The first time I tasted muhammara in Beirut, my aunt leaned over and whispered, “Your grandmother used to make it with walnuts from the grove, before the grove became Syria.” I remember the dip’s deep, smoky sweetness—roasted red peppers, Aleppo pepper, pomegranate molasses—and the way her words landed heavier than the bread in my hand. Borders, I realized, don’t just split land. They split recipes, memories, whole worlds of taste.
I’m Yasmin Khoury, and on deaditerranean.com, I trace how the Eastern Mediterranean’s shifting lines redrew what we eat and what we’ve lost. This isn’t nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake. It’s about understanding that every dish on your plate carries the scars of a map drawn in a distant office. The hummus you dip, the kibbeh you fry, the za’atar you sprinkle—they crossed borders, endured partitions, and sometimes disappeared on the wrong side of a fence.
So come into the kitchen. Let’s see how politics seasoned our food.
The Ottoman Table: A Shared Language Before Lines
For over 400 years, the Ottoman Empire stretched from the Balkans to the Arabian Peninsula. In its kitchens, ingredients and techniques roamed freely. Eggplants traveled from India to Aleppo; stuffed vegetables—dolma—appeared in Istanbul, Jerusalem, and Cairo with local twists but a shared grammar. Cooks spoke a common culinary language, one of clarified butter, lamb, cumin, and slow-cooked wheat berries.
My great-grandfather, a baker in Tripoli, learned his art from a Turkish ustaz who had settled there. He made pide and simit alongside mana’eesh. The border between Tripoli and what is now northern Syria was a formality. Olive oil caravans moved from groves near Antakya to presses in Lebanon without a passport. Spices from Aleppo’s famous souk perfumed kitchens as far as Nablus. The food didn’t know nations; it knew seasons.
Then came the Great War, the fall of the empire, and the pens of Sykes and Picot.
When a Line Became a Wall
The 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement and the mandates that followed carved the Levant into French and British zones. Borders hardened. Families who had traded figs and apricot leather for generations suddenly needed visas. A farmer in the Biqa’ Valley who sold labneh to Damascene merchants found his path blocked by a new frontier. More than goods stopped; recipes began to diverge.
Take kibbeh nayyeh, the raw lamb and bulgur dish beloved across the region. In Lebanon, it grew into a celebratory centerpiece, mixed with more fine bulgur and spiced with marjoram. In Syria, variations leaned into allspice and sometimes a drizzle of pomegranate syrup. In Hatay, annexed by Turkey in 1939, the dish morphed into içli köfte, often fried and served with yogurt. Same ancestor, three different paths—because the borders said so.
Displacement and the Disappearing Dish
1948 didn’t just create a state; it scattered an entire pantry. Palestinians who fled or were expelled carried their seeds, their sourdough starters, their memories of musakhan—roast chicken on taboon bread with sumac and caramelized onions. In refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria, cooks recreated what they could with UNRWA rations. Sumac became scarce; onions plentiful. The dish adapted, but something was lost: the specific aroma of a village oven, the oil from a grove you could no longer visit.
My friend Um Ahmad, born in a camp in Burj al-Barajneh, once told me she learned to make maqluba from her grandmother, who learned it in a village near Lydda. “She described the eggplants from her father’s field,” Um Ahmad said. “I’ve never seen them. I use whatever the market has.” The recipe survives, but the terroir—the taste of a particular piece of land—is gone. That’s a quiet kind of forgetting.
The Slow Erasure of Ingredients
Borders don’t just move people; they strangle ingredients. Consider Aleppo pepper, a fruity, mildly hot chile that defined northern Syrian cooking. Before the war, it was exported worldwide. The conflict decimated farms and trade routes. For years, what was sold as “Aleppo pepper” often came from Turkey, sometimes with different heat, different color. Cooks in diaspora kitchens learned to blend paprika and cayenne as a ghost of the original.
Then there’s frikeh, the smoky green wheat harvested young and burned in the fields. It was a staple from Gaza to southern Lebanon, but as borders tightened and trade slowed, it became a specialty, not a daily grain. In some villages, the knowledge of when to harvest and how to control the burn faded with the old farmers. A whole vocabulary of taste is shrinking.
