Day of Honey: A Memoir of Food, Love, and War

Her book is full of more insight and joy than anything else I have read on Iraq. . . . Ciezadlo is a wonderful traveling companion. Her observations are delightful—witty, intelligent and nonjudgmental.—The Washington Post Book World

Her writing about food is both evocative and loving; this is a woman who clearly enjoys a meal. . . . A glass of Iraqi tea, under Ciezadlo’s gaze, is a thing of beauty.—The Associated Press

IN THE FALL OF 2003, AS IRAQ DESCENDED INTO CIVIL WAR, Annia Ciezadlo spent her honeymoon in Baghdad. For the next six years, she lived in Baghdad and Beirut, where she dodged bullets during sectarian street battles, chronicled the Arab world’s first peaceful revolution, and watched Hezbollah commandos invade her Beirut neighborhood. Throughout all of it, she broke bread with Sunnis and Shiites, warlords and refugees, matriarchs and mullahs. Day of Honey is her story of the hunger for food and friendship during wartime—a communion that feeds the soul as much as the body.

In lush, fiercely intelligent prose, Ciezadlo uses food and the rituals of eating to uncover a vibrant Middle East most Americans never see. We get to know people like Roaa, a young Kurdish woman whose world shrinks under occupation to her own kitchen walls; Abu Rifaat, a Baghdad book lover who spends his days eavesdropping in the ancient city’s legendary cafés; and the unforgettable Umm Hassane, Ciezadlo’s sardonic Lebanese mother-in-law, who teaches her to cook rare family recipes (included in a mouthwatering appendix of Middle Eastern comfort food). From dinner in downtown Beirut to underground book clubs in Baghdad, Day of Honey is a profound exploration of everyday survival—a moving testament to the power of love and generosity to transcend the misery of war.

Ciezadlo’s lovely, natural language succeeds where news reports often fail: She leads us to care.—The Oregonian

MOHAMAD BAZZI

ANNIA CIEZADLO has written about culture, politics, and the Middle East for The New Republic, The Nation, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, Time, Newsweek, Foreign Policy, and Foreign Affairs. Annia lives with her husband in New York.

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Praise for

Day of Honey

"Her book is among the least political, and most intimate and valuable, to have come out of the Iraq war. . . . A carefully researched tour through the history of Middle Eastern food . . . filled with adrenalized scenes from war zones, scenes of narrow escapes and clandestine phone calls and frightening cultural misunderstandings. Ciezadlo is completely hilarious on the topic of trying to please her demanding new Lebanese in-laws. These things wouldn’t matter much, though, if her sentences didn’t make such a sensual, smart, wired-up sound on the page. Holding Day of Honey I was reminded of the way that, with a book of poems, you can very often flip through it for five minutes and know if you’re going to like it; you get something akin to a contact high. . . . Ciezadlo is the kind of thinker who listens as well as she writes. . . . Readers will feel lucky to find her."

—Dwight Garner, The New York Times

Her book is full of more insight and joy than anything else I have read on Iraq. . . . Ciezadlo is a wonderful traveling companion. Her observations are delightful—witty, intelligent and nonjudgmental. Skirting the politics, hotel food and headline-grabbing violence, she spills the secrets of this region so rich in history as if they were spices from a burlap sack. Her writing is at times so moving that you want to cry for countries destroyed, but she writes with such wisdom that you don’t fret over the future of these 4,000-year-old civilizations. It’s a shame that the hundreds of journalists, aid workers and pundits who dominate the discussion of Iraq and Lebanon rarely stop to delight in the countries’ beauty.

—The Washington Post Book World

"In her extraordinary debut, Day of Honey: A Memoir of Food, Love, and War, Annia Ciezadlo turns food into a language, a set of signs and connections, that helps tie together a complex moving memoir of the Middle East. She interweaves her private story with portraits of memorable individuals she comes to know along the way, and with the shattering public events in Baghdad and Beirut. She does so with grace and skill, without falling into sentimentality or simple generalizations."

—The Globe and Mail

Ciezadlo’s memoir is, fortunately, fascinating. And touching. Plus alternately depressing (because of the seemingly endless, senseless sectarian deaths in Iraq and Lebanon) and laugh-out-loud funny (because of the self-deprecation, not to mention the vivid portraits of unique characters such as her mother-in-law). . . . ‘Voice’ is difficult to define precisely, but writers (and plenty of readers) know it when they see it. Ciezadlo’s voice is marvelous.

