There’s a particular ache that settles into a recipe when it crosses a line someone else drew on a map. It’s not the ache of a missing ingredient you can just order online. It’s the ache of a flavour that once belonged to your grandmother’s morning routine, to the sound of her slippers on the kitchen tiles, and then one day it didn’t. Borders don’t only divide land. They divide pantries. They sever the memory of a taste from the soil that grew it, and in that severing, they change not only what we eat but who we think we are.
I grew up understanding that food was a kind of cartography. My mother’s kitchen was a map of the Levant drawn in olive oil and sumac, and I learned to read it before I could read a book. But the map was always shifting. A line would move, a crossing would close, and suddenly a spice blend that had been a birthright became a smuggled secret. This isn’t a story about loss alone. It’s a story about how people, when faced with the impossible, learn to cook memory itself.
The Spice Route That Ended at a Checkpoint
Before the borders hardened, the flavours of the Eastern Mediterranean bled into one another with the ease of a ripe fig splitting open. A cook in Aleppo might use the same dried limes as a cook in Isfahan. A baker in Beirut and a baker in Damascus would both recognise the scent of mahleb wafting from a hot oven. These weren’t separate cuisines so much as dialects of the same aromatic language. The land dictated the palate, and the land didn’t care about the names of empires.
Then came the lines. The Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916, drawn with a ruler across a map in a room far from any kitchen, carved the Levant into zones of French and British influence. What had been a fluid exchange of ingredients and techniques became a series of checkpoints, tariffs, and eventually, impassable borders. A family in Tripoli could no longer easily source the Aleppo pepper that had defined their muhammara for generations. A grocer in Jerusalem found his supply of Iranian dried limes suddenly subject to the whims of geopolitics. The map of taste was redrawn not by cooks but by diplomats, and the kitchen has been adapting ever since.
Consider the humble za’atar. In the hills of Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria, wild thyme grew with abandon, and families would forage it, dry it, and mix it with sumac, sesame seeds, and salt. Each household had its own ratio, its own secret addition—a little more sumac for tartness, a pinch of cumin for warmth. But when borders closed and foraging grounds became military zones or foreign territory, the blend itself became a political act. Palestinians who could no longer access their hills began mixing za’atar from whatever dried herbs they could find, often substituting oregano or marjoram. The taste changed. The memory of the original blend became a story told by grandmothers, a flavour preserved in exile like a pressed flower.
When the Kitchen Becomes an Archive
In diaspora, the kitchen transforms. It’s no longer just a place of sustenance; it becomes a living archive. When you can’t walk the streets of your grandmother’s village, you can still taste her kibbeh nayeh if you close your eyes. But the ingredients are different now. The lamb is grain-finished, not grass-fed from the hills of Baalbek. The bulgur is from a health food store, not the stone mill of a neighbour. The cook must become an archaeologist, reconstructing a dish from fragments of memory and whatever the local supermarket offers.
My aunt, who left Beirut in 1982, spent years trying to replicate the mouneh—the pantry of preserved goods—that her mother had kept in the cool basement of their home. She couldn’t find the tiny, intensely flavoured eggplants for makdous, so she used baby aubergines from a Turkish grocer in London. She couldn’t get the same coarse salt, so she adjusted the brine. The result wasn’t identical, but it was a translation, and in that translation was a kind of truth. The dish had survived a war, a border, and a generation. It carried the DNA of the original, even if it had learned to speak with a new accent.
This is how food memory works. It’s not a perfect recording. It’s a story told and retold, each time with slight variations, until the variation itself becomes part of the tradition. The sfiha of São Paulo, brought by Syrian and Lebanese immigrants in the early 20th century, are now made with Brazilian beef and sold as fast food. They’re not the same as the lamb-topped pastries of Tripoli, but they’re not meant to be. They’re a monument to movement, a taste of what was carried and what was left behind.
