, I think they were right. Born in England, I grew up on my father’s stories, too, of going to a Baghdad street stall to buy hot samoon, Iraqi bread shaped like a teardrop, with a puffy middle and a crunchy crust, with amba (mango pickle) oozing out of it. But he left Baghdad even earlier, in 1951, in a mass airlift along with most of Iraq’s Jews. I grew up in Britain, homesick for a place I’ve never been to, and will probably never see. There are now just three Jews left in Iraq.
Scattered across the world, we didn’t have much from Iraq, but we did have the recipes, which we clung to like a life raft. We didn’t just eat together but often cooked together, too. One of my earliest, happiest memories is of sitting under the Formica table in my grandmother’s kitchen at maybe three or four, and pulling the stalks off parsley so my mother and aunt could make tabbouleh. When, decades later, I was finally about to become a mother myself, I was excited about sharing Iraqi Jewish food with my son. Maybe he’d even want to be my tiny sous chef! Maybe he’d like tabbouleh as much as I did. We make it vivid green with barely any bulgur in it (I was confused when I first saw the pots of beige in the supermarket because they looked nothing like the salad I’d grown up with). Maybe he’d love ingriyi (fried aubergine slices layered with fried lamb or beef and sliced tomato, and simmered with turmeric, lemon juice and date syrup); and tbeet, which just means “overnight” because it was an ingenious dish developed to get around the restrictions on lighting fires or turning on ovens on Shabbat. The flame was kept very low, and chicken and rice were cooked through the night with cardamom, cinnamon and cloves, with eggs tucked around the chicken till they went a deep brown. I imagined if I made him kitchri, rice with red lentils, garlic, turmeric, cumin, tomato, melting onions, so much butter and melting slabs of halloumi, and thick yoghurt spooned over the top, he’d say ashteedek (long live your hands) in our language, Judeo-Iraqi Arabic, and understand me when I replied awafi (to your health).
I wish I’d known when he was born that it was an old Iraqi tradition to put a date in a baby’s mouth so their first taste of life was sweet. Maybe this was where I first went wrong. Because for a long time we didn’t have the ashteedek/awafi conversation, not just because he doesn’t know the language, and not even because it is going extinct, but because, to my chagrin, he would not even try most of my favourite dishes.
This hurdle was unexpected. Before I became a mother, I secretly judged parents who let their children subsist on white bread and pea-and-pesto pasta. It served me right, because my son – now eight years old – won’t even eat pesto. I have to dredge his spaghetti with cheese (not even parmesan; cheddar) and he’ll have the peas but only on the side. Like Sally in When Harry Met Sally, on the side is a very big thing for him.
He rejects tomatoes except on pizza and in ketchup, and, with the same exceptions, anything he calls “sauce”. Aubergines and courgettes are a hard no. I thought all children liked the Middle Eastern staples, hummus and yoghurt, but not mine. And, because for a long time he also had a blanket ban on soup, I could not get him to eat my ultimate comfort food: lentil soup, made with red lentils, onion, lemon, cumin and turmeric. I really tried with that soup. When he complained it had “bits” in, I blitzed it smooth. I tried making it without a lemon, then without an onion. I even sacrilegiously added cheese and called it “sunshine soup”. Still no.
Meanwhile, he showed an early fondness for fish fingers and Marmite (not together), foods I have never been able to get my head around. Of course, I didn’t mind him eating food that wasn’t Iraqi. I wanted him to honour that side of his heritage, too, to fit in in England, and I didn’t want him to find school dinners as alien as I did. And I am happy if he eats (almost) anything because, it turns out, I’m horrified to admit, that I am not just a mother but that sitcom cliche, a Jewish mother. However, it satisfied me in another, deeper way when he enjoyed something Iraqi.
