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 street they had left, which cousin kept the house key. The recipes crossed the Mediterranean. The street names did not survive the crossing. This column is about that second notebook — about how borders changed what people ate and what they forgot.
One term, defined once, used throughout. A border kitchen is a dish, an ingredient, or a technique whose present shape cannot be explained without a dated political event. The three files that open the series are chosen for their range: a treaty signed at Lausanne in 1923, a repatriation that docked at Marseille in 1962, a closure imposed on Gaza in 2007. Different seas, same mechanism. Borders ration. Borders rename. Borders redistribute credit.
Lausanne, 1923: the treaty that moved a million cooks
On 30 January 1923, Greek and Turkish delegates at Lausanne signed the Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations; the Treaty of Lausanne that underwrote it followed on 24 July. The exchange — mübadele in Turkish — was compulsory and confessional. About 1.2 million Orthodox Christians left Anatolia and Eastern Thrace for Greece; roughly 400,000 Muslims left Greece for the new republic. Language did not matter. Birthplace did not matter. Only the church or mosque your people belonged to.
What landed at Piraeus was not Greek cooking coming home. It was the market cuisine of Smyrna, the pulse-and-pepper food of Cappadocia, the sweets of Constantinople, carried by people who in many cases had never seen the Greek mainland. Within a decade, Athens — until then a modest city of olive oil and pulses — was eating soutzoukakia smyrneika, cumin-scented meatballs named for a city most of its new customers had fled, and ordering politiki kouzina, city food, which is to say Constantinople’s, as if the name were a compliment rather than an address. Bougatsa crossed the Aegean in refugee hands and settled onto Athenian breakfast tables for good.
The traffic ran both ways. Muslims from Greek Macedonia, Epirus, and Crete were settled into İzmir, İstanbul, and the Aegean coast — often, with a bureaucratic neatness nobody at the time found strange, into the houses the Greek and Armenian owners had just been emptied from. İzmir’s Cretan tavernas still sell those exchangees’ grandmothers’ food as regional color. The state renamed the villages and kept the recipes.
The forgetting ran on a schedule. Among the exchanged Orthodox were the Karamanlides, Turkish-speaking Christians of central Anatolia who wrote their Turkish in Greek letters; their recipe manuscripts still turn up in Athenian flea markets, quantities in one alphabet, instructions in another. Greece put their children into Greek-only schools, and within a generation the language of those kitchens died while the dishes stayed on the table. On the Turkish side the loss was faster and crueler: the Rum pastry masters and confectioners of İstanbul were broken by the pogrom of 6–7 September 1955 and finished off by the expulsions of 1964. Even coffee changed names — after Turkey invaded Cyprus in 1974, Greek cafés rebranded Türk kahvesi as ellinikos, and the bean stayed the same.
Two states, one mechanism. Each absorbed the other’s grandmothers and filed the paperwork under national continuity. The contest here is not Greek cuisine against Turkish cuisine. It is two governments that needed the shared table to look ancient and singular, against grandmothers who knew better. The stakes were the sentence we were always here, which both countries wanted to say with a full mouth.
Marseille, 1962: independence arrives by boat, couscous stays for dinner
The Évian Accords were signed on 18 March 1962, and Algeria proclaimed independence on 5 July. Within a year, roughly 800,000 pieds-noirs — the European settler colony — had left for France, most of them through Marseille, on the same quays my grandmother would later cross with her two notebooks. The city’s rents, its politics, and its menus were never the same.
But couscous did not arrive in 1962. Marseille had been eating North African food for decades — the Algerian dockworkers and laborers coming since the 1920s, the cafés of Belsunce, the stalls of the Marché des Capucins. What 1962 changed was authorship. A dish that colonial households had eaten off Algerian women’s labor entered France as the settlers’ nostalgia, and the women went unnamed. The word went unexplained too — couscous, which most linguists trace to the Amazigh seksu. By the 1990s, pollsters kept finding couscous among France’s favorite dishes, and hardly anyone asked which 1962 it had come from.
This is a contested dish, so name the parties. Pied-noir memoir cookbooks mourn our Algeria through the steaming pot — a nostalgia that turns a war of independence into a family misfortune. French food media files the result under Mediterranean, a word that has done as much concealing as describing. In the restaurants of Noailles and La Blancarde, Algerian families cook couscous without mourning, because for them 1962 is the date the flag changed, not the day paradise closed. When Algeria, Morocco, Mauritania, and Tunisia jointly inscribed couscous at UNESCO in December 2020, France stood in the corridor. That corridor is the whole story: whether the dish remembers the women who cooked it or only the family that ate it.
There is joy in this file, and it belongs to Marseille — the couscous weddings, the merguez sandwiches at the Vélodrome on a Sunday. And there is a grief the menus never carry: the harkis, tens of thousands of Algerians who fought for France and spent the years after 1962 interned behind wire in camps like Rivesaltes. Their kitchens fed nobody’s nostalgia. That is what the pot remembers when the menu forgets.