The Disappearance of the Mulberry Kitchen
Some losses are quieter. They happen not because an ingredient becomes illegal or inaccessible, but because the knowledge of how to use it fades. The mulberry tree was once central to the foodways of the Levant and Mesopotamia. Its fruit was eaten fresh, dried into sweet-tart leathers, or boiled into a dark syrup called dibs al-tut that rivalled molasses in depth. Its leaves fed silkworms, linking the kitchen to the loom. In parts of Syria and Lebanon, you can still find old mulberry trees shading courtyards, but the practice of making mulberry syrup at home has nearly vanished. The trees stand as living ghosts, their fruit falling to the ground unpicked.
Why did this happen? Partly, it was the border of time. Industrial food production made grape molasses and date syrup cheaper and more widely available. But there was also a border of the mind. As people moved to cities, as women entered the workforce in new ways, the labour-intensive rituals of the mouneh became harder to sustain. The knowledge of how to boil mulberry juice to exactly the right consistency, how to skim the foam without wasting a drop, how to store the syrup so it would last through winter—this knowledge wasn’t written down. It lived in hands and in stories. When the hands stopped doing, the stories stopped being told.
I once met a woman in the Bekaa Valley who still made dibs al-tut every June. She let me stir the pot, a heavy copper thing that had belonged to her mother-in-law. The syrup bubbled slowly, releasing a scent that was both fruity and deeply savoury, like the memory of a forest. She told me that when she was a girl, the whole village would make it together, and the air would be thick with the smell. Now she was the only one. She gave me a jar to take home. I still have it, half-empty, because I’m afraid of the day it will be gone.
The Politics of the Plate
Food is never just food. In contested lands, it becomes a flag. The debate over who “owns” hummus, falafel, or tabbouleh isn’t really about chickpeas or parsley. It’s about legitimacy, about whose story gets to be the official one. When a dish is claimed by a nation-state, it’s often stripped of its messy, multi-ethnic history. The fact that Jews and Arabs in the Levant both ate kubbeh for centuries, that the soup dumpling crossed religious lines as easily as a shared courtyard, is inconvenient for narratives that demand purity.
This politicisation changes the food itself. When a dish becomes a symbol, it must be defended, and in that defence, it often becomes frozen. Innovation is seen as betrayal. A Palestinian cook who adds a new spice to musakhan might be accused of diluting tradition, while an Israeli chef who reinterprets sabich might be celebrated as creative. The double standard is a border too, one that runs through kitchens and cookbooks. It dictates whose adaptations are seen as evolution and whose are seen as erasure.
But there’s a quiet resistance in the act of cooking across these lines. When a Syrian refugee in Berlin opens a restaurant and serves fattoush with German bread because she can’t find the right pita, she’s not betraying her heritage. She’s proving that it can survive. The salad is still a riot of sumac and purslane and tomato, still a testament to the ingenuity of peasants who never wasted stale bread. The bread is different, but the idea is intact. The border couldn’t stop it.
What the River Remembers
Water, too, has its own culinary borders. The Tigris and Euphrates rivers once sustained a freshwater fish culture that’s now endangered. The masgouf of Baghdad, a butterflied carp grilled low and slow over an open fire, is a dish that requires not just a specific fish but a specific way of life. The fish must be from the river, the fire from fruitwood, the time from an afternoon that stretches unhurried. War, sanctions, and environmental degradation have made the fish scarce and the leisurely cooking nearly impossible. Dams have altered the rivers’ flows. Pollution has thinned the stocks. A dish that was once the pride of a city is now a rare luxury, and with its decline goes a whole set of rituals: the family outings to the riverbank, the debates over the perfect marinade, the way the smoke would cling to your clothes for hours afterward.
Yet masgouf persists, in exile and in memory. In London, Iraqi restaurateurs grill farmed carp over charcoal and call it by the same name. It’s not the same. The river is missing, and with it, a certain wildness. But the act of gathering around the fish, of eating it with pickles and flatbread, of telling stories about the Tigris—this is a form of preservation. The dish has become a vessel for a place that many cannot return to. It’s a taste of longing.
