levantish [in progress]

Levantish is a nostalgia and historical memory project masquerading as a recipe website. I've spent most of my life learning Lebanese recipes from my parents and extended family, and lately I've been exploring ways to preserve and share them.

Many of our recipes are passed generationally. I make tabbouli the way my mother makes it, which is based on the way her mother made it. Parsley-powered time travel. But I'm worried about these things getting lost. So I've been putting them to words, which hasn't been easy because no one in my family (including me!) likes to record recipes.

The plan is to publish and grow this collection as a site or web app. It'll include family dishes, others from around the Levant, and many I've developed, too. I'm still thinking through exactly what this looks like. I want to avoid the blog-then-recipe format (though that's often driven by copyright incentives) and the million ad popup pages that are the norm now. But I also want the project to be protected and sustainable. There are underexplored forms of digital publishing I'm interested in experimenting with (evolving books, interactive guides, etc.), and this project may be a good place to start.

Check back here for updates (I'm hoping to get a version of this out sometime in 2024). Until then, here's my favorite poem with themes of nostalgia, place, and food.

What I've Lost

Mahmoud Darwish

In exile you choose a space to tame habit, a private space for your journal. So you write: Place is not the trap. We can say: Here we have a side street, a post office, a bread seller, a laundry, a tobacco shop, a tiny corner, and a smell that remembers …

Cities are smells: Acre is the smell of iodine and spices. Haifa is the smell of pine and wrinkled sheets. Moscow is the smell of vodka on ice. Cairo is the smell of mango and ginger. Beirut is the smell of the sun, sea, smoke, and lemons. Paris is the smell of fresh bread, cheese, and derivations of enchantment. Damascus is the smell of jasmine and dried fruit. Tunis is the smell of night musk and salt. Rabat is the smell of henna, incense, and honey. A city that cannot be known by its smell is unreliable. Exiles have a shared smell: the smell of longing for something else; a smell that resembles another smell. A panting, nostalgic smell that guides you, like a worn tourist map, to the smell of the original place. A smell is a memory and a setting sun. Sunset, here, is beauty rebuking the stranger.

But to love the sunset is not, as they say, one of the attributes of exile.

Memory, your personal museum, takes you into the realms of what is lost. A sesame field, a plot of lettuce, mint, a round sun that falls into the sea. What is lost grows in you and in the sunset, which grants what is distant the attributes of paradise and purges it of any defect. Whatever is lost is worshipped. Yet it is not so!

Rein in place, then, with the halter of expression! Carry it, just as you carry your name, not your shadow, in your imagination, not in a suitcase. In this sunset words alone are qualified to restore what was broken in time and place and to name gods that paid no attention to you and waged their wars with primitive weapons. Words are the raw materials for building a house. Words are a homeland.