Deaditerranean

The Kitchen as a Border Archive When I say borders changed what people ate, I mean something specific: the lines drawn by treaties, mandates, and military fronts between 1918 and 1949 did not just move populations. They moved pantries. They renamed dishes. They made certain ingredients illegal to sell, impossible to grow, or too expensive… Continue reading How Borders Changed What People Ate and What They Forgot

My grandmother kept a slab of halloum wrapped in wax paper in her Beirut fridge, and I grew up thinking of it as the least political food on earth: squeaky, salty, fried in a dry pan until it blistered. It took me years of writing about the Mediterranean’s moving borders to understand that in Cyprus… Continue reading How Borders Changed What People Ate — and What They Forgot: Halloumi, Hellim, and the 1974 Line That Split Cyprus’s Cheese

A border cuts twice. Once through the land, once through the memory of what that land grew and cooked. The second cut doesn’t show up on any map. It shows up in the kitchen. I write this column, Deaditerranean, because the recipes on our shelves are paperwork from expulsions. Soutzoukakia carries the 1923 Greek-Turkish population… Continue reading How Borders Changed What People Ate and What They Forgot: Soutzoukakia, Hellim, and the Jaffa Orange

The sound gets there first. Before the smell, before anything. A copper briki on a gas flame—the metal ticking as it heats, then the low murmur of coffee starting to move. Not the furious rise that means it’s ready. Just the first quiet conversation between water and grounds. In my aunt’s kitchen in Alexandria, this… Continue reading How Greek Coffee Survived the Fracture of 1923 and What ‘Greek’ Even Means Now

Border Files, No. 1 My grandmother left Beirut in the autumn of 1982, after the Israeli invasion had spent a summer dismantling the city she knew. In her suitcase, folded between prayer books, she carried a notebook of recipes written in three alphabets and a second notebook of names: which aunt owned which recipe, which… Continue reading How Borders Changed What People Ate and What They Forgot: Lausanne, Marseille, Gaza

Borders are not just lines on a map; they are also lines drawn through a pantry. When the Ottoman Empire collapsed and the Eastern Mediterranean was carved into mandates, protectorates, and nation-states, the new boundaries did not simply divide land. They divided recipes, renamed dishes, and decided which ingredients would be remembered as “ours” and… Continue reading How Borders Changed What People Ate and What They Forgot

The squash is grated into a wet heap, salted, and left to weep in a colander. This is how bourekitas de kalavasa begin—not with a flourish, but with patience and a cloth to squeeze the moisture from what remains. The recipe appears in a Ladino-language community cookbook printed in Thessaloniki in 1931, one of the… Continue reading The Sephardic Cookbooks of Thessaloniki That Greek Nationalism Erased and Diaspora Grandmothers Preserved

Borders are not just lines on a map; they are recipes interrupted. When the Ottoman Empire collapsed and the mandates, republics, and military frontiers of the 20th-century Eastern Mediterranean took its place, the region’s kitchens were carved up along with its provinces. A dish that once moved freely between Aleppo, Beirut, and Jerusalem suddenly needed… Continue reading How Borders Changed What People Ate and What They Forgot

Borders are not just lines on a map; they are also lines drawn through a pantry. In the Eastern Mediterranean and North Africa, the 20th century was a long lesson in how political boundaries reorganized kitchens, renamed dishes, and quietly erased the people who once cooked them. This article is about the foods that crossed… Continue reading How Borders Changed What People Ate and What They Forgot

How Borders Changed What People Ate and What They Forgot By Yasmin Khoury My grandmother, born in Jaffa in 1929, could not read a recipe. She never needed to. Her hands knew the exact pressure to crimp a sambousek, the precise moment when the onions for mujadara turned from translucent to gold. She carried her… Continue reading How Borders Changed What People Ate and What They Forgot