Tag: Writing

May Bsisu’s The Arab Table – Reading Recipes for Cultural Understandings

Bsisu, May. (2005). The Arab Table: Recipes and Culinary Traditions. New York: William Morrow.

For years, I had only one cookbook, The Joy of Cooking, a present from my mother. But after I started to do research on foodways in Southern Arabia, I began to buy cookbooks to learn more about Arabic foodways in general and to compare and contrast with Dhofari foodways. My areas of interest are how “the Arab table” can have various meanings in various locations and what those meanings might be in Dhofar.

My favorite cookbook so far is May Bsisu’s The Arab Table (2005). She is so generous and comprehensive; she lived in several countries including Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, England and the United States so she knows several food traditions and the difficulties of cooking “home” food in a new land. She includes data about which plants grow where (e.g. 252) and recipes for non-Muslim celebrations (299, 303, 345). The photos are gorgeous, the recipes are clearly written and she always gives hints, substitutions and information about where to get ingredients. I wish I had someone who would cook the delicious dishes for me!

I am reading it for cultural data, trying to catch the moments of surprise then exploring and articulating the variances, such as the difference between Bsisu’s threed/ thareed recipe (188, a platter layered with bread covered with sauce, then rice, then chicken and finished with a garnish) and how it is made in Salalah (a soup to which pieces of dried bread is added). Her chicken schwarma recipe (190) calls for pieces, not slices, of chicken. She has Um Khalid (331); in Dhofar the bread-pudding dessert is called Um Ali.

She describes specific foods for New Year’s which indicate happiness (322), something I have not found here. In asking about ‘performative’ food, i.e. food that brings about a change such as good luck, my informants say that is not part of Dhofari cultures, although there are foods for physical changes such as to lose or gain weight. She also discusses foods, such as raw meat (225) and certain cheeses (16), which are not eaten here.

Other difference are that many recipes require a specific cooking environment such as accessories not easily found in Dhofar (especially in 2005 when the book was published, for example fleece blankets 220), the implication that meat is bought from butchers who will prepare meat as requested (207), and the implied need for a fully out-fitted kitchen with spice-grinder, food processor, sauce-boats, plates to invert dishes on, etc.

Thus reading The Arab Table is fun on several levels. First there are great recipes and also I can see how not just the food choices, but the expectations of serving food, vary greatly between cultures.  For example, Bsisu discusses putting things of “each guest’s plate” (188) and setting up various “table” or “stations” for dinners (264-6) whereas in Dhofar, almost every main dish is eaten communally and guests sit in one location unless it is a large wedding party with a buffet.

At a party in a private home, there might be a table with desserts, but guests do not choose for themselves. A plate is made up and brought to them. At an Omani wedding party once, the hostess told me that she would bring a plate for me. I told her not to bother and got up and took sweets for myself. Later I realized how rude I had been, to deny her the chance to take care of a guest and to possibly allow others to judge her as not being an attentive hostess, to let a clearly foreign woman fend for herself.

The Arab Table is an excellent, thorough, big-hearted overview of Arab cooking.

https://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/00000144-0a39-d3cb-a96c-7b3d746a0000

(photo above is from social media, I didn’t want to take images from her book without permission)

 

Food Here and There/ Missing Food

While traveling recently I was thinking about how people miss foods when they are not in their home culture, but it’s more complicated than that. Sometimes you miss a certain taste (Diet Coke served with a lime slice and a lot of ice) and sometimes it’s a food experience (food + activity, walking around a mall with a Diet Coke in hand).

When I am not in Oman, I don’t miss food – I miss food experiences. I don’t like rice, but I miss white rice with grilled fresh fish served with dates, eaten on a beach with friends next to a campfire. I miss the way of eating: eating with my hands and the knowledge that all food is communal, that I can take something from another person’s plate without worrying that they will be upset and all my food is up for grabs from someone else. I don’t miss hummus, but I miss how hummus (and all appetizers) are shared. There’s no ‘I ordered this, it’s mine, if you want to try you have to ask my permisson’ but you ask for hummus and fatoush, the person you are with gets vine leaves and baba ganoush and you each take as much as you want from any dish.

When I am in Oman, I really miss coffee, the joy of a waiter or waitress walking towards me with a large carafe of coffee that will be put on my table. I have had more than my fill of “espresso-coffee” (espresso with hot water is not really coffee!). And I miss food. I miss pie. I miss raspberries, big salads with 25 ingredients, cheese plates and Mexican food. I miss a real breakfast: eggs, toast, hash browns and all the trimmings. I miss the taste of cranberries: cranberry juice and cranberry/ orange muffins.