—The Christian Science Monitor

"With Day of Honey, Ciezadlo’s lovely, natural language succeeds where news reports often fail: She leads us to care. . . . Day of Honey is a delicious first book (and the recipes at its end only make it more so). May it not be Ciezadlo’s last."

—The Oregonian

A strange mix of sensuous writing about food, evocative firsthand reports of living life during wartime (in Iraq and Beirut), and the stresses of adapting to a new family and culture. Ciezadlo’s work feels both dizzying and strangely grounded. And it makes you hungry.

—The Nation

"Equal parts history of the Middle East, tale of cross-cultural marriage, and riveting account of life as a civilian reporter in two war zones . . . Day of Honey is first and foremost a paean to the powers of food, recipes included. . . . A passionate argument for the idea that whether it’s your mother-in-law or a military enemy, meeting over a meal eases differences, and that knowing the world means dining in it."

—Bookforum

"Ciezadlo’s Day of Honey was a rich, delicious portrait of a war-ravaged Middle East, including Baghdad and Beirut, that was so visceral that when I finished, I felt covered with dust, hungry and with a deeper understanding of this culture and part of the world that until now had been elusive and confusing."

—Fort Worth Star-Telegram

Ciezadlo observes daily life and documents her experiences in two war zones (Baghdad and Beirut) with extraordinary insight and skill. . . . Ciezadlo paints memorable portraits of shopkeepers, journalists, poets, women’s rights activists, restaurant owners, and the ways they cope. . . . When Ciezadlo describes meals, I am both hungry and drunk on her words. . . . The best books transport us to worlds outside our experience, making them both real and comprehensible. Unequivocally, this is one of those books.

—The Austin Chronicle

"It’s been a long time since I have enjoyed any nonfiction as much as I did Annia Ciezadlo’s Day of Honey.. . . Ciezadlo’s determination to know intimately the cuisine of wherever she’s staying lends the book both its organization and richness. . . . Ciezadlo is a splendid narrator, warm and funny. . . . Cooking and eating are everyday comforts, and with any luck, a source of fellowship; Day of Honey was a beautiful reminder that this doesn’t change even in the midst of war."

—Slate

Her fast-paced, graceful writing weaves politics into discussions of literature and cuisine to bring insight into the long history of cultural mix and transition in the Middle East, reminding us that even as war persists, our humanity helps to preserve our civilization, and our food binds our communities and our families . . . . A highly recommended personal perspective on political and cultural aspects of the war-riven Middle East.

—Library Journal

"Capped off with a collection of mouthwatering recipes, many from Ciezadlo’s larger-than-life mother-in-law, Day of Honey turns thoughts on food into provocative food for thought."

—BookPage

[A] vividly written memoir . . . Like any successful travelogue writer, [Ciezadlo] fills her pages with luminous, funny, and stirring portraits of the places and people she came across in her time abroad. But there is also, always, her passion for food, and through it, she parses the many conundrums she faced in her wanderings, such as the struggle to define identity, ethnic and personal, and the challenge of maintaining social continuity in wartime. The capstone to all her thoughtful ruminations is a mouthwatering final chapter collecting many of the dishes she describes earlier in the book. She does this all in writing that is forthright and evocative, and she reminds us that the best memoirs are kaleidoscopes that blend an author’s life and larger truths to make a sparkling whole.

—Booklist, starred review

A lucid memoir of life in the war-torn Middle East. . . . Through immersion in food and cooking, Ciezadlo grounded herself amid widespread instability while gaining special insight into a people forced to endure years of bloody conflict. . . . This ambitious and multilayered book is as much a feast for the mind as for the heart.

—Kirkus Reviews

"Annia Ciezadlo’s Day of Honey is a gorgeous, mouthwateringly written book that convincingly demonstrates why, even with bombs going off all over the place, you gotta eat."

—Suketu Mehta, author of Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found

A riveting, insightful, and moving story of a spirited people in wartime horror told with affection and humor. Food plays a part in the telling—unraveling layers of culture, history and civilization, revealing codes of behavior and feelings of identity and making the book a banquet to be savored.

—Claudia Roden, author of The New Book of Middle Eastern Food

A warm, hilarious, terrifying, thrilling, insanely smart debut book that gets deep inside of you and lets you see the Middle East—and the world—through profoundly humanitarian eyes. And if that weren’t enough, there’s also a phenomenal chapter’s worth of recipes. Buy this important book. Now.

