I learned to make warak enab from my grandmother in a kitchen that smelled of lemons and lamb fat, a kitchen in Beirut that no longer exists. She’d hand me a single grape leaf, slick with brine, and tell me to place it vein-side up, shiny side down. “The veins hold the filling,” she said. “The shiny side is for the eye. The eye must never see the work.”
Years later, in a different kitchen across the sea, I tried to teach the same dish to a friend in London. I reached for my grandmother’s spices—allspice, cinnamon, a whisper of nutmeg—and my friend frowned. “That’s not how my Turkish mother makes it,” she said. “She uses currants and pine nuts. No cinnamon at all.” There we were, two women from opposite sides of a line that didn’t exist in our grandmothers’ time, arguing over a dish that once belonged to no nation, only to a hillside and a harvest.
Borders are strange, hungry things. They don’t just divide land; they divide memory. They take a shared pot and pour it into separate bowls, renaming it as they go. What was once a fluid, living cuisine becomes national heritage, then cultural property, then a weapon. And in the process, we forget what the dish actually survived.
The Levantine Table Before Lines
Before the Sykes-Picot Agreement scratched its arbitrary lines across the map in 1916, before the French and British mandates carved the Eastern Mediterranean into protectorates and colonies, the land from the Taurus Mountains to the Sinai was a single, breathing culinary body. Travelers from Aleppo to Gaza ate the same kibbeh, the same mutabbal, the same wood-fired flatbreads slapped against the walls of communal ovens. Recipes moved with the caravans, with brides, with the seasonal migration of shepherds who followed the rain.
My great-grandfather was a merchant who traveled between Damascus and Mosul, trading pistachios for wool, stories for salt. His wife, my teta’s mother, cooked with whatever he brought home. Her freekeh soup tasted of green wheat smoked in the fields of Houran; her mujaddara was a poor woman’s dish of lentils and rice that she dressed with caramelized onions until it wept oil. She never called it Lebanese food or Syrian food or Iraqi food. She called it food of the house.
The Ingredients That Knew No Passports
Think about the ingredients themselves. Bulgur wheat, fermented yogurt, tahini, pomegranate molasses, sumac, dried mint. Not national ingredients—geographical ones. They grew where the soil and climate allowed, indifferent to which flag flew over the nearest garrison. A farmer in what is now southern Turkey grew the same red peppers as a farmer in what is now northern Syria. They dried them on the same flat rooftops, ground them into the same smoky paste, and called them the same name: isot in Kurdish, filfil chilli in Arabic, pul biber in Turkish—words that bled into each other at the edges of the bazaar.
When the borders hardened, something strange happened. The same pepper, grown in the same soil, became Urfa biber if you stood on one side of the line and Aleppo pepper if you stood on the other. And each side began to claim the pepper as its own, building origin stories that erased the farmers on the opposite slope of the valley.
The Mandate Kitchens: How Colonialism Reorganized the Pantry
The French and British mandates didn’t just redraw maps; they reorganized kitchens. In Lebanon, the French introduced butter, cream, and the concept of the croissant, which Beirut bakeries transformed into the croissant au za’atar—a flaky, savory pastry that is now so deeply “Lebanese” nobody remembers it was once an import. In Palestine, the British brought tinned corned beef, tea with milk, and the notion that a proper meal ended with a pudding.
But the more profound change was administrative. The colonial powers established national ministries of agriculture, national food export boards, national culinary schools. They needed the new states to have distinct economic identities, and food was part of that identity-making. Lebanon was to be known for apples and wine, Syria for wheat and sheep, Palestine for citrus. A farmer who had always grown a little of everything was now encouraged—or forced—to specialize for the export market. And the export market wanted labels.
When Cheese Became a Nationality
Take the story of halloumi. For centuries, Cypriot shepherds made a semi-hard, brined cheese that could withstand the island’s brutal summer heat. They made it from sheep’s milk, sometimes goat’s, and folded it with fresh or dried mint. The cheese traveled across the eastern Mediterranean, showing up in Egyptian breakfasts and Palestinian wedding feasts. No one called it “Cypriot halloumi.” It was just halloumi, a cheese of the region.