Thinking about ‘missing’ reminds me of a great quote from Adam Gopnik’s Paris to the Moon (2001)

The things an American who is abroad for a very long time misses—or at least the things I missed—I was discovering, weren’t the things you were supposed to miss. We are supposed to come to Europe for leisure, sunshine, a more civilized pace, for slowness of various kinds. America we are supposed to miss for its speed, its friendliness, for the independence of its people and the individualism of their lives. Yet these were not the things I missed, and when I speak to Americans who have lived abroad for a long time, those are not the things they seem to miss either. I didn’t miss crosstown traffic, New York taxicabs, talk radio or talk television, or the constant, appalling flow of opinion that spills out like dirty floodwater…

I found, to my surprise, that what I missed and longed for was the comforting loneliness of life in New York, a certain kind of scuffed-up soulfulness. In Paris no relationship, even one with a postman or a dry cleaner, is abstract or anonymous; human relations are carved out in a perpetual present tense. There’s an intricacy of debits and credits. Things have histories…The things Americans miss tend to involve that kind of formlessness, small, casual, and solitary pleasures. A psychoanalyst misses walking up Lafayette Street in her tracksuit, sipping coffee from a Styrofoam cup with the little plastic piece that pops up. My wife, having been sent the carrot cake that she missed from New York, discovered that what she really missed was standing up at the counter and eating carrot cake in the company of strangers at the Bon Vivant coffee shop.

 

 

 

 

“Arabic Coffee,” a poem by Naomi Shihab Nye

A lovely poem by a wonderful poet.   (complete image is below)

It was never too strong for us:

make it blacker, Papa,

thick in the bottom,

tell again how the years will gather

in small white cups,

how luck lives in a spot of grounds.

Leaning over the stove, he let it

boil to the top, and down again.

Two times. No sugar in his pot.

And the place where men and women

break off from one another

was not present in that room.

The hundred disappointments,

fire swallowing olive-wood beads

at the warehouse, and the dreams

tucked like pocket handkerchiefs

into each day, took their places

on the table, near the half-empty

dish of corn. And none was

more important than the others,

and all were guests. When

he carried the tray into the room,

high and balanced in his hands,

it was an offering to all of them,

stay, be seated, follow the talk

wherever it goes. The coffee was

the center of the flower.

Like clothes on a line saying

You will live long enough to wear me,

a motion of faith. There is this,

and there is more.

Nye, Naomi Shihab. (2002). Arabic Coffee. Poems by Naomi Shihab Nye. Now Classroom. http://www.pbs.org/now/arts/nyepoems2.html

Essays about Teaching Poems

John Clare Looks Good in a Dishdash: Linking John Clare to Middle Eastern Poetry

Marlowe in Salalah: Making English Poetry Relevant – 2008

Teaching Literature and Staying au courant – The Man from Nowhere and the Ancient Greeks

Foodways and Literature – Food Stories and Poems

Foodways and Literature – Animal Poems

Teaching Paired Literary Texts

Translating Western Conceptions of “Nature” to the Middle East – 2009

gm - coffee 2

I am happy to announce that my article “مناقشة إثنوغرافية للحكايات الشعبية من جنوب عمان” [An Ethnographic Discussion of Folk Tales from Southern Oman] has been published in the journal Al Sha’ar (Alaan Publishers, Amman).

(photo by M. A. Al Awaid)

This paper examines the cultural markers within a set of folk tales recorded in southern Oman. In the 1970s Dr. Tom Johnstone documented the un-written, Modern South Arabian languages of Gibali (also known as Jibbali and Shehri) and Mehri in the Dhofar region of Oman. In 2014, Dr. Aaron Rubin’s published a book on Gibali grammar based on his own research, Johnstone’s notes and data from Gibali speakers living in America; the book includes 70 texts of taped speech transliterated into Gibali with an accompanying English translation which cover a variety of genres including folk tales, autobiography, grammar exercises, and fairy tales.

The paper explains how the folk tales texts are representative of southern Omani culture by analyzing the various textual elements such as characters, setting, plot events and theme, as well as physical markers such as landscape and animals. These texts are among the very few documents written in Gibali and help illustrate ways in which the Dhofari culture has, and has not changed, since the rapid modernization after the 1970s. I will also compare the elements from the Johnston/ Ali Al Mahri/ Rubin texts with folk tales from other texts Khadija bint Alawi al-Thahab’s Stories of My Grandmother: Folk Tales from Dhofar, Hatim Al Taie and Joan Pickersgill’s Omani Folk Tales, and Grace Todino-Gonguet’s Halimah and the Snake, and other Omani Folk Tales.

 

 

Food Tastes Better in the Rain – Khareef in Salalah

I had been in Salalah about ten months and it was the first day of my first khareef (the word means ‘autumn’ in Arabic, it’s used in Salalah to mean the monsoon season from the end of June until the end of August). I walked outside my house, felt the drizzle on my face and walked back in. With a washcloth I dried my face and thought about how could I possibly keep my hair de-frizzed in such humidity.