—James Oseland, editor in chief, Saveur

Annia Ciezadlo combines ‘mouthwatering’ and the Middle East in this beautifully crafted memoir. She adds a new perspective to the region and leavens the stories of lives caught up in the tragedies of war, including her own, with recipes for understanding. She is a gifted writer and a perceptive analyst. Ciezadlo’s portraits are unforgettable.

—Deborah Amos, author of Eclipse of the Sunnis: Power, Exile, and Upheaval in the Middle East and correspondent for National Public Radio

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Copyright © 2011 by Annia Ciezadlo

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Free Press Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

First Free Press trade paperback edition February 2012

FREE PRESS and colophon are trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

The retellings of the Gilgamesh tales on pages 69–70 and 150–151 draw on both the Standard Version and the Old Babylonian tablets. Excerpts from The Epic of Gilgamesh translated by Maureen Gallery Kovacs. Copyright © 1985, 1989 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Jr. University. All rights reserved. Used with the permission of Stanford University Press, www.sup.org.

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Book design by Ellen R. Sasahara

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ciezadlo, Annia.

Day of honey : a memoir of food, love, and war /

Annia Ciezadlo.—1st Free Press hardcover ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Ciezadlo, Annia. 2. Journalists—Iraq—Baghdad. 3. Journalists—Lebanon—Beirut. 4. Journalists—United States—Biography. 5. Baghdad (Iraq)—Social life and customs. 6. Beirut (Lebanon)—Social life and customs. 7. Food—Social aspects—Iraq—Baghdad. 8. Food—Social aspects—Lebanon—Beirut. 9. Iraq War, 2003—Social aspects. I. Title.

PN4874.C5185A3    2011

070.92—dc22

[B]                                         2010019739

ISBN 978-1-4165-8393-6

ISBN 978-1-4165-8394-3 (pbk)

ISBN 978-1-4165-8422-3 (eBook)

For Mohamad

Contents

Part I: New York

Introduction The Siege

Chapter 1: The Quiet Assassin

Chapter 2: Afghanistanism

Chapter 3: Bride of the World

Chapter 4: Mjadara

Part II: Honeymoon in Baghdad

Chapter 5: The Benefits of Civilization

Chapter 6: Iraq Has No Cuisine

Chapter 7: Becoming Human

Chapter 8: The Movement of Democratic Lovers

Chapter 9: The Sumer Land

Chapter 10: The Flavor of Freedom

Chapter 11: Iftar Alone

Chapter 12: Chicken Soup for the Iraqi Soul

Chapter 13: The Devil’s Hijab

Chapter 14: The Free One

Chapter 15: Even a Strong Person Can Ask for Peace

Part III: Beirut

Chapter 16: Republic of Foul

Chapter 17: The Green Revolution

Chapter 18: Death in Beirut

Chapter 19: The War of the Kitchen

Chapter 20: The Operation

Part IV: Eat, Pray, War

Chapter 21: Fear and Shopping

Chapter 22: Mighli

Chapter 23: Cooking with Umm Hassane

Chapter 24: Supper of Stones

Part V: God, Nasrallah, and the Suburbs

Chapter 25: There Are No Shiites in This Neighborhood

Chapter 26: My Previous Experience in Warfare

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Author’s Note

Recipes

Glossary

Select Bibliography

Index

Reading Group Guide and Author Q&A

Day of honey, day of onions.

—Arabic proverb

Much earlier in this century an Austrian journalist, Karl Kraus, pointed out that if you actually perceived the true reality behind the news you would run, screaming, into the streets. I have run screaming into the streets dozens of times but have always managed to return home in time for dinner.

—Jim Harrison, The Raw and the Cooked: Adventures of a Roving Gourmand

PART I

New York

All great change in America begins at the dinner table.

—Ronald Reagan

Introduction

The Siege

HE WAS ONE of an endangered species: among the few white, native-born cab drivers left in New York. Meaty, middle-aged, face like a potato. A Donegal tweed driving cap. He pulled up beside me, drew down the window, and growled out of the corner of his mouth: You wanna ride?

We rode in silence until we reached Atlantic Avenue. You see this street? he said, waving a massive hand at the windshield. They’re all Arabs on this street.

He was right, more or less. The conquest began in the late 1800s, as the Ottoman Empire waned and the Mediterranean silk trade collapsed. Between 1899 and 1932, a little over 100,000 Syrians—in those days, a catchall term for practically anyone from the Levant, the French name for the eastern Mediterranean—emigrated to the New World. Many of them settled in New York. In 1933, the Arab-American newspaper Syrian World described Atlantic Avenue, with gently sarcastic pride, as "the principal habitat of the species Syrianica."