Gaza, 2007: the closure that rewrote sayadieh
Sayadieh — sayyadiyeh in the older transliteration — is a fisherman’s dish: rice colored and perfumed by slow-caramelized onions and spice, the catch fried and laid on top, the broth doing the rest. In Gaza it was spring food, made when the sardine run came close enough to shore to be cheap, cooked in the clay zibdiyeh bowl that gives its name to half the Gazan kitchen. A dish of the sea’s calendar is a dish of the sea’s politics.
In June 2007, after Hamas took control of the Gaza Strip, Israel sealed the territory, with Egypt closing Rafah behind it. The numbers tell it plainly. The 1995 Oslo II agreement had set Gaza’s fishing zone at 20 nautical miles; after 2007 Israel cut that limit — three nautical miles at its tightest, generally six to nine in the years since — as the Israeli legal center Gisha has documented year by year. The sardines run offshore, beyond the line. Ice, fuel, and netting were rationed along with distance. The catch collapsed, and sayadieh was not banned but edited: imported frozen fish where the sardines had been, smaller portions, the onions stretched further. A border does not need to burn a cookbook. It only needs to move the fish.
Laila El-Haddad and Maggie Schmitt recorded this dish, and hundreds like it, in The Gaza Kitchen (2012), while the closure was already old news. Since the war that began with Hamas’s attack of 7 October 2023 and Israel’s assault on the Strip, the fleet is destroyed, the markets are gone, and the word famine has moved out of the history books and back into the present tense. At the time of writing, sayadieh is a memory of a memory for most of Gaza. I will not dress that sentence up. This is what a border does when it stays closed long enough: first it changes what people eat, then it changes what they are allowed to remember eating.
And still — in Amman, in Dubai, in London — Gazan cooks make sayadieh with what the diaspora can buy, and they say the name out loud. The dish survives as evidence. That is the last thing an occupier can take and the first thing a grandchild gives back.
What borders make people forget
Three files, one mechanism. Borders ration — what you may catch, import, or grind. Borders rename — Smyrna becomes İzmir, Türk kahvesi becomes ellinikos, an empire’s kitchen labor becomes Mediterranean. Borders redistribute credit — the settler keeps the cookbook, the cook keeps the silence. Forgetting is not decay. It is administered, by school language policies, by pogroms, by fishing limits, by inscription forms that list four states and no cooks.
The counter-archive is real, and this column will spend its months on it. Karamanlidika manuscripts in Athenian flea markets. İzmir’s Cretan tavernas. The Noailles restaurant that has never once called couscous French. The Gazan grandmother in Amman teaching her daughter to caramelize onions for a fish she can no longer buy. Recipes are the paperwork of people whose paperwork was taken from them.
Frequently asked questions
What is sayadieh?
A fisherman’s rice dish of the Eastern Mediterranean: rice browned with slow-caramelized onions and spices, fish fried and served on top, the broth binding the two. In Gaza it is classically spring food made with sardines when the run is close. The dish is older than the border. The current recipe is not.
How did the 1923 population exchange change Greek food?
It moved about 1.6 million people by religion rather than language, and their kitchens went with them. Smyrniot and Constantinopolitan dishes — soutzoukakia smyrneika, politiki kouzina, bougatsa — became standard in Greece, while Greece’s Muslims carried Macedonian and Cretan kitchens into Turkey. Both states absorbed the food and buried the exchange that carried it.
Why is couscous so popular in France?
Because of 1962. Roughly 800,000 pieds-noirs arrived after the Évian Accords carrying the settler kitchen’s repertoire — but the dish had already entered France through Algerian workers and colonial households, where Algerian women did the cooking. Its popularity is a document of empire that rarely says the word empire.
Can a recipe be political?
A recipe is a record of who could cook, for whom, with what ingredients, and under whose flag. Soutzoukakia after Lausanne, couscous after Évian, sayadieh after the closure of 2007: the politics were in the ingredient list before they were anywhere else.
Sources, and the next file
Dates and figures follow the Britannica entries linked above and Gisha’s year-by-year documentation of Gaza’s fishing limits; The Gaza Kitchen (Laila El-Haddad and Maggie Schmitt, 2012) is the essential record of the pre-war Gazan kitchen. Next in Border Files: the İstanbul pogrom of September 1955 and the disappearance of the Rum confectioners. If you carry a dish like the ones in this file — a recipe from the politiki kitchen of Athens, an entry from our Gaza glossary — write in. The column keeps a second notebook, and it has room.
Yasmin Khoury is a food historian born in Beirut and based in Marseille, where her grandmother’s two notebooks are still in the family. Border Files appears monthly on Deaditerranean.