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 spent more time rolling dice for Yahtzee than grape leaves for yaprakis. So my grandmother made the complicated foods that she loved—éclairs, yaprakis, foods within food—at home in her kitchen with me. She would swaddle the rice with birdskin hands, as fragile and strong and delicately veined as the yaprak themselves. While she rolled each leathery green leaf she would tell me stories that crossed from true to make-believe and back again: stories that contained other stories, though I was too young to understand that then.
In my grandmother’s day, the 1930s and ’40s, very few of the big supermarkets carried “ethnic” foods like yogurt. “Tahini. Didja ever hear of it?” she asked me once, rolling grape leaves and cigarettes. “It’s sesame seeds—food of the gods! When we were children, my mother used to make yogurt. Then when she died, my father used to go to the Greek markets around Halsted and Harrison. He would bring anchovies and the orange fish roe and baklava. We thought that was just the nuts.”
She laughed, licked a cigarette paper between her lips. “Yogurt we thought was a treat,” she said. “Now you can get that stuff anywhere.”
Back in Queens, it began to dawn on me, a little late, that this meal might actually be something like a date. If so, I was committing the cardinal sin of talking endlessly about myself.
“Am I boring you?”
“No, not at all,” he said. But he was always exquisitely polite. Unlike me.
We stared at each other, then looked quickly down at our plates.
“You know,” he said, “my mom used to make grape leaves too.”
“Used to?”
“Well, I guess she still does. I meant when I was a kid. She’s in Lebanon.”
“But I thought you grew up here. Did she move back there?”
“No, she stayed in Lebanon. During the war.”
Beirut, circa 1979, a neighborhood called Shiyah: a jumble of crooked concrete buildings. Laundry and electrical wires tangled across the sky. Rebar jutted from the tops and sides of rough cement walls like porcupine quills; many of these buildings would stay just like this, perpetually unfinished, for the next thirty years. People lived in apartments with whole walls blasted open, cross-sectioned dioramas, like ants between glass. The Bazzi family—mother, father, three older brothers, one older sister, and little Mohamad—all stuffed themselves inside one tiny two-room flat.
But behind the building was a courtyard where a kid could play: a tree, a cinderblock wall, a patch of mangy grass. His mother planted gardenias and oregano in rusty powdered milk
tins and perched them on the wall where they would get some sun. At night, bullet casings and artillery fragments fell into the yard. In the morning, he collected the pieces of metal in a rattling tin can that used to hold mint candies. Other buildings loomed up and over, protecting the minuscule garden.
This neighborhood belonged to the Shiite Muslim militia Amal. The neighborhood a couple of blocks down the street belonged to a Christian militia. In between was a no-man’s-land, a ragged borderline that ran across the entire city. Some parts grew so abandoned, so shaggy with weeds and urban underbrush, that foreigners called it the “Green Line.” The Lebanese called it khatt al-tamaas, the line of contact. Aside from a few checkpoints where people could go from one side to the other, the snipers on both sides made the line virtually impossible to cross.
The militias did not tolerate neutrality. They called on young men to defend their neighborhoods, their families, their gods. Those who didn’t want to fight could be threatened, bullied, or beaten.
Or they joined the biggest militia of all, the army of the disappeared. More than seventeen thousand people, mostly fighting-age men, vanished into the void of the fifteen-year war. They evaporated at checkpoints and into ransomless kidnappings, their fates unknown (and yet a terrible certainty) to this day.
Or, if they were lucky and could get a visa to somewhere, anywhere, they left.
First to leave were Mohamad’s three older brothers: Hassan to France, Hassane to Spain, Ahmad and his wife to New York City. His sister Hanan stayed behind, but the brothers faced more danger from the militias that ruled the streets. They planned to return when the war was over.
And in one of those pristine, photographic moments that engineer our fates, his parents decided not to to send their youngest son to Paris, or Barcelona, but to Jackson Heights, Queens. It was 1985. He was ten years old.
The truth is I was never all that interested in the Middle East. I knew the basic story line. But when it came to the endless criminations and recriminations, the bitter arm-wrestling over history, my brain—like those of most Americans—glazed over.
Lebanon was different, though. It was part of my childhood, along with Sesame Street and Free to Be. . . You And Me and the war in Vietnam. I would lie underneath my grandmother’s piano, stretched out on the burnt-orange polyester shag rug, and watch the war on our blurry old television. Vietnam bled into Beirut with hardly a costume change, or so it seemed to my six-year-old mind. We had won the war in Vietnam, they told us in school, but now there was trouble in a place called Lebanon.
This alarmed me, because we went to Lebanon three or four times a year. Lebanon was the sleepy northern Indiana town that we passed through on the five-hour drive from Bloomington, where I grew up, to Chicago, where my grandparents lived. Lebanon had a rest stop where we would stretch our legs. Elderly couples in pastel polyester pantsuits ambled around their Winnebagos. Hoosiers traded fly-fishing tips while waiting in line for the drinking fountain. A family of stray cats lived in a culvert. It seemed harmless enough.
But the nightly news showed a black-and-white Lebanon where cars exploded, buildings fell, and old women screamed and clutched the sides of their heads. Sideburned men in bell-bottomed jeans dashed from building to building, cradling Kalashnikovs, in a life-or-death game of hide-and-go-seek.
The next time the war flashed past on TV, I asked my grandfather if we could skip Lebanon on the drive back to Bloomington.
He roared with laughter. “Hey Dina!” he shouted into the kitchen, where my grandmother was chain-smoking and grinding hamburger, refueling for her own domestic wars. “Listen to this! Putti thinks the war is in our Lebanon!”
