‘Our food, our heritage, our culture': the chef highlighting Palestinian cuisine
Boustany: A Celebration of Vegetables from My Palestine is a masterclass on how less is so often more when it comes to creating food that connects with people and how the joy derived from cooking and sharing food can, in itself, be an act of resistance.
'As a chef and writer this is a political act, a way to show young Palestinians who weren't born there the deep emotional connection we have to the land, to the food of our land, and how Palestine used to be,' Tamimi said. 'This is me being resilient as a Palestinian but also recognizing that I am privileged to have a voice and talking about our food is a way of keeping it alive.'
Each recipe – from tahini, halva and coffee brownies to green kishk (fermented yoghurt and bulgar) and Gazan dukkah (a spice mix for dipping) – speaks to how much Palestinians love to forage, cook, preserve and eat food. It's a core part of the culture and heritage that Tamimi hopes will help broaden the world's understanding of what it means to be Palestinian.
'Our dishes are being claimed by some Israeli chefs and so many native ingredients – lentils and sesame and greens – that I remember foraging for with my family are starting to disappear as access to our land shrinks. But this is our food, this is our history, our culture. You can't take my memories away from me. You can't tell me that this is not my land,' said Tamimi.
Tamimi was born and raised in the Old City of Jerusalem, and grew up foraging in the surrounding hills with his parents for herbs, berries and greens – ingredients his mother would then use to create honest, simple dishes that were mostly vegetarian.
After a long stint as head chef at Lilith, a fine dining establishment in Tel Aviv, Tamimi moved to London in 1997 at the age of 29 to work at Baker & Spice, where Yotam Ottolenghi, then a young pastry chef who grew up in the Jewish part of the Old City, also landed. The pair went on to create a hugely successful culinary enterprise including several restaurants in central London and together co-wrote the bestselling cookbooks Ottolenghi (2008) and Jerusalem (2012).
In 2020, Tamimi co-wrote Falastin (2020), a love letter to Palestine's ancient, diverse culinary traditions – and the people who have preserved the food amid unbearable losses.
He rediscovered a passion for foraging in Umbria, Italy, which has a similar climate to Palestine, and began re-creating dishes from his homeland to stave off homesickness during the Covid pandemic. This helped sow the seed for Boustany, which means 'my garden' in Arabic, that is steeped in childhood memories of staying at his grandparents' home in Hebron in the southern West Bank, where the garden they tended with love delivered a bounty of fruits and vegetables each season.
'The majority of our cuisine is based on vegetables, grains and pulses, and for me the whole process of cooking vegetarian food connects me back to the environment, to the land, to simple dishes – that could be just a bit of chard with some mackerel and a bit of onion and garlic,' he said. 'It's simple, not gimmicky, but really flavorsome and colorful and brings comfort because it connects me back to my family, to my heritage and all those beautiful memories. It was going to be a vegan cookbook but I couldn't give up on cheese and eggs – especially for making sweets.'
The 70-year-plus Israeli occupation and expansion into Palestinian territories has severely restricted access to land, and foraging some native plants is actually banned by the Israeli state for Palestinians, while it fills the market with cheap Israeli alternatives. Olive trees, central to Palestinian identity, are frequently burned and chopped down by Israeli settlers in the West Bank; irrigation systems and wells are contaminated and destroyed; and for years fishers in Gaza have been denied access to Palestinian waters – and targeted with violence.
Preservation is an arc of this book, a deliberate though unsaid theme at a time when Palestinian food, land and culture are under unprecedented assault. This includes a pantry, or mooneh, chapter, a unique concept to Middle Eastern cooking, especially Palestinian and Levantine cuisine. Mooneh involves preserving (pickling, freezing, fermenting and bottling) seasonal products such as nuts, herbs, fruits, pulses and vegetables so they can be enjoyed throughout the year.
But the book also looks forward, with new twists to traditional recipes inspired by Tamimi's travels and evolution as chef over the past four decades. 'For me it's more important to take the essence of a traditional dish and build on it, by adding the layers and the texture,' he said. 'But you shouldn't play with the dish too much to ruin it.'
Tamimi was in the final stretch of writing Boustany when Israel launched its unprecedented and relentless military assault on Gaza – in retaliation for Hamas's attack on 7 October 2023. Israel has since razed the tiny territory, targeting the farmland, forests, olive orchards and greenhouses to stop Gazans from producing their own food while blocking humanitarian supplies – which together has put 2 million Palestinians on the brink of starvation.
Last month, a French historian who made it into the territory to document the horrors hidden from foreign journalists reported that he saw starving children sharing bits of food with scrawny stray cats.
'Palestinian people are full of life, they always want to make you welcome and will push food on your plate just to make sure that you are well fed, happy and comfortable,' Tamimi said. 'It's horrendous for people that always celebrated life and food and seasonality and feeding people to be stripped from all of that, and for it to be used as a weapon against them.'
