When my grandmother made makdous, the kitchen smelled of brine and bruised walnuts. She’d sit on the low stool my grandfather built, her fingers stuffing baby eggplants with a mix of red pepper paste, salt, and crushed nuts. Each jar she sealed was a letter to the village she left in 1948. The recipe never changed. But the way she talked about it shifted—depending on which side of the border we were visiting. In Lebanon, she called it Syrian. In Jordan, she called it Palestinian. On our own table in Montreal, she just called it home. That’s when I first understood: borders do more than separate land. They separate memory. They dictate what goes into the pot, what gets renamed, and what gets quietly erased.

Food is often called a universal language, but it’s spoken with a heavy accent. The accent comes from the soil, the climate, the tools, and the political lines drawn across maps. When a border shifts, the kitchen becomes a site of negotiation. A spice disappears from the market. A name becomes dangerous to say aloud. A dish is adopted by a new nation and stripped of its origin story. I’ve spent years tracing these stories—not as a historian in an archive, but as a cook standing over a simmering pot, asking questions. Why does my family’s freekeh taste different from the version sold in Jerusalem? Why did a Turkish friend’s mother hide her Armenian recipes? Why do I feel grief when I taste a perfect sahlab in a Beirut café, knowing it was once sold on streets I can’t visit?

The Politics of the Plate

Let’s start with something simple: bread. In the Levant, bread is life, literally—aish means both “bread” and “life” in colloquial Arabic. But the bread of my ancestors wasn’t the pita pocket you find in supermarkets. It was taboon, a flat, slightly chewy loaf baked on hot stones in a clay oven. After 1948, Palestinian families who fled to Jordan or Lebanon couldn’t rebuild those ovens in refugee camps. They adapted, using metal saj domes to make paper-thin shrak. The bread changed. The memory of the taboon’s smoky crust became a ghost in their mouths.

Governments know this. They know that controlling food is controlling identity. In 2018, Israel announced a plan to register hummus as its national dish, sparking a culinary war with Lebanon. The Lebanese claimed ownership, citing centuries of preparation. But hummus is older than both nations. It’s a dish of the land, not the border. When you eat hummus in an Israeli restaurant today, it’s often served with hard-boiled eggs and hot sauce—a tradition brought by Jews from Yemen and North Africa. When you eat it in Palestine, it’s often topped with pine nuts and a river of olive oil from trees planted by great-great-grandparents. Same base, different story.

But some stories get swallowed. The dish rummaniyya—a thick stew of lentils, eggplant, and pomegranate molasses—was once a staple in Gaza. It’s ancient, mentioned in medieval Arab cookbooks. Today, it’s nearly forgotten outside the strip, partly because pomegranate molasses became a luxury, partly because displacement shatters culinary knowledge. A dish needs a kitchen. A kitchen needs a home. When the home is a tent or a temporary shelter, the dish risks becoming extinct.

When a Name Becomes a Threat

My friend Lilit, whose grandmother survived the Armenian genocide, once told me about chi kofte—raw meatballs kneaded with bulgur and spices. In Turkey, it’s called çiğ köfte and is considered a national specialty. But Lilit’s grandmother never called it that. She called it khoi kufteh, the Armenian name, and she made it only on special occasions, in silence. “The Turks took everything,” Lilit said. “We won’t let them take the name.” But in public, in Istanbul, the family ordered the Turkish version, careful not to reveal their dialect. The food tasted the same, but the act of eating it was a performance of forgetting.

This is the quiet violence of borders: they force people to hide their recipes in plain sight. In the Balkans, a similar dance happens with burek. Is it Bosnian, Serbian, or Turkish? The pastry—flaky layers stuffed with meat, cheese, or spinach—crossed borders for centuries. Yet after the Yugoslav wars, every newly formed nation claimed it as uniquely theirs. A Bosnian baker in Sarajevo told me, “We shape it in a spiral. The Serbs do it in a straight line. That’s how you know.” A line of dough as a line of demarcation. A spiral as a memory of a unified past.

