The first time I tried to recreate my grandmother’s freekeh soup, I stood in my Beirut kitchen staring at a bag of cracked green wheat and realized I didn’t know if she used lamb shoulder or neck. She died before I thought to ask. What I did know was that her family’s version came from a village that, after the French mandate carved up Greater Syria, suddenly sat on the other side of a line someone drew in a Paris office. The recipe crossed the border. Parts of its memory did not.
Borders do more than divide land. They interrupt what gets passed down, what becomes “their” food and what stays “ours.” They change the names of dishes, the shape of a bread, the spice that no longer arrives because the trader’s route is now a checkpoint. I’m Yasmin, and this is a story about how political lines rewrote the cookbook of the eastern Mediterranean, and how our kitchens still carry the ache of what was left behind.
The Day the Za’atar Stopped Crossing
Between 1916 and 1923, the Sykes–Picot Agreement and the treaties that followed sliced the Levant into mandates, protectorates, and eventually nation-states. For families, that meant a morning walk to a cousin’s house could become an international crossing. For food, it meant the slow severing of a shared pantry.
Take za’atar. The wild herb blend—thyme, oregano, sumac, sesame—was once a single cultural language spoken from Aleppo to Nablus. Each region had its twist: more sumac in the south, more anise seed in the north, but the grammar was the same. After the border between Lebanon and Palestine hardened in the 1940s, the wild za’atar that grew on the Galilean hills became harder to source in Beirut markets. Traders, once uncles and neighbors, became smugglers. The price rose. By the time I was a child in the 1990s, my mother bought her za’atar from a man who whispered about “the other side” as if it were a ghost kitchen.
But something else happened too: we started to forget that za’atar had ever been a shared thing. Lebanese cookbooks from the 1960s began classifying “Palestinian za’atar” as a distinct variety, as if it were a foreign spice. The border had become a culinary taxonomy. The taste was still there, but the story of who it belonged to had changed.
The Dish That Lost Its Name
In my family, we make a dish of bulgur and lentils called mujaddara. It is humble, ancient, and mentioned in 13th-century Arabic cookbooks. My grandmother called it mujaddara hamra when she added tomato paste, a version common in what is now southern Turkey. But after the Hatay province was annexed by Turkey in 1939, the Arabic-speaking families who stayed found their food renamed. Mujaddara became mercimekli köfte in official contexts, the bulgur shaped into fingers, the Arabic name fading from menus.
I learned this from an elderly woman in Antakya who runs a small restaurant. She told me, “I cook what my mother cooked, but I have to call it a Turkish name now. The young people don’t know the old word.” She served me a plate of what was unmistakably mujaddara, topped with caramelized onions and a drizzle of pomegranate molasses. The taste was a homecoming. The label was a loss.
Passports, Checkpoints, and the Missing Spice Route
It’s not just names that borders change. It’s the physical ability to cook what your grandmother cooked. After 1948, Palestinian families who were displaced to Lebanon, Jordan, or Syria lost access to the ingredients that defined their regional cooking. Gazan sumac, darker and more sour than the Lebanese variety, became a memory. The specific small, oily olives from the groves near Lydda disappeared from the family table, replaced by whatever was available in the refugee camp market.
My neighbor, an old woman from a village near Acre, once showed me her mother’s recipe for maqluba. She had written it on a scrap of paper in 1950, the year after they fled. In the margins, she had noted substitutions: “no more eggplant from the garden, use potato.” “If no allspice, use more cinnamon.” The dish adapted, but the original version became an artifact, a photograph of a kitchen that no longer existed.
Even today, the checkpoints between the West Bank and Israel mean that fresh herbs from Jenin can rot in a truck waiting eight hours to cross into Jerusalem. A chef in Ramallah told me she can’t guarantee the same taboon bread from one week to the next because the flour shipment depends on the mood of a soldier at the gate. The border doesn’t just block people. It blocks the taste of home.