By 1998, the Atlantic Avenue strip was such a symbol of Arab-American identity that 20th Century Fox re-created it for a movie called The Siege. In the movie, Arab terrorists carry out a series of bombings in New York City, and the government imposes martial law and rounds up all the Arabs, guilty and innocent alike, into detention camps.

These Arabs, yeah, the cabbie continued. They come over here, they try to act normal. Try to act like you and me. Like they’re fitting in, ya know?

He barked out a laugh. Turns out they’re al-Qaeda.

It was a relief when people said it openly. I could talk to this guy. He was an ethnic American, and he assumed I was one too. He was right: I’m a Polish-Greek-Scotch-Irish mutt from working-class Chicago. A product of stockyards and steel mills and secretarial schools. I could see where he was coming from. I came from there myself.

But then again: the man I loved was named for Islam’s prophet. We had been seeing each other for about five months. I had thought of him as just another ethnic American, but now it was September 13, 2001, and suddenly nobody else seemed to see it that way. On September 11, the landlady had knocked on his door just before midnight. Mrs. Scanlon was an immigrant herself, from Ireland, and no doubt with terrorism-related memories of her own. In a high and quavering voice, she asked, Mohamad, are you an Arab?

I had been thinking about The Siege quite a bit since then.

When 20th Century Fox started filming The Siege in the late 1990s, I had just moved to the heavily Polish Brooklyn neighborhood of Greenpoint. Apparently the real Atlantic Avenue didn’t have enough brownstones to look like New York on film, so overnight, Hollywood set designers transformed Greenpoint’s Little Warsaw into a cinematic version of the Arab street. Awnings that had once read Obiady Polski (Polish Dinners) now surged with Arabic script. Tanks rolled past under klieg lights. Wandering down the imitation Atlantic Avenue, it was easy to imagine that all of our carefully constructed ethnic identities were nothing but Hollywood sets, as specious a notion as the species Syrianica, a scaffolding you could put up or tear down in a couple of hours.

The city had papered Greenpoint’s streetlights with flyers forbidding people to park because of Martial Law, the movie’s working title; as it happened, many Greenpointers had fled Poland in the early 1980s, when it was under actual Communist martial law. Middle-aged Polish émigrés would stop and glower at the Hollywood diktats with gloomy satisfaction: You see? I told you it would happen here too.

Back in September 2001, red and yellow traffic lights flowed over the dark windshield. The few cars ghosting down the empty avenue ignored them. Everyone ran red lights during the days after the attacks. Stopping seemed pointless, like everything else.

No, man, that’s not true, I said finally. "A lot of the Arabs here left their countries because they weren’t al-Qaeda. A lot of them left to get away from those guys."

Al-Qaeda wouldn’t have had much use for my Arab: he’s a Shiite, at least by birth. But introducing the Sunni-Shiite divide seemed a little ambitious in this case. They left cause their countries were messed up, I said. "The ones that are here are the ones that wanted to come to America."

He looked hard at me in the rearview mirror, his eyes flashing in the little strip of glass.

I sighed. You know, most of the Arabs here in the U.S. are actually Christians.

A cowardly argument. My own Arab was a Muslim, after all.

Shyeah! the cabbie spat. "They act like they’re Christians. They pretend. But they’re really al-Qaeda."

Gray metal shutters hid the store windows, but memory filled in what I couldn’t see. Here on my right was Malko Karkanni’s shabby storefront, jammed with bins of olives and dusty coffeepots. Mr. Karkanni liked to talk; if you had time, he would pull out a stool, make you tea, and talk about the lack of human rights in Syria, the country he still missed. Ahead on the left was a restaurant named Fountain, with a real fountain inside, like an Ottoman courtyard; once, when I told the waiter where my grandmother was from, he broke into fluent Greek. And here was Sahadi’s, the famous deli and supermarket, run by a family that has been part of New York ever since 1895, when Abraham Sahadi opened his import-export company in lower Manhattan, back when my ancestors were still plowing fields in Scotland, Galicia, and the Peloponnese.

Well, my boyfriend’s an Arab, I said suddenly. The words tumbled out, high-pitched and breathless. And he’s not al-Qaeda, and I have a lot of Arab friends, and they’re not al-Qaeda either!

The eyes flashed back at me again, a little more anxiously this time. Was he going to kick me out of his car? Would he call the police, the FBI, and tell them about me and my Arab boyfriend?