The Sweetness of Adaptation
Not all changes wrought by borders are bitter. Sometimes, the collision of cuisines produces something entirely new and wonderful. The Lebanese diaspora in Mexico gave birth to tacos al pastor, a direct descendant of the shawarma brought by immigrants in the late 19th century. The vertical spit, the marinated meat, the method of shaving it thin—all of this came from the Levant. But the pork, the pineapple, the corn tortilla—these were Mexican innovations. The result is a dish that belongs to both places and to neither, a delicious mongrel that tells the story of migration in every bite.
Similarly, the Indian subcontinent’s biryani carries the imprint of Persian polo, brought by Mughal rulers who crossed the mountains. The dish transformed as it moved south and east, absorbing local spices, local rice varieties, local techniques of layering and steaming. Today, there are dozens of regional biryanis, each one a chapter in a long history of movement and mixing. The border between Persia and India is now a line on a map, but in the kitchen, it’s a blur of saffron and cardamom.
Recipes as Resistance
To cook a dish from a place you can no longer visit is an act of defiance. It says: I remember. It says: This land is mine, even if I cannot stand on it. In the camps, in the diaspora, in the new cities where the old language is fading, the kitchen becomes a site of stubborn continuity. Women who have lost everything else—homes, husbands, the view from their childhood windows—will still rise early to knead dough for manaeesh. They will still soak chickpeas overnight for fatteh. They will still argue, with the passion of scholars, about whether knafeh should be made with fine or coarse semolina.
These arguments aren’t trivial. They’re the maintenance of a world. When a border tries to erase a culture, the culture hides in the kitchen. It hides in the way you fold grape leaves, in the precise moment you add the lemon juice to the mloukhiyeh, in the sound of coffee being pounded in a brass mortar. These things cannot be confiscated at a checkpoint. They cannot be bombed or bulldozed. They live in the body, in muscle memory, and they’re passed down not through official channels but through the intimate, everyday act of cooking together.
I think of my grandmother, who left her village in 1948 and never returned. She carried with her a small bag of seeds: cucumber, tomato, a particular type of mint that grew near the spring. She planted them wherever she went—in the yard of a rented house in Amman, in a pot on a balcony in Cairo, finally in the rich soil of a garden in Montreal. The seeds were her deed to a land she could no longer claim. Every summer, when the mint flowered, she would pick a leaf, crush it between her fingers, and hold it to my nose. “This is the smell of home,” she would say. And I, who had never seen that home, would breathe in and believe her.
Frequently Asked Questions
How did the Sykes-Picot agreement specifically affect food traditions in the Levant?
The 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement divided the Ottoman Arab provinces into British and French spheres of influence, creating new political borders that disrupted centuries-old trade and foraging routes. Ingredients like Aleppo pepper, wild za’atar, and specific grains became harder to source across these new lines. Families who had once freely gathered herbs or traded spices found themselves separated by checkpoints and tariffs, forcing them to substitute ingredients or abandon certain dishes altogether. The agreement didn’t just redraw maps; it fragmented a shared culinary heritage into isolated national cuisines.
Why do some traditional dishes disappear even when ingredients are available?
Dishes often fade not because of physical scarcity but because the knowledge and rituals surrounding them are lost. Industrial food production, urbanisation, and changing family structures mean that labour-intensive practices—like making mulberry syrup or preserving eggplants for makdous—are no longer passed down. When the hands stop performing these tasks, the stories and techniques that accompany them also vanish. A dish survives not just through its recipe but through the living culture that sustains it, and when that culture is disrupted by migration or modernisation, the dish can become a memory.
Can a dish still be authentic if it’s made with substitute ingredients?
Authenticity is a moving target, especially in diaspora cooking. When a cook substitutes an ingredient out of necessity—using oregano for wild za’atar or farmed fish for river carp—the dish becomes a translation rather than a replica. This translation carries its own truth: it tells the story of adaptation and survival. The emotional and cultural core of the dish often remains intact, even if the flavours shift. In this sense, a dish made with substitute ingredients can be deeply authentic to the experience of exile and memory, preserving the spirit of the original while acknowledging the reality of the present.