When a Seed Becomes Contraband
In the 1980s, during the Lebanese Civil War, the Green Line that bisected Beirut turned the city into two separate food economies. East Beirut had access to certain mills; West Beirut had others. My mother remembers a year when burghul was nearly impossible to find on her side. A friend smuggled some across in a baby’s diaper bag. She made kibbeh that night, crying into the meat because the bulgur smelled like the village she hadn’t seen in three years.
This is what borders do: they turn a seed into contraband, a spice into a memory, a recipe into a coded message. And the people who survive this learn to cook with ghosts.
What the Cookbooks Left Out
When you read the great mid-century Lebanese cookbooks—Anissa Helou’s early work, or the spiral-bound church collections—you’ll notice a silence. They rarely mention the villages that became Israeli, the dishes that originated in what is now northern Syria, the Jewish-Iraqi influences that once flowed through the markets of old Beirut. The borders had edited the story.
I found a 1955 cookbook in my grandmother’s cupboard. It had a chapter called “Southern Dishes,” which included recipes from Safed and Tiberias. By 1970, a new edition had renamed the chapter “Palestinian-Inspired Dishes,” and most of the specific village names were gone. The food was still there, but its geography had been erased, as if the dishes had floated up from nowhere.
This erasure is not unique to Lebanon. In Cyprus, after the 1974 division, Greek Cypriot cookbooks stopped including the bulgur-and-herb pilafs that had been common in the mixed villages of the north. Turkish Cypriots, relocated south, lost their wood-fired oven bread traditions because the new houses didn’t have the right ovens. The border didn’t just divide a kitchen. It told each side that the other’s food had never been theirs.
The Taste That Survived
But here is what borders cannot do: they cannot stop someone from tasting something once and carrying that taste in their body for the rest of their life. In 2019, I sat in a small kitchen in Amman with a Syrian woman who had fled Daraa in 2012. She made shakriyeh, a yogurt-and-lamb stew, and when she added the dried mint at the end, she paused. “My mother’s mint was from our garden,” she said. “This is from a packet. But if I close my eyes, I can still smell the garden.”
She served the stew over rice. I ate it, and I could taste the garden too—not because it was in the food, but because her story put it there. That is what survives: the story whispered over a pot, the hand motion you copy without thinking, the spice combination you can’t explain but know is right. Borders can take the land. They can’t take the gesture.
FAQ
How did the Sykes–Picot Agreement affect everyday meals?
The 1916 agreement and the borders it created disrupted centuries-old trade routes and kinship networks. Spices, grains, and fresh herbs that once moved freely between villages suddenly faced tariffs, checkpoints, or outright bans. Families lost access to specific regional ingredients—like a particular variety of olive or a wild herb—and recipes adapted out of necessity, often losing their original character in the process.
Why do some traditional dishes have different names in neighboring countries?
When borders were drawn, governments often promoted national identities by renaming dishes in the official language or downplaying their shared origins. For example, a bulgur-and-lentil dish called mujaddara in Arabic might be given a Turkish or Hebrew name depending on where the new line fell. Over time, these new names stuck, and the dish’s cross-border history became less visible.
Can food memories survive displacement?
Yes, but they transform. Displaced families often recreate dishes with substitute ingredients, which changes the taste but preserves the ritual. The smell, the technique, and the story attached to a dish become a kind of edible archive. While the exact flavor of a lost garden’s mint cannot be replicated, the act of making the dish keeps the memory alive in a form that borders cannot confiscate.
What is the role of cookbooks in preserving or erasing food histories?
Cookbooks are not neutral records. They reflect the political realities of their time. A cookbook published in a newly formed nation-state might exclude or rename dishes from communities that are now on the other side of a border, effectively writing them out of the national cuisine. Later editions can restore these dishes, but the erasure in the intervening decades often means that home cooks no longer remember a dish as “theirs.”
Next time you stand in your kitchen, measuring out cumin or soaking bulgur, think about what your recipe has crossed. Maybe it crossed a border. Maybe it lost its name along the way. But if you cook it with the story still warm inside, you’re doing something more than feeding yourself. You’re refusing to forget.