Or would he just shake his head and decide that I was a fool—one of a breed of unfortunate women who marry foreign men, put them through flight school, and end up later on talk shows insisting that he seemed so normal? Like Annette Bening in The Siege, who falls for an educated Arab guy, a Palestinian college professor who acts normal but—you can’t trust them—turns out to be a terrorist in the end?

He thought about it for a block or two before he spoke. His voice was casual, and unexpectedly gentle, as if we had backed up and rewound the whole conversation to the beginning.

You know that place Sahadi’s? he said. "Y’ever been in there? They got some great food in there, yeah. Hummus, falafel, you know. Boy, that stuff is pretty good. You ever try it?"

There’s a saying in Arabic: Fi khibz wa meleh bainetna—there is bread and salt between us. It means that once we’ve eaten together, sharing bread and salt, the ancient symbols of hospitality, we cannot fight. It’s a lovely idea, that you can counter conflict with cuisine. And I don’t swallow it for a second. Just look at any civil war. Or at our own dinner tables, groaning with evidence to the contrary.

After September 11, liberal New Yorkers flocked to Arabic restaurants, Afghan, even Indian—anything that seemed vaguely Muslim, as if to say, Hey, we know you’re not the bad guys. Look, we trust you, we’re eating your food. New York newspapers ran stories about foreigners and their food, most of which followed much the same formula: the warmhearted émigré alludes mournfully to troubles in his homeland; assures the readers that not all Arabs/Afghans/Muslims are bad; and then shares his recipe for something involving eggplants. They were everywhere after September 11, photos of immigrants holding out plates of food, their eyes beseeching, Don’t deport me! Have some hummus! But a lot of them did get deported, and American soldiers got sent to Afghanistan and Iraq. A decade later, the lesson seems clear: You can eat eggplant until your toes turn purple, and it won’t stop governments from going to war.

But then again, there is something about food. Even the most ordinary dinner tells manifold stories of history, economics, and culture. You can experience a country and a people through its food in a way that you can’t through, say, its news broadcasts.

Food connects. In biblical times, people sealed contracts with salt, because it preserves, protects, and heals—an idea that goes back to the ancient Assyrians, who called a friend a man of my salt. Like Persephone’s pomegranate seeds, the alchemy of eating binds you to a place and a people. This bond is fragile; people who eat together one day can kill each other the next. All the more reason we should preserve it.

Many books narrate history as a series of wars: who won, who lost, who was to blame (usually the ones who lost). I look at history as a series of meals. War is part of our ongoing struggle to get food—most wars are over resources, after all, even when the parties pretend otherwise.

But food is also part of a deeper conflict, one that we all carry inside us: whether to stay in one place and settle down, or whether to stay on the move. The struggle between these two tendencies, whether it takes the form of war or not, shapes the story of human civilization. And so this is a book about war, but it is also about travel and migration, and how food helps people find or re-create their homes.

One of my old journalism professors, a man with the unforgettable name of Dick Blood, used to roar that if you want to write the story, you have to eat the meal. He was talking about Thanksgiving, when reporters visit homeless shelters, collect a few quotes, and head back to the newsroom to pump out heartwarming little features without ever tasting the turkey. But I’ve found that this command—You have to eat the meal—is a good rule for life in general. And so whenever I visit a new place, I pursue a private ritual: I never let myself leave without eating at least one local thing.

We all carry maps of the world in our heads. Mine, if you could see it, would resemble a gigantic dinner table, full of dishes from every place I’ve been. Spanish Harlem is a cubano. Tucson is avocado chicken. Chicago is yaprakis; Beirut is makdous; and Baghdad—well, Baghdad is another story.

In the fall of 2003, I spent my honeymoon in Baghdad. I’d married the boyfriend, who was also a reporter, and his newspaper had posted him to Iraq. So I moved to Beirut, with my brand-new husband and a few suitcases, and then to Baghdad.

For the next year, we tried to act like normal newlyweds. We did our laundry, went grocery shopping, and argued about what to have for dinner like any young couple, while reporting on the war. And throughout all of it, I cooked.