Palestinian recipes always have a local spin. For example, the cuisine in Gaza was uniquely influenced by its proximity to Egypt, so dishes are spicier, and the falafel is often made with fava beans instead of just chickpeas. Gaza's version of knafeh – a popular dessert that combines crispy pastry, sweet cheese and fragrant syrup – includes walnuts and sometimes bulgar or couscous. The seafood enjoyed in Gaza before Israel's total siege – such as crab and squid – are hard to find in other parts of Palestine, and the strawberries there are the sweetest, said Tamimi.
'There is another side to Palestinians that I want to show in the book. They want to eat and enjoy life, they want to live life to the max. Through food and these dishes I can connect with people who want to know more about Palestine and Palestinian culture. If there is something positive, with all the horrible stuff happening now, it is that it has opened people's eyes.'
Boustany by Sami Tamimi (Ebury Publishing, £30). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
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In Lawrence's wake came Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin and Georges Bataille – all about abjection and breaking taboos. Then the outrageously argumentative Norman Mailer and John Updike, whose frank delight in the female form called out for a feminist backlash. It came in the shape of Kate Millett's wittily polemical 1970 Sexual Politics and a new wave of sexually explicit novels by women concerned less with celebrating than with demythologising sex. Erica Jong's epochal 1973 Fear of Flying ushered in the 'zipless fuck' – sex without strings – and allowed a generation of feminists to experiment with promiscuity, but for all its brilliance on psychoanalysis and marriage, the book is pretty terrible on sex. It took another backlash – within feminism itself – to make sex great again. In 1967 Susan Sontag had written The Pornographic Imagination, an essay defending writers such as Bataille from prudery and fighting to classify pornographic writing as literature, even or especially when it exceeded realism. 'Tamed as it may be, sexuality remains one of the demonic forces in human consciousness,' she wrote – so why not make it a resource for 'breaking through the limits of consciousness'? Angela Carter took on Sontag's ideas in her 1978 study, The Sadeian Woman, arguing against feminists concerned to outlaw porn, and making the case for the 'moral pornographer' – an artist who 'uses pornographic material as part of the acceptance of the logic of a world of absolute sexual licence for all the genders'. Sontag and Carter saw that the power of sex lay in opening selfhood to otherness with extravagant force. Otherness and innovation go together, so great writing about great sex always has radical potential. The parameters they set out still define the best possibilities of what sex writing can be, though plenty of men – from Philip Roth to Michel Houellebecq – came along in the meantime to try to prove that male desire was still fascinating. Reading in our contemporary era, I find myself most riveted by writers who continue Carter's tradition. Published earlier this year, Sophie Kemp's Paradise Logic tells the satirical story of a young woman's attempt to make herself into the ideal girlfriend and, in doing so, exposes the patriarchal nature of porn culture. But precisely because it's so clever and sassy it reveals the limits of satire, whereas other contemporary novelists are bringing together the pornographic and the transcendent in a more transporting way. It's telling that these writers are more often writing gay than heterosexual sex. Garth Greenwell, who has described himself as wanting to write scenes that are '100% pornographic and 100% high art', is more trammelled by questions of identity than Alan Hollinghurst was when he wrote The Swimming-Pool Library – a book Greenwell credits as an inspiration. Greenwell is writing sex in the age of consent and dutiful identity politics, but arguably it's these constraints that power his existential quest. There's a scene in Greenwell's 2020 Cleanness where the pornographic and the transcendent explicitly entwine. The narrator has a BDSM encounter with a Bulgarian man he calls Svetcheto, 'the little saint'. The usually submissive narrator has agreed to dominate. It's a brutal scene, all the more frightening because it mirrors an earlier encounter when the narrator was dangerously violated. We're worried both that he'll reenact that violence and that he won't carry off this new role. But then it becomes clear he's enjoying himself. Suffused by mutual, unexpected transcendence, the couple's porn-inspired identities simultaneously break down and burst into flower. Laughing, Svetcheto licks away the narrator's tears. 'Do you see? You don't have to be like that,' he says. 'You can be like this.' Jen Beagin, K Patrick and Yael van der Wouden write moving, powerful portraits of lesbian desire, full of anatomical detail. Beagin's Big Swiss is a large-hearted tale of a love affair between Flavia, an absurdly beautiful gynaecologist, and Greta, the more klutzy, down-at-heel writer who's paid by Flavia's sex therapist to transcribe her sessions. 