It wasn’t about nutrition – he ate a healthy-ish diet – but about other kinds of nourishment, which I could hardly name. It was about feeling part of a story, about belonging. It was about relishing big flavours – and maybe also big feelings – and the complexity of sweet and sour, hamedh-helu, which is the Iraqi flavour. (It’s tempting to make a link between this complexity, its bittersweetness and the country’s complicated history, but not everything has to be a metaphor.) My son’s rather limited, bland diet reminded me of a joyless time in my own life, when I didn’t eat Iraqi Jewish food either. After girls at school made fun of my packed lunches (of pitta bread, eggs, fried aubergine slices, hummus and tomato), like a coward I switched to white bread and cream cheese, which I ate every day for years – is this why I am only 5ft 3in? My parents gave me a rice cooker to take to university, but like a fool I let it gather dust due to embarrassment and impostor syndrome. How could I cook the food when I was born in England not Iraq, couldn’t belly dance, was not a demon at backgammon, and couldn’t stammer out more than a few phrases in the language? There was a psychic cost to denying myself proper rice, and I felt more and more disconnected until, eventually, in my 20s, I found my way back to cooking Iraqi food, and something shifted. I started unfurling, feeling more at home, more like me. I wanted this for my son, too. So I kept on trying.
I tried, even though Iraqi food is incredibly labour-intensive, and more experienced parents warned me that the more effort you put into cooking for your child, and the more desperate you are for them to like it, the more likely it is that they’ll reject it. I made zangoola, dough rosettes deep-fried and dunked in syrup scented with rosewater and orange flower water, which he deemed “too sticky”. I baked “black eggs”, as we called them, although they were actually brown from being baked overnight, and he found them “weird”. For years I chased a fruit I hadn’t even tasted, the nabug (a variety of jujube), which grows everywhere in Baghdad but is almost impossible to get in the UK. When I managed to get my hot little hands on a small punnet of them, my older relatives went into nostalgic raptures, but my son said he’d rather have a Haribo. It was hard not to take it personally.
I didn’t want to pass on every single dish. There is a recipe that involves stuffing raw cow intestines with meat and herbs and then sewing them up before cooking them. Having done the sewing once, I don’t think I could cook or eat them again, still less inflict them on my child. And I’ll confess there is another delicacy I have never enjoyed: pickled turnips. But the thought of him never learning to love mango pickle kept me up at night. Amba is my community’s sticky, DayGlo yellow essence, a permanent fixture on our kitchen tables, in tall bottles marked with green “Ship Brand” labels warning us to “BEWARE OF IMITATIONS”. As a child I was convinced that the ship pictured on the label was Sinbad the Sailor’s. And this was another reason I wanted to pass on the food – because with the food came the stories. But it wasn’t Sinbad’s story that made me anxious; it was Siegfried Sassoon’s. Because amba’s origin myth is that it was invented by Sassoon’s great-grandfather David Sassoon who was born in Baghdad in 1793, loved Indian mangoes so much that he wanted to find a way of exporting them to Baghdad, had the brainwave of pickling them, and made amba the iconic Iraqi Jewish pickle. And the tragedy is that his poet great-grandson probably never tasted it. Siegfried grew up in England, almost totally deracinated, a stranger to his Iraqi Jewish family, and arguably also to himself. Throughout his life he wrestled with his identity, coming across as quintessentially English – his autobiographical novel was even called Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man – but worrying on the page and in private about who he was and where he came from. Would Sassoon have had an easier time if he had known more about his culture, if he had tasted amba? Could you truly be Iraqi Jewish if you didn’t love it?
All wasn’t totally lost. When I made a list of all the foods my son would eat and stuck it on the fridge, I was encouraged by how many were Iraqi or at least Iraqi-adjacent. He loves dates, and velvety black date syrup (from Basra, of course), which he drizzles perhaps slightly too enthusiastically on pancakes, leaving sticky puddles on the table. He only agreed to try pomegranate seeds because he was going through a pirate phase and I served them in his Playmobil treasure chest and claimed they were edible jewels – but they’re still on the list. Olives were an early hit, too. He claims that he doesn’t eat nuts but he does love masafan, chewy almond macaroons. And watermelon has been a stalwart fruit. As a toddler he liked nothing more than to lounge in his pushchair, clutching a fat pink triangle in each hand, chin and coat spattered with sticky juice. I allowed myself to feel quite smug about this situation until the day a stranger stopped us, literally blocking our path, to exclaim, affronted, that watermelon was very exotic for a child. She was furious. She didn’t move. I had to manoeuvre the pushchair awkwardly around her to get past. And, to be honest, years on, I still haven’t got over the way she othered me and my child. Because that was what she was doing – who could object to a child eating fruit (fruit!) unless they had another, meaner agenda? And she wasn’t even right. Watermelons have been grown in England since 1597, which makes you wonder how long it takes for something to stop being “exotic”.