Some people construct work spaces when they travel, lining up their papers with care, stacking their books on the table, taping family pictures to the mirror. When I’m in a strange new city and feeling rootless, I cook. No matter how inhospitable the room or the streets outside, I construct a little field kitchen. In Baghdad, it was a hot plate plugged into a dubious electrical socket in the hallway outside the bathroom. I haunt the local markets and cook whatever I find: fresh green almonds, fleshy black figs, just-killed chickens with their heads still on. I cook to comprehend the place I’ve landed in, to touch and feel and take in the raw materials of my new surroundings. I cook foods that seem familiar and foods that seem strange. I cook because eating has always been my most reliable way of understanding the world. I cook because I am always, always hungry. And I cook for that oldest of reasons: to banish loneliness, homesickness, the persistent feeling that I don’t belong in a place. If you can conjure something of substance from the flux of your life—if you can anchor yourself in the earth, like Antaeus, the mythical giant who grew stronger every time his feet touched the ground—you are at home in the world, at least for that meal.

In every war zone, there is another battle, a shadow conflict that rages quietly behind the scenes. You don’t see much of it on television or in the movies. This hidden war consists of the slow but relentless destruction of everyday civilian life: The children can’t go to school. The pregnant woman can’t give birth at a hospital. The farmer can’t plow his fields. The musician can’t play his guitar. The professor can’t teach her class. For civilians, war becomes a relentless accumulation of can’ts.

But no matter what else you can’t do, you still have to eat. During wartime, people’s lives begin to revolve around food: first to stay alive, but also to stay human. Food restores a sense of familiarity. It allows us to reach out to others, because cooking and eating are often communal activities. Food can cut across social barriers, spanning class and sectarian lines (though it can also, of course, reinforce them). Making and sharing food are essential to maintaining the rhythms of everyday life.

I went to the Middle East like most Americans, relatively naive about both Arab culture and American foreign policy. Over the next six years, I saw plenty of war, but I also saw normal, everyday life. I sat through ceremonial dinners with tribal sheikhs in Baghdad; kneeled and ate kubbet hamudh on the floor with Iraqi women from Fallujah; drank home-brewed arak with Christian militiamen in the mountains of Lebanon; feasted on boiled turkey with a mild-mannered peshmerga warlord in Kurdistan; and learned how to make yakhnet kusa and many other dishes from my Lebanese mother-in-law, Umm Hassane, who doesn’t speak a word of English. Other people saw more, did more, risked more. But I ate more.

If you want to understand war, you have to understand everyday life first. The dominant narrative of the Middle East is perpetual conflict: the bombs and the bullets and the battles are always different, and yet always, somehow, depressingly the same. And so this book is not about the ever-evolving ways in which people kill or die during wars but about how they live before, during, and after those wars. It’s about the millions of small ways people cope—the ways they arrange their lives, under sometimes unimaginable stress and hardship, and the ways they survive.

Every society has an immune system, a silent army that tries to bring the body politic back to homeostasis. People find ways to reconstruct their daily lives from the shambles of war; like my friend Leena, who once held a dinner party in her Beirut bomb shelter, they work with what they have. This is the story of that other war, the one that takes place in the moments between bombings: the baker keeps the communal oven going so his neighborhood can have bread; the restaurateur converts his café into a refugee center; the farmer feeds his neighbors from his dwindling stock of preserves; the parents drive all over Baghdad trying to find an open bakery so their daughter can have a birthday cake. They are warriors just as much as those who carry guns. There are many ways to save civilization. One of the simplest is with food.

Chapter 1

The Quiet Assassin

IN A RATIONAL world, Mohamad and I would never last. I talk; he observes. I launch into rambling, circuitous stories whose destinations I sometimes forget before I’m halfway through. He’ll listen quietly, then eviscerate with one perfect sentence. I like to drink. He’ll take a sip or two of red wine, then sit and watch with a quiet smile. He is calm and rational; I’m proud, opinionated, and easily enraged. I curse like a sailor. He does not. You will never hear Mohamad describe anything as the biggest in the universe or the dumbest thing I ever heard. Without hyperbole I would die.

Nowhere do we disagree so much as over food. I will eat anything, from tongue to tripe to grilled lamb testicles—a delicacy in Lebanon, which is just one of many reasons I like the place. In school I was that kid who sidled up to you and said, You gonna eat that? Watching me finish off leftover meatballs, a friend once observed, You know, Annia, I think you’d eat a roll of paper towels if someone told you it was food.

Mohamad, on the other hand, refuses to consume: asparagus, artichokes, mushrooms, beets; anything cruciferous; pumpkin not in the form of pie; duck; pork; fish of any kind, shellfish, seaweed, and anything else that emerges from water, such as frogs or eels; beef that hasn’t been cooked to resemble linoleum; coffee or beer. That is a partial list.