When Borders Create New Kitchens
It’s not all loss. Sometimes, a border forces a beautiful hybrid. I think of the Armenian communities that settled in Lebanon after the genocide. They brought sujuk—spiced beef sausages—and basturma—air-dried cured beef—that merged with local flavors. You’ll now find basturma on Lebanese pizzas, wrapped around pickled cucumbers, or fried with eggs. The border that pushed them here also created something new.
In Jordan, Iraqi refugees after 2003 introduced masgouf, the iconic grilled carp dish from Baghdad’s Tigris banks. Amman’s restaurants began serving it, adapted to local tastes with more lemon and less tamarind. The dish traveled because people had to. It’s a taste of home, but home is a concept that keeps moving.
The Diaspora Kitchen: Memory on a Plate
I cook in a small apartment in Montreal now, and my pantry is a map of losses and compromises. The pomegranate molasses comes from a Lebanese brand, but the pomegranates themselves are probably Turkish. The za’atar I blend uses wild thyme from Jordan, sumac from Syria, sesame seeds from Ethiopia. It tastes like my mother’s, almost. The difference is the longing.
For diaspora cooks, the recipe becomes a ritual of preservation. We measure in coffee cups, not grams, because that’s how our grandmothers did it. We argue about whether to soak the bulgur or just rinse it. We insist on a specific brand of orange blossom water because it reminds us of a certain pastry shop in a city we can’t return to. The dish is a witness.
What We Forgot, What We Remember
Food history is full of silences. There are dishes that simply vanished because the people who made them were scattered beyond recall. There are spices that disappeared from markets because a border closed and the caravans stopped. In some villages in southern Turkey, near the Syrian border, you’ll still find old women who remember a kind of cheese their mothers made—a cheese that required a particular grass that only grew on a hill now part of a military zone. The recipe exists in memory alone.
I think about the Kurdish cooks who moved between mountains that are now divided by Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria. Their dishes—kutilk (bulgur dumplings), dawet (yogurt soup with wheat berries)—traveled with them, but each side of the border now claims them as national cuisine. The food stays the same; the story around it changes.
When I set a plate of stuffed grape leaves on the table, I’m serving a dish that survived Ottoman collapse, French mandate, civil war, and the Atlantic crossing. Each leaf wraps a history of borders crossed and recrossed. The rice inside might be from Egypt, the herbs from my balcony pot, the olive oil from a grove I visited once as a child. The taste is a palimpsest.
So the next time you tear a piece of pita and scoop up some hummus, pause. Ask yourself: whose land did these chickpeas grow on? Who drew the line that separated the olive from the lemon? What did this dish forget along the way? That’s the real flavor of the Eastern Mediterranean—not just sumac and garlic, but survival.
Frequently Asked Questions
How did the Sykes-Picot Agreement specifically affect Middle Eastern food?
The 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement divided Ottoman territories into British and French spheres of influence, creating hard borders where trade routes had flowed for centuries. This disrupted the movement of ingredients like Aleppo pepper, olive oil, and grains. Family recipes that once spanned regions became confined to new nation-states, leading to distinct national variations of dishes like kibbeh and hummus. It also cut off communities from ancestral fields, changing the very taste of produce.
What is an example of a dish that changed because of a border?
Musakhan, a Palestinian dish of roasted chicken on taboon bread with sumac and onions, is a powerful example. After 1948, displaced Palestinians recreated it in refugee camps using available ingredients. The original version depended on a specific village oven and local olive oil; the adapted version uses whatever is accessible. The core recipe endures, but the sensory connection to a particular land has been severed.
Are there positive culinary outcomes from border changes?
Yes, culinary hybridity often follows displacement. When Armenian communities settled in Lebanon, they introduced cured meats like basturma and sujuk, which blended into local dishes. Iraqi refugees brought masgouf to Jordan, where it evolved with local flavors. These mergings create new traditions, though they are born from loss. The food becomes a testament to adaptation and resilience.