Although I’m still arguing with that woman in my head, I’m also grateful because she prompted me to try to learn whether Iraqi and English food are as opposed as she seemed to think. They are not. As early as the 12th century, a cookbook by the 11th-century Baghdad pharmacologist Ibn Jazla was translated into Latin, and the recipes shared across Europe. If Watermelon Woman had been in England in the middle ages, she would have eaten food that, according to food historian Kate Colquhoun, was closest to Moroccan food now. Because this is a culinary conversation that has been going on for centuries, Middle Eastern ingredients are at the heart of some of the most indelibly English foods, like Christmas pudding and brown sauce. It doesn’t have to be either/or. Certainly this Iraqi Jew has enjoyed making (and eating) things like yorkshire puddings and mince pies. My son could surely love both fish fingers and kubba (the Iraqi version of kofta).
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In the end it was my mother who got him eating the food of his heritage. Maybe being a generation removed helped, or maybe it’s because she’s a much better cook, but it’s because of her that he eats the dense, cataclysmically cheesy omelettes called ajjat b’jeben (cheese storm); and beidh b’laham (egg burgers made with herbs and – her secret ingredient – ketchup); sambusak bel tawa (crescents of dough filled with chickpeas, turmeric and cumin, and deep-fried so the dough puffs up and goes golden); and kubba burghul (beef or lamb mixed with pine nuts and sultanas, stuffed into a dough made from more minced meat and bulgur, first boiled then fried). This felt quite a triumph but when she told me she was making my six-year-old son kubba shwandar, I thought, “Good luck with that.” Kubba shwandar is spiced beef or lamb in a shell made out of ground rice and pounded meat, and simmered in a sweet and sour sauce with beetroots that stain the kubba ruby red. I love it, but I did not believe in a million years that my son, who said he was “allergic to sauce”, would touch it. I packed a cheese sandwich just in case.
But when we got to my mother’s he sat down and ate twelve. He declared it his new best food. He triumphantly wrote in his diary “I ATE KUBBA” and drew one, in cross-section so you could see the meat inside.
Obviously this was terrible news. I wanted him to eat things I could sling together in five minutes, not laborious, time-consuming, multiprocess dishes. It didn’t even make sense for him to like kubba shwandar with its intricacy of flavour, its many textures, its sauce. But, although this development clearly doomed me to hours of labour, I also felt – just slightly – thrilled.
When his school asked him to bring in a food that represented his heritage, he chose another recipe my mum had introduced him to: the date-stuffed pastries some Iraqi Jews call makhboose (which just means “baked”) and others call baba bit tamar (balls with dates). I am addicted to these. They’re my Desert Island food. Now, at eight, my son loves making makhboose almost as much as he likes eating it; pummelling the dough, and testing he has kneaded it enough by touching his earlobe and then seeing if the dough feels similar – an old Claudia Roden trick. Squidging the dates together in his hands, and rolling the balls of dough, and stuffing them and sealing them tight, and then flattening them with his palms, and messily painting them with egg. He draws the line at sprinkling the tops with sesame seeds – which he doesn’t like – but perhaps one day. Back then, he was excited when we read one of the only picture books about Iraqi Jews, Sarah Sassoon’s Shoham’s Bangle, and he saw a picture of the small heroine making makhboose, too, cutting out circles of dough with a gold bangle that matched my mother’s and mine. And although I groaned when he told me I had to make enough for his whole class that same evening – because, unlike my mum, I don’t always have a stash in my freezer, and they are a faff to make – I was proud, too, that he knew makhboose were special and that he wanted to share them with his friends. Somehow, it seemed, he had developed both a taste for Iraqi Jewish food and the instinct to feed people, to find a part of himself in food and to express love by passing it on.
The next morning he was up at six shouting mataboose! – because he couldn’t pronounce it properly yet – and my whole family says it that way now, too. When he grabbed one and bit into it and grinned, I felt more connected than I have ever been. As he ate it messily, with joy, I didn’t need him to tell me my hands would live on. I knew my makhboose would, connecting us back to my many great-grandmothers in Baghdad – and forward, too, to the dishes my son might make for his children one day, and they might make for their children, in a future I will never see. “Awafi,” I told him, and he sneaked another, brazenly, right in front of my face.