A friend invited us to dinner once and called me first to find out what Mohamad liked.

How about I tell you what he doesn’t like instead? I said, in case she had any ideas.

There was a long silence as she imagined life with someone who refused to eat all these foods.

Wow, Annia, she said in a hushed voice. And then: "You must love him a lot."

Strange, then, that the whole thing started off with food. And a convoluted, introverted kind of food at that: stuffed grape leaves. If we hadn’t eaten the grape leaves, Mohamad wouldn’t have asked me about my grandmother; if I hadn’t told him about my grandmother, he would never have talked about his mother, and we wouldn’t have heard the stories (or was it the stuffed grape leaves themselves?) that made us realize we were falling in love.

In any event, I blame the grape leaves. They got us talking; they instigated our travels—across the Boulevard of Death, to Turkey, on to Afghanistan, and ultimately to Baghdad and Beirut.

But first to Queens.

I watched him for a moment before he saw me. He was waiting for me as I walked down out of the elevated train station, a grave, small figure standing still amid the roaring tide of rush-hour commuters, satiny black hair almost, but not quite, concealing his eyes. They were big and long-lashed, the color of roasted cocoa beans, beneath straight black eyebrows. What saved him from looking too pretty was the long, sardonic nose and the posture of a man whose idea of an exciting evening is poring over city procurement documents. Mohamad covered transportation for Newsday, the Long Island–based newspaper. I wrote about urban poverty and politics for a small monthly newsmagazine. It was April 2001.

In those days I believed that transportation, the warp of bridges and buses and subways that wove New York City’s eight million souls together, was the most glamorous beat in the world. And so, during our occasional dinners, we spoke of transportation policy. Over Indian food on Sixth Street, we outlined the city’s ten-step franchise approval process; at Habib’s, a cramped East Village falafel place, where Habib played Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, we spoke of pedestrianization. Over dessert, we discussed the intricate beauties of congestion pricing. Our conversation bristled with acronyms of city, state, and federal agencies: HPD, MTA, HCFA. The stuff of romance, of adventure, it was not.

And yet, every time this new friend called me, I felt a mysterious exhilaration. I saved up anecdotes about obscure city bureaucrats to tell him. Sometimes I laughed out loud for no reason. I told myself these feelings were just the novelty of getting to know a new friend. A nice guy, I told my friends, but a little boring. We mostly just talk about work. But the truth was that I would talk about work. He would listen.

Mohamad is a quiet man. He speaks so softly and so seldom that one of his former coworkers christened him the quiet assassin. That watchfulness made him a formidable investigative reporter. But over dinner it made my palms sweat. If I asked him a question, he would pause before responding, watching me silently, and I would feel that I was the one being interrogated. I avoided looking directly into his eyes; whenever I did, I would forget what I was saying, caught off guard by their expression of amused intelligence. And so I would stare down at his precisely folded hands, or at his mouth, with its occasional crooked hint of a smile, and keep talking. I can talk as much as I can eat, and at the same time too.

He never talked about himself and seldom ventured an opinion. Which was a shame, because something about his voice made my heart beat faster, perhaps because I hardly ever heard it. His eyes hinted at thoughts and stories, hidden away somewhere inside. But maybe I was imagining that. I was about to give up on him when unexpectedly, one sunny spring day, he invited me out to his neighborhood in Queens.

Mohamad pointed out the neighborhood landmarks as we walked: here was Queens Boulevard, so perilous to pedestrians that the New York Daily News had christened it the Boulevard of Death. And here was Sunnyside Gardens, where he lived, the famous Progressive-era experiment in shared urban living. Rows of brick garden apartments all backed onto a massive common garden: a shared backyard for children to play, dogs to gambol, and families to eat picnics together.

The Gardens is a cool idea because people have to cooperate, and get along with their neighbors, so they can share the space, Mohamad said.

Then he laughed, rolled his eyes. Of course, what usually ends up happening is they each just take their own piece of the yard and fence it off. But still. It’s a nice idea.

Sunnyside was the world in miniature: Irish bars built by migrant contractors; windowless Romanian nightclubs; Mexican women selling tamales out of coolers; Korean barbecue joints. There was even, over across the boulevard, a Turkish restaurant.

Turkish?

My grandmother was Greek. She had died a year earlier, and the loss of her was a dull ache that never went away. Eating stuffed grape leaves, one of her signature dishes, relieved it for a while.

Can we go there?

He shrugged. Why not? We forded the boulevard at a crosswalk and opened the door.