Then, in the 1990s, the Republic of Cyprus applied for a Protected Designation of Origin from the European Union. After years of legal battles, halloumi was registered as a PDO in 2021, meaning that only cheese produced in Cyprus using specific methods could legally be called halloumi within the EU. A triumph for Cypriot producers—and a quiet erasure of the Lebanese, Egyptian, and Palestinian cheesemakers who had been making the same cheese under the same name for generations. Now they sell “grilling cheese” or “white cheese for frying,” as if renaming the thing could undo its history.
This is what borders do to food. They don’t just claim it; they disown its relatives.
The Partition Pantry: India, Pakistan, and the Dishes That Split
In 1947, the British drew a line through the province of Punjab, dividing it between India and Pakistan. The line cut through villages, through families, through kitchens. On one side, the new nation of India; on the other, the new nation of Pakistan. And in the chaos of Partition, a shared cuisine was torn in two.
Before 1947, Punjabi food was a single, glorious affair: wheat-based breads like makki ki roti, slow-cooked legumes, dairy-rich gravies, tandoori meats, and the ubiquitous sarson ka saag—mustard greens simmered for hours with ginger and green chilies. Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs ate from the same culinary tradition, with variations dictated by religious dietary laws but not by national identity.
After Partition, the food began to diverge. In Indian Punjab, the Hindu and Sikh majorities leaned into vegetarian dishes, elevating paneer and lentil preparations that aligned with dominant cultural practices. In Pakistani Punjab, the Muslim majority deepened its relationship with meat, developing elaborate nihari and haleem traditions. The tandoor, once a communal village oven, became a symbol of Pakistani restaurant culture in cities like Lahore, while in India it became synonymous with Delhi’s butter chicken—a dish invented in the 1950s by a Punjabi refugee who had fled the violence.
The Dish That Lost Its Name
I think often of dal makhani. In my London neighbourhood, it’s served in “Indian” restaurants, a creamy black lentil dish finished with butter and cream. But the dish’s origins are in the undivided Punjab, where it was a winter specialty cooked slowly over dying embers, the lentils absorbing smoke and time. Pakistani Punjabis make a version they call mash ki dal, with fewer dairy enrichments but the same patient, overnight cooking. The two dishes are siblings who no longer recognise each other, separated by a border that their ingredients never crossed.
When Borders Move and Kitchens Stay
Sometimes the border moves, and the kitchen stays put. The people living around Trieste have seen their city belong to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Italy, Yugoslavia, and Italy again. Each regime brought its own foodways: the Austrians left strudel and sauerkraut, the Slavs brought cevapi and burek, the Italians entrenched espresso and prosciutto. The result is a city where you can eat jota—a bean and sauerkraut soup—for lunch and fritto misto for dinner, and neither feels out of place.
But Trieste is an exception. More often, when borders shift, the food of the “other” is suppressed. In the Balkans, the wars of the 1990s turned burek—a flaky filled pastry of Ottoman origin—into a battlefield. Serbia claimed it as a national dish; Bosnia insisted on its own version; Croatia developed a seafood variant. The pastry itself, innocent of politics, was filled with the weight of ethnic identity.
The Silencing of the Shared Pot
What gets forgotten in these culinary nationalisms is the shared pot—the dish that belonged to everyone and no one. Dolma, for instance. The word simply means “stuffed thing” in Turkish, and the practice of stuffing vegetables with rice, meat, and herbs stretches from the Balkans to Central Asia. Greeks call it dolmades; Armenians call it tolma; Iraqis have a version with Swiss chard. The Persian dolmeh often includes split peas and tarragon. Each nation insists on the primacy of its version, building culinary museums and filing UNESCO applications, as if the dish could be owned.
My grandmother would have laughed at all this. She made warak enab with whatever was in the garden. If she had Swiss chard, she used Swiss chard. If the lamb was too expensive, she used beef. The dish was not a statement; it was a response to hunger, to season, to the particular light falling through the kitchen window at the hour of preparation.