A few hours later, some of the Omani men in my research group stopped by. I made tea and set the carafe on a tray with cups and cookies and brought it into the majlis. One of the men picked up the tray and brought it out to the garden.

“We are NOT eating out there, it’s wet!” I yelled.

Oh, we were most certainly eating out there; it’s khareef. Time to eat outside.

For me then (and to a certain extent, even now) I don’t get it. Omanis are always so clean, so well-turned out: impeccable clothes, gorgeous perfumes and everything spotless. Why would you want to go sit in muddy fields and get rained on? And the mosquitos! Let’s not forget the mosquitos and some other smaller insect that leaves a welt that lasts for three days. And what happens to the food? Rained on. Damp cookies, soggy bread, a film of water on everything and you have to constantly drink tea to stay warm in your damp clothes.

“Isn’t it gorgeous?” Omanis say to me.

I try to smile, using a mushy Kleenex to dry off my face, “Oh lovely!” And it is, the grass turning green, the fog rolling in, that wonderful damp earth smell – but could we not enjoy this through a plate glass window? No, we could not.

I have bowed to the inevitable and bought a water-proof purse; I wear washable Crocs. I have learned to always keep a stick or two of wood in my car so that it stays dry enough to get a fire started. I used to try to keep all the food covered but have given on that. Rain on the kabsa, rain on the briyani, rain on the mandi, rain on the mishgak (meat kebabs).

I have been on magical picnics. If you are sitting near the edge of a cliff, the clouds move in and out, opening and closing the vista down to the sea or over the plains. In the mountains, the ground is a carpet of green, with beautiful white flowers and purple flowers later in the season.

The culture you are born into is hard to shake; there are times I long for an umbrella, a rain jacket and a crisp cookie. But, food tastes better in the rain, or so I am told.

IMG_3202

(photo from social media)

 

My article “An Ethnographic Discussion of Fairy Tales and Folktales from Southern Oman” will be published in Fabula

I am pleased to announce that my article “An Ethnographic Discussion of Fairy Tales and Folktales from Southern Oman” will be published in Fabula [https://www.degruyter.com/view/j/fabl]

This article discusses a collection of fairy and folktales from southern Oman to explain how some of the physical and cultural markers described in the texts which are still extant today. The tales, most of which were recorded in the 1970s, were originally spoken in Gibali (also known as Jibbali or Shahri, a non-written, Modern South Arabian language) and are published in Rubin’s The Jibbali Language of Oman: Grammar and Texts (2014). This paper does not place these texts within established codices; rather, the exegesis turns inward, examining how these stories, recorded at the beginning of modernization in the Dhofar region, reflect many traditional elements of Gibali cultures. Further, the article compares the texts to other Dhofari/ Omani fairy and folktales from Al Thahab’s Stories of My Grandmother: Folk Tales from Dhofar (2012), Al Taie and Pickersgill’s Omani Folk Tales (2008), and Todino-Gonguet’s Halimah and the Snake and other Omani Folk Tales (2008) to highlight how the Johnstone/ Al Mahri/ Rubin texts show Dhofari beliefs about oath-taking and the importance of teaching morality in written, but not oral, texts.

 

 

Ramadan and Foodways – Images of food in connection to greetings and good behavior, Vimto and selling food

Marieke Brandt (2017) and John Postill (2016) have written about using social media to do anthropological research in places that are difficult to reach; it is also valuable when you are living in the same area. Scanning social media in Dhofar helps me to understand how food is conceptualized during the holy month of Ramadan. The analysis of the images comes next, but for now I am trying to discover the range of images and sorting through to see what kind of categories are found (and not found). In this post are some examples of food images in Ramadan greetings, different type of images with Vimto (a drink that has become associated with Ramadan), efforts by the government/ official channels to encourage good eating and generous behavior and an example of how prepared food is sold.

Food as a part of typical Ramadan greetings

 

The importance of Vimto!

 

Vimto at McDonald’s and Baskin-Robbins

 

Vimto as decoration

 

Fun with Vimto

vimto - moon

Efforts by government and private entities to improve eating habits during Ramadan

ramadan - nuts

This slideshow is stills from an ad which makes fun of people who have too much of something as a way to caution people against making too much (and then wasting) food at Iftar: a man who has several watches, a woman who has several TVs, a man wearing several hats, then the message.

 

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Stills from a short video reminding people to not embarrass (judge) others during Ramadan. The video starts with 2 women preparing iftar, one is seen by a man as she eats a samosa. Then you see the family sitting at the table and enjoying iftar. The man pretends to ask the girl if she is enjoying the food, then humiliates for breaking her fast. As she looks sad, his wife pulls his dishdash and explains that she has a lawful reason not to fast.

 

There are many photos to children helping to prepare Iftar/ handing out food

iftar help

Selling prepared food for Iftar:

 

The photos of the woman selling food are taken from an ad on social media which shows close-ups of several types of food and an description of the exact location of her tent.