Inside, the restaurant was quiet and dark. A television flickered soundlessly in the back. A glass case held plates of food in unfamiliar shapes and colors. I ordered grape leaves and baba ghanouj and a grainy red substance that looked like it had been shaped inside a clenched fist (which, as it turned out, it had).

The waiter stood over us with our plates. He tilted his head and studied me through narrowed eyes.

Excuse me, he said, in hesitant, slightly accented English. But you look Turkish. You are Turkish perhaps?

No, I said and smiled. But you’re close. I’m part Greek.

His head flinched back a little, as if I’d gone to slap him. They always do that. The Greco-Turkish War ended in 1922, but people don’t forget these things overnight.

Ah, he said, putting down the plates. Placing one hand on his heart, he swirled the other outward in an expansive semicircle. Then welcome. My . . . supposed enemy.

Some recipes are poems. A few scene stealers are novellas. But stuffed grape leaves are short stories—tiny fables of transformation, not of people (though the best recipes can do that too) but of food.

Most of the grape leaves you get in restaurants come from giant industrial cans. But every once in a while you find a place whose owners are stubborn enough to make their own. When they taste right, I am back in Chicagoland, circa 1977. I can hear the asthmatic growl of our old smoke-stained Frigidaire, WGN’s theme music crackling out of our black-and-white Zenith; can smell lamb stewing on the stove with tomatoes and zucchini, fogging up the windows; can see my grandmother in the kitchen, smoking Bugler roll-your-owns and wrapping yaprakis, which is what our family always called stuffed grape leaves. Yaprak is Turkish for leaf. But it can also mean layer, like the buttery tulle of baklava; or page, like the brittle brown pages of Leaves of Grass, my grandmother’s favorite book.

Yaprakis are the food of people who waste nothing, not even the leathery leaves of the grape. Waste not, want not was Grandma’s credo: whatever raw ingredient she had, she’d cook it, save it, hoard little scraps of it, and turn them into stock. She composted long before compost was cool. Meat and dairy leftovers she fed to our family’s irregular army of half-breed Siamese cats. In her kitchen, nothing was ever wasted: instead, it metamorphosed and came back as something else.

She grew up in the Great Depression, and that was part of it. But it went deeper than just saving money. I know whatever you take from the earth, you’ll have to put back, she told me once, the summer before she died. You have to give back to the world. That’s what they always told me—my parents, my elders—growing up. So I always plant seeds, always plant things, all my life.

Her garden grew bushels of plump green beans, which she added to lamb stew; wine-dark tomatoes, to be salted and tossed with oregano, olive oil, crumbled feta, and onions sliced paper thin (you sopped up the brine with day-old bread); corn and potatoes and zucchini and dill. And along the fence, a grapevine grew glossy dark green leaves, which she stuffed with rice and meat and braised in the lemony egg broth avgolémono.

All foods have an invisible ingredient, a kind of culinary dark matter without which the dish will never taste exactly right. Pesto is best pounded by hand with a mortar and pestle; bruised, the cell walls of the basil leaves expel their oils more generously, making a silkier, more emulsified sauce than if they are slit open by the sharp metal blades of a blender or a knife. In this case, the secret ingredient is blunt force: pesto, from the Italian pestare, means pounded.

Sometimes the secret ingredient is time. Make zucchini stew in a pressure cooker and you’ll have it on the table in an hour, but it will taste flat and tinfoily. Let the meat and onions get to know each other for a couple of hours, and the flavor will add up to more than what you put in the pot.

Stuffed grape leaves take forever to make. Make them alone and you’ll die of boredom, which is why very few people make them these days. You need to be surrounded by relatives, friends, neighbors; you need gossip and stories and talk. Perhaps you have to be a little distracted, so that the leaves come out different sizes and cook in different times. Or maybe the leaves need to be rolled by many different hands: one look at the dark green avalanche that Leena and her nimble-fingered daughters produce in their Beirut kitchen and you can tell whose hands rolled which leaf. Whatever the reason, when they’re made communally, stuffed grape leaves create cascading layers of flavor in much the same manner that telling the same story from different points of view adds layers of meaning. Grape leaves are a narrative dish: each ingredient speaks as the package unfolds, containing multitudes, little edible matryoshka dolls.

In some mythical, soft-focus Peloponnesian past, my grandmother might have sat outside, under a leafy arbor of grapevines, rolling yaprakis with her sisters. In Chicago, when my grandmother got together with her sisters, they