'Her pussy looked like advanced origami. A crisp pink lotus flower folded by a master. Greta briefly rearranged it with her mouth.' The sex scenes in Patrick's Mrs S are less metaphorical and more breathlessly desiring, though the prose is taut in its lyricism. It can feel like the plot – a love affair between the 22-year-old new teaching recruit and the headmaster's wife in a girls' boarding school – is an excuse for the sex scenes, but in a way that's the point. In both books, it is striking how quickly sex reveals the existential need for transformation. Even in that first sex scene, Greta feels as if she's reached a place 'she's been visiting in her dreams for years and forgetting'. Mrs S is casually historical – set in the 1980s or 90s – which means its identity politics can be implicit: the narrator wears a chest binder but the book doesn't raise questions of trans identity. Instead it is preoccupied with the loss of identity, as the narrator feels herself remade as the 'You' she becomes in her lover's mouth. 'It is as if she has always been waiting for this arrival, of me into my body. You. I don't have a name. Isn't it so much better, to not have a name, to be dropped straight from the clouds?' The sex scenes are more shocking in Van der Wouden's The Safekeep because the subject matter is so serious. This is the story of a violently sudden passion that becomes a love affair between Eva, a displaced Jew, and Isabel, a gentile woman who has unwitting power over her. The book is set in the aftermath of the second world war and, given the gravity of the material, some reviewers have wondered if the sex scenes are necessary. But this is to miss the point, which is that the book only works if the relationship throws both women entirely off-kilter – using the edges of porn to show sex derailing not only their lives but their selves, and indeed the conventional novel form itself. Isabel finds herself vulnerably, joyously powerless in an unfamiliar body: 'At Eva's mercy, trapped between the cage of her teeth, she had grown a new shape.' Van der Wouden insists that her complex sense of character development justifies sexual explicitness. But she has also been clear in interviews that no justification is needed: 'The girls deserve to have some fun. This was my mantra while writing: Let them have some fun!' So what about those writers daring to write explicit, ecstatic heterosexual sex? The most compelling are Eimear McBride, whose The Lesser Bohemians makes the reader feel as though they are almost inside the bodies of the protagonists, and Sally Rooney, who is casually magisterial at writing sex scenes that are at once radiant and minutely observed by her overthinking characters. Like Greenwell, Rooney balances a commitment to a contemporary vision of identity and consent with a willingness to explore the pull of dissolution and abjection. Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion In Intermezzo, the young chess genius Ivan checks repeatedly that his lover likes what he's doing, while his brother Peter half-exploits Naomi, a young woman who has sold pornographic images of herself and remains too willing to abase herself for men. But beneath these exterior sexual identities are their private bodily lives, and sex is the best means of growth they have. Rooney follows McBride in dizzyingly contorting her sentences: 'Deep pressing almost hurting and she felt him throbbing, wanting to, and she wanted that also, wet inside, image of silver behind her closed eyelids, jetting, emptying into her …' Rooney is surprised that people don't ask her more often about the place of sex in her novels; 'the erotic is a huge engine in the stories of all my books,' she has said. But it is in All Fours that the full possibilities of Carter's 'moral pornography' are realised. July's novel manages to be at once an ethnographic account of women's perimenopausal sexuality and a more darkly anti-realist tale of a woman living out her sexual fantasies. The narrator spends vast sums transforming a small-town hotel room into a sumptuous dreamscape, where she tests her capacities for love and lust with Davey, a beautiful, potent but determinedly chaste young dancer she meets at the gas station. The encounters with Davey are brilliantly, exuberantly realised – all the more so because July never loses sight of their comedy. In the absence of sex, they seek consummation elsewhere, and at one point Davey changes her tampon. The scene is both bathetically comic, intensely erotic, and unexpectedly moving. But it is once she and Davey part and the narrator has sex with sexagenarian Audra that the novel becomes incandescent. The narrator is home now, adjusting to her former life, but has negotiated a weekly night in the hotel. She seeks out Audra, who had a relationship with Davey years earlier, desperate to compare notes. 'Fantasies are all good and well up to a certain age,' Audra says, 'Then you have to have lived experiences or you'll go batty.' And so Audra describes her sexual past with Davey, while both women masturbate, an experience that, for the narrator, 'lit up new neural pathways, as if sex, the whole concept of it, was being freshly mapped'. As a sexual encounter, this is moving and original. As a vision of womanhood undergoing feats of change and confronting mortality, it's extraordinary. This scene takes us beyond realism. In her life at home, July's narrator is casually, matter-of-factly bound up in the sexual questions of her contemporary world: she has a nonbinary child and is anxiously aware how limited her sex life is by motherhood. But July uses the narrator's experiences in the hotel room to bend and test our sense of novelistic, psychological plausibility. It is a place where identity can be discarded and remade. Sex remains at the centre of much of the best fiction, and we need powerful fictions to show us what sex is or can become. This is where realism comes up against something stranger, and body and consciousness undo and affirm each other, because it can be at once so ordinary, and so transcendent. Lara Feigel is the author of Look! We Have Come Through! – Living with DH Lawrence (Bloomsbury).