The Spice Route of Forgetting

Borders don’t only erase; they also import. When the British drew the line between India and Pakistan in 1947, millions crossed in both directions. They carried what they could: a few clothes, a Qur’an, a sewing kit. And seeds. My neighbor in London, an elderly woman from Lahore, grows karela (bitter gourd) in her allotment garden. “My mother brought the seeds in the hem of her sari,” she said. “She didn’t trust the soil here.” That distrust is a form of culinary memory. The soil of Punjab was left behind, but its taste was carried in a wrinkled gourd.

In the other direction, what was left behind was erased. In Pakistan, halwa puri is a breakfast staple, especially in cities like Karachi. Across the border, in Delhi, it’s also loved, but few remember that it was once a Muslim specialty from the Mughal courts. The Hindu nationalist movement has subtly rebranded it as “Indian street food,” stripping its Persianate roots. The halwa—a semolina pudding scented with cardamom—remains sweet. The politics around it are bitter.

Sometimes the erasure is literal. During the Greek-Turkish population exchange of 1923, Orthodox Christians from Anatolia were forced to Greece, and Muslims from Greece to Turkey. The Greeks brought with them a tradition of politiki kouzina—the cuisine of Constantinople (Istanbul). Dishes like makaronia me kima (pasta with minced meat and béchamel) became part of Greek home cooking, but the name “Constantinople” was a wound. Over time, the dish was absorbed into the broader “Greek” category, its refugee origins fading. In Turkey, the departing Greeks left behind their vineyards and olive groves. The new Muslim arrivals from Greece didn’t know how to tend them. Olive oil production plummeted. The taste of the land changed.

The Jar That Travels

I keep a jar of my grandmother’s makdous in my pantry. It’s the last one she made before she died. The oil has clouded slightly, but I know the eggplants inside are still tender, the walnut stuffing still fiery with Aleppo pepper. Aleppo pepper—another border story. Before the Syrian war, it was a protected spice, named for the city where it was grown and processed. Now, many of the farmers are dead or displaced. The pepper is still sold, often under the same name, but it’s grown in Turkey or Israel, from seeds that were smuggled out. Is it the same pepper? Biologically, yes. Emotionally, no. The terroir—that French word for the taste of a place—has been shattered.

This happens more often than we admit. Consider the Maine lobster. When the U.S.-Canada border was formalized in 1842, it cut through fishing grounds that had been shared by Indigenous and settler communities for centuries. Today, a lobster caught one mile east of the line is “Canadian” and subject to different regulations, different market prices. The lobster doesn’t know. But the fisher does. And the consumer, eating a lobster roll in Boston, might not care—until the price spikes because of a trade dispute. Borders create economic flavors.

What Gets Cooked in Exile

My grandmother’s kitchen in Montreal was a museum of what she lost. She had a spice grinder from Damascus, a mortar from Beirut, a clay pot from Nablus. Each tool was a passport stamp. She cooked maqluba—that glorious upside-down rice and eggplant dish—every Friday. But she never used the word Palestine in front of my school friends. She’d say “Middle Eastern food,” a phrase that made the dish safe, generic, exportable. I watched her flatten her identity into something digestible for a Canadian potluck. The dish was still delicious. But in that flattening, something was lost: the pride of saying “This is from my village, from my trees, from my dead.”

Exile cooking is a genre of its own. It’s characterized by substitution, nostalgia, and a stubborn refusal to adapt. My friend’s Vietnamese father, who fled after the war, makes phở with brisket instead of the traditional cuts because that’s what was available in 1980s Kansas. Now, his children prefer the brisket version. The “authentic” recipe is the one that survived the journey, not the one that stayed behind. In this way, borders create new traditions. But they also create a hierarchy: the refugee version is often seen as lesser, a mimicry, while the homeland version is the “real” one. This is a lie. Both are real. Both are responses to loss.

The Forgotten Famine Foods

Borders also create scarcity. When a region is cut off from its usual supply chains, people turn to what grows wild. In Gaza, the blockade has revived a taste for khobiza—a mallow weed that was once considered poor people’s food. It’s cooked with onions and olive oil, a simple stew that sustained my grandmother’s generation during the 1948 famine. Now, young Gazans are sharing recipes for it on social media, not as a relic but as a necessity. The border made them forget the dish; the border made them remember.