I was embarrassed; I had said something silly, but I didn’t know what.
“No, Putti,” he said kindly, once he saw the scowl of confusion on my face. “That’s not the same Lebanon. That’s a different Lebanon from the one on TV.”
Mohamad laughed. Good. He wasn’t offended.
I was born in 1970, I told him—smack between Tet and Watergate. To us children of Nixon, Lebanon symbolized all that went wrong between humans, just as Vietnam did for our parents. And so when this man with whom I was maybe on a date told me that he was from Lebanon, I pictured something bigger than a patch of land half the size of New Jersey: a country of myth and symbols, a Lebanon of the imagination. When he spoke of his childhood in Beirut, I nodded and tried to look wise. Afterward I ran home and frantically Googled “civil war lebanon.” Who fought whom, and why? How did it start? How did it end?
Google didn’t tell me what I know now: that we are still fighting over the answers to these questions—still fighting, to this day, over the questions themselves.
Queens had its green lines too, but they were invisible. South Asians on one block; Irish on another. A shift in continents, from South Asia to South America. There were no checkpoints, no snipers—the boundaries only existed inside your head.
Ahmad lived with his wife and their baby daughter in a two-bedroom apartment in a massive red-brick building. The skinny, brooding ten-year-old from Beirut slept on the living room couch. Ahmad’s wife was unhappy in the new country, and food was one of the few things that she could control: if she had a treat—candy, cake—she would hide it from Mohamad and feed it to her daughter. In pictures from that time he looks ravenous, temporary, a skinny scowling kid hovering in the frame as if he were trying to disappear.
He learned English immediately and with no accent. His seventh-grade English teacher, Mrs. Hertz, convinced him to write stories for the school newspaper. By eighth grade he was covering local news—a church concert, a library exhibit—for the Western Queens Gazette. People laughed at the quiet, serious thirteen-year-old sitting in the back of the room with his notebook. But he didn’t care: in Lebanon, surrounded by older brothers and sister and cousins, he had always been the youngest person in the room. When he wrote stories, he missed Lebanon, and his mother and father, a little bit less.
In 1994, nine years after he left Beirut, Mohamad finally sat down to dinner with his entire family again. The war had been over for four years, but none of the brothers had returned to live in Lebanon. They were scattered, funneled into separate lives, with jobs and wives and children in different countries. They spoke English, French, and Spanish as well as Arabic. They gathered at Hassane’s house in Barcelona. Nobody said it, but they didn’t have to: there wouldn’t be any going back now.
That night, his mother made stuffed zucchini and grape leaves, one of her most spectacular meals. Holding each plump, stubby zucchini in one hand, she bored out the inside with a long metal file. She kept the boub alkusa, the pale green curlicues of interior flesh, and braised it with onions and seven spices to serve as a side dish. She kneaded rice and ground meat, flavored with cinnamon and allspice, and stuffed the delicate hollowed-out shells of zucchini, then the grape leaves one by one, holding each leaf in the palm of one hand while rolling it up with the other. She lined the bottom of a 12-quart pot with flat grape leaves to protect the vegetables from burning. She laid down a layer of stuffed grape leaves, then a layer of stuffed zucchini shells, packing them tightly together like masonry, alternating all the way up to the top, pressing them down with a plate, as if by making the most complicated food possible, nesting food within food, a Shahrazad of the stove, she could trick time and keep her family together forever.
When the meal was done, her children got up from the table and prepared to leave her once again. She began to cry.
“She said something I’ve never forgotten,” Mohamad told me, so quietly I had to lean forward to hear him. “She said, ‘What did I do, that God has cursed me this way, so that all my children have to live in different corners of the world?’”
In Bloomington, Indiana, where I grew up, we had a farmer’s market in the town square outside the courthouse. Every Saturday, farmers would drive in from the countryside before dawn, setting up stands heaped with whatever was in season: spring meant strawberry-and-rhubarb pie, wild
chives, and ramps. Summer brought peach pie, succotash, gooseberries, and corn. In fall we would drive out into the countryside and buy apple cider straight from the orchard. Giant lumpy green pumpkins right from the patch. Purple, white, and yellow Indian corn candy-striped with red. And in winter, when there was no harvest, we still had stone-milled cornmeal and Amish cheeses. The market was where my mother taught me to eat what was in season instead of the hard bright strawberries I always begged for at the grocery store. On Saturday mornings my mother would run into people she knew buying homemade pies, dried sassafras bark, or green bell peppers (such exotic items in the southern Indiana of the early 1970s, before globalization folded the ends of the earth together, that people referred to them as “mangoes”).
But when I was thirteen, my mother married the wrong man, at least according to my grandfather. Driven by demons that no one understood, least of all himself, my grandfather declared us “disowned.” His anachronistic gesture meant we were no longer welcome to visit the house I had always thought of as home—the piano, the burnt orange carpet, and my grandmother’s kitchen. My grandmother wasn’t happy about this, but what could she do? Her power stopped at the kitchen walls.
My mother and I packed all our possessions into the backseat of a beat-up old Honda and drove to her new husband’s place in Arizona. I didn’t know it then, but it would be years before we would settle down.
Our first stop was Ganado, a tiny northern Arizona town in the Navajo Indian Reservation. Ganado was my first high school, a series of doublewide trailers in the desert. Ganado was fry bread and posole and Navajo tacos, a giant flap of fried bread layered with beef, beans, cheese, onions, lettuce, tomatoes, and as much hot sauce as you could stand. My mother got divorced, and soon Ganado was just a tiny desert outpost disappearing in the rearview mirror.
Day of Honey: A Memoir of Food, Love, and War Page 3