What We Forget When We Claim a Dish
The tragedy of culinary nationalism is not that it celebrates a particular version of a dish—celebration is beautiful, necessary, an act of love. The tragedy is that it erases the debt. Every national dish is a palimpsest, layer upon layer of borrowed technique, traded ingredient, conquered and conqueror sharing a plate. To claim hummus as solely Lebanese or solely Israeli or solely Palestinian is to forget that the chickpea was first domesticated in the Fertile Crescent ten thousand years ago, before any of those identities existed, before writing, before nations, before the very idea of a border.
We forget the cooks who carried the recipe across the mountains. We forget the grandmother who added a new spice because her neighbour, newly arrived from a different village, suggested it. We forget the famine that forced a substitution, and the substitution that became the tradition. We forget that food, like water, seeks its own level, flowing downhill toward hunger regardless of the lines we draw on maps.
The Taste of Forgetting
There is a particular taste to this forgetting. It is the taste of tarator—the tahini and lemon sauce that accompanies so many Levantine dishes—made without the garlic that a Syrian refugee in Beirut cannot afford because her ration card doesn’t cover fresh produce. It is the taste of za’atar mixed with sumac from a tree that now grows on the other side of a militarised fence. It is the taste of a dish that has lost its name, served in a restaurant that calls itself “Mediterranean” because that is the only label that doesn’t start a fight.
Cooking Across the Line
I cook now in a small kitchen in a city that is not my own, and I cook the dishes of a country that may not exist in the way I remember it. Lebanon is a place I carry with me, a place that lives in the smell of toasted pine nuts and the sound of olive oil hitting a hot pan. When I make kibbeh nayyeh, the raw lamb dish that terrifies my British friends, I am not making a political statement. I am making lunch.
But I am also, quietly, making a refusal. A refusal to accept that a dish belongs to a flag. A refusal to forget the Syrian grandmother who taught my grandmother a better way to pound the meat. A refusal to let a line on a map tell me what I am allowed to cook, to eat, to remember.
If you want to understand what borders have done to food, don’t read the cookbooks that claim to represent a nation. Go to the kitchens where the borders are ignored. Go to the refugee settlements where women from Aleppo and Homs and Idlib share a single gas burner and discover, to their astonishment, that they all make shakriyeh the same way. Go to the diaspora restaurants in Berlin and Toronto where the menu is a map of loss—dishes from Hama, from Jaffa, from Mosul, from places that no longer exist in the way the cook remembers them.
The dish survives. That’s what my grandmother understood. The dish survives the war, the partition, the displacement, the renaming. It survives because someone, somewhere, is hungry enough to make it, and in making it, to remember.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why do so many Middle Eastern cuisines share similar dishes?
The Eastern Mediterranean was a unified cultural and trade zone for centuries under the Ottoman Empire and earlier caliphates. Ingredients, techniques, and recipes moved freely with merchants, pilgrims, and migrating communities. What we now see as “separate” national cuisines—Lebanese, Syrian, Palestinian, Jordanian—are regional variations of a shared culinary foundation that predates modern borders.
How did colonialism specifically change food in the Levant?
Colonial powers introduced new ingredients and eating habits, but their deeper impact was structural. The French and British mandates created national agricultural policies that encouraged monoculture for export, established national culinary identities as tools of state-building, and erected customs barriers that disrupted traditional trade routes. A farmer who once sold his olives freely to both Damascus and Haifa suddenly needed a passport and a permit.
Is it possible to talk about food without nationalism?
It is difficult but essential. One approach is to speak of dishes in terms of their historical and geographical context rather than their modern national labels. Instead of “Lebanese tabbouleh,” one might say “the parsley and bulgur salad of the Mount Lebanon region.” This acknowledges the dish’s roots without erasing the other communities—Syrian, Palestinian, Jordanian—who make and cherish versions of the same dish.
What can home cooks do to honour the shared history of a dish?
Cook with curiosity and humility. When you learn a recipe, ask where it came from—not just which country, but which village, which grandmother, which specific hillside. Acknowledge the variations that exist across borders. Use ingredients that respect the dish’s origins, but don’t be afraid to adapt, because adaptation is part of the dish’s history. And when you serve it, tell the story: not the simplified national myth, but the messy, beautiful story of a food that belonged to everyone who loved it.