In Cuba, after the U.S. embargo tightened in the 1990s, the government promoted conejo (rabbit) as a protein source. Rabbit wasn’t traditional; it was a survival food. Today, it’s part of the national palate, but older Cubans still speak of the pork they used to eat, the pork their grandparents raised. The border—in this case, an economic wall—rewrote the menu. Similarly, in North Korea, the famine of the 1990s led to the widespread consumption of injo gogi (soy-based fake meat). It was originally a byproduct of industrial soy processing, but now it’s a nostalgic street food for defectors in South Korea, a taste of the hardship they escaped.

Reclaiming the Table

So how do we eat honestly? How do we taste the borders without letting them silence the cooks? I try to cook with names intact. When I make musakhan—roasted chicken with sumac and onions on taboon bread—I call it Palestinian. Not “Middle Eastern.” Not “Israeli.” I say the word, and I watch my guests’ faces. Some flinch. Some nod. Some ask questions. The dish opens a door that assimilation tried to seal shut.

I also listen. In a Kurdish restaurant in Berlin, I ate kutilk—bulgur dumplings stuffed with spiced meat, served in a yogurt sauce. The owner, a refugee from northern Syria, told me the dish was once made with wild herbs from the mountains. “Now we use spinach from the Turkish market,” she said. “It’s not the same, but it’s still ours.” That “ours” is a small act of resistance. It refuses to let the dish be absorbed into “Turkish cuisine” or “Arabic cuisine.” It insists on a specific, threatened identity.

Food writers have a responsibility here. Too often, we write about “discovery”—as if we are the first to taste these dishes, as if they were waiting for our attention. But these dishes were never lost. They were hidden, guarded, whispered. To write about them is to amplify the whisper. I think of the cookbook Palestine on a Plate by Joudie Kalla. She writes recipes with stories, each one a small repatriation. She doesn’t argue about ownership; she simply states it. That’s what I try to do here.

The Sweetness of Memory

Desserts carry a special burden. They are the foods of celebration, and celebrations are when borders sting most sharply. My grandmother’s knafeh—a cheese pastry soaked in syrup—was the centerpiece of every Eid. She made it with Nabulsi cheese, which she bought from a Palestinian grocer in Brooklyn, who shipped it from Jordan, where the Nabulsi family had fled in 1967. The cheese traveled 6,000 miles to reach our table. Each bite was a geography lesson. In Nablus itself, the same cheese is made in the same way, but the knafeh is baked in large round trays and sold by the kilo. The taste is identical, but the context is a world apart. In exile, the dessert becomes a monument. In the homeland, it’s just breakfast.

Another sweet with a tangled map: baklava. Greeks, Turks, Lebanese, Armenians, and Bulgarians all claim it. The truth is that the delicate layers of phyllo, nuts, and honey were perfected in the Ottoman kitchens, which stretched across all these modern nations. Today, a baklava in Gaziantep is made with pistachios and little syrup; in Athens, it’s walnuts and drenched in honey. Each version is a postcard from a different point on the empire’s corpse. When I eat baklava in a Lebanese bakery in Dearborn, Michigan, I taste the empire’s dissolution, the scattering, the stubborn sweetness that survived.

The Invisible Border of Language

Even the words we use for food are border guards. In English, we say “herbs,” but in Arabic, we distinguish between baqdoonis (parsley), za’tar (wild thyme), and na’na’ (mint)—each with its own memory and use. In my grandmother’s kitchen, to mistake one for another was a small betrayal. Language carries the precision of place. When a border forces a family to adopt a new language, those distinctions are often the first to go. A dish loses its name, and then the plant loses its story. I still grow za’tar in a pot on my balcony in Montreal. It doesn’t taste exactly like the hills of Jenin, but it’s close enough to make me pause. And that pause—that space between the taste and the memory—is where the border lives.

Next time you sit down to a plate of something “ethnic” or “regional,” ask yourself: whose map are you tasting? What lines were crossed to bring this to you? And what was left on the other side?