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Welcome to the luscious flavors of Crescent and a meal from Nadia's Cafe.
As the Arabs say: You are twice welcomed!
Tabbouleh Salad
What is the dish that first lures Hanif to Sirine? It's her tabbouleh salad, of
course. You wouldn't think that such a basic, sturdy dish would have such
magnetic attraction. But such is the power of a few fresh vegetables when they're
chopped finely, dressed with just the right amounts of lemon and oil, and allowed
to do their work.
Nobody ever wants to make the tabbouleh salad when they're throwing a party,
because you've got to wash all that parsley and then mince and mince and mince
until you think you're going to go mad. But then all the company comes over in
their nice clothes, and they're so glad to see the good, simple tabbouleh salad
on the table. Then they know that everything is going to be fine, the
conversation will be witty, the women charming and the men flirtatious. Because
once you combine the elements of tabbouleh together, you can't imagine that they
should ever be separate.
1/4 cup medium bulgur (available in Mediterranean specialty stores)
3 bunches of parsley washed thoroughly and minced (take care not to bruise),
stems discarded
3–4 scallions, finely sliced in rings
2 medium tomatoes, finely diced
1 medium cucumber, peeled, seeded, and finely diced
Dressing:
1 lemon
4 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
salt to taste
Rinse bulgur, then cover with cold water and soak in a bowl for one hour. Change
the water or add more if necessary (it will absorb some water and there should
be water left over). Drain completely (you can even squeeze it out with your
hands).
Toss ingredients together in a nice bowl. Stir in dressing.
Mjeddrah
Some people think of this dish as peasant food—it has no ornate sauces or
intricate spices to elevate its status. But in Crescent, as in the
everyday world, it is one of the dishes that people end up craving the
most—especially when they move away from their countries and homes and
families. It is the sort of dish that allows you to taste the deep flavor of its
elemental ingredients: lentils, onions, and rice. And through these flavors, it
seems that you taste the delicious notes of the earth itself, the place where
you were born and raised, where you remember kicking a ball around until your
mother was hollering for you—for heaven's sakes—to come in for dinner,
already.
When you cook mjeddrah, its scent fills the whole house and notifies all the
children and all the company exactly what you are making. Gradually, they follow
the entrancing fragrance into the kitchen where they lean over the counter and
won't leave you alone until you put the plates in front of them, and then the
flavors of childhood wash over everyone.
1 cup uncooked rice
1/2 cup dried brown lentils, soaked for one hour, rinsed several times, and
drained
a pinch or two of cumin
1 beef bouillon cube
salt and pepper to taste
2 tbsp butter
1 onion, finely chopped
2 tbsp olive oil
In a medium saucepan mix the lentils into the uncooked rice, add 1-1/2 cups water,
the cumin, and the bouillon cube. Add salt and pepper and the butter. Bring to a
boil then cover and lower the heat to simmer. Fry the onion in the olive oil
until golden brown. When the rice is done, take it off the heat, let it rest for
twenty minutes, then fluff it with a fork, put it on a nice platter, and place
the onions on top.
Serve with a chopped cucumber and mint yogurt mix on the side.
Roasted Leg of Lamb Stuffed with Garlic
All cooks need a signature dish: the dish that you make to impress visiting
dignitaries or for the first time you meet your mother-in-law or for when you
need to bribe someone with something extra wonderful. This is the meal that
everyone talks about when they discuss dinner at your house, and they sigh and
fan themselves and say, "Did you taste her leg of lamb? It's incredible!" And
they feel very smug indeed, knowing that you only prepare it for VIPs.
I didn't taste roasted leg of lamb until I was nine years old. I can still
remember discovering the embedded pockets of garlic that roasted with the meat,
turning butter-soft and mellow, perfect for slathering over the fork-shreddable
lamb. I was actually angry that my father had made me wait till I was nine
before serving it to me. But a leg of lamb is an expensive cut of meat and
sometimes people forget that children like to eat well too.
1 lean leg of lamb, 5–7 lbs
6 cloves of garlic, minced
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp pepper
5 tbsp olive oil
1 small onion, finely chopped
1/2 cup water
1/2 cup wine vinegar (or red wine)
4–5 carrots, peeled and cut in chunks
2 lbs small potatoes
1/2 lb mushrooms, peeled and quartered (if big)
Trim fat from the lamb. Mix the garlic with the salt and pepper. Put several
slits in the lamb all over and stuff with the garlic mixture.
Heat the oil in big pot, add the onion and any excess garlic. Turn the heat to
high and sear the lamb on both sides, about five minutes per side. Add the water
and vinegar, bring to a boil, then lower the heat and cover. Bring to a simmer
on medium heat. Cook 1-1/2 hours, turn the lamb, test the seasoning, and cook
about 1/2 hour. Add the carrots and cook another 1/2 hour. Peel the potatoes, fry
in a pan with olive oil and sautí until brown. Add the potatoes and mushrooms
to the lamb and carrots in the pot and cook for another 1/2 hour.
Bring the leg out on a beautiful platter with the vegetables scattered around the
meat, and the juice served on the side. Slice the meat against the grain and it
will fall apart into fragrant, succulent pieces.
Stuffed Grape Leaves with Lamb Shanks
Sirine the chef rolls her grape leaves alone by the light of the moon because
it's just that sort of dish: you have to be patient and have a nice long
afternoon or evening laid out in front of you. It's the sort of task you lose
yourself in: the mild, easy-going boredom of laying out the grape leaves, placing
the rice filling just so, and seeing how neat and narrow you can roll them.
There's a competition among certain members of my family about who makes the
skinniest stuffed grape leaves, and one of my relatives likes to brag that hers
are rolled tighter than cigarettes.
I can neither confirm nor deny such claims. Some say that the leaves are more
tender if you roll them under a full moon. And my parents insist that the best
leaves come from California. I can only say that if you give yourself to the
gentle meditation of stuffing grape leaves, they will reward you with a luscious,
juicy, beautiful meal.
1-1/2 cups Uncle Ben's rice
1/2 lb lean hamburger
1/2 cup finely minced parsley
6 fresh mint leaves, finely minced
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1/4 tsp cumin
salt and pepper to taste
1-1/2 cups water
1 large jar of (California) grape leaves
3 fresh lamb shanks, trimmed of fat
8 garlic cloves, cut in half
1 large can diced peeled tomatoes and juice
4 tsp olive oil
2 lemons
In a small bowl mix by hand the rice, hamburger, parsley, mint, cinnamon, cumin,
salt and pepper, and 1 cup water. Mix thoroughly; it will have a thick, soupy
consistency.
To stuff grape leaves: rinse the leaves carefully, then spread a leaf flat on a
work surface. (My father says to use about 1/2 tsp stuffing if the leaf is small
or 1 tbsp if the leaf is about the size of a woman's hand. Adjust accordingly!)
Place the stuffing at the base of the leaf, roll once to cover, fold in the
sides, then finish rolling.
Place the lamb shanks in the bottom of a large Dutch oven and sprinkle with 8
garlic clove halves. Place half the stuffed grape leaves on top of the shanks,
line them in rows, folded side down. Sprinkle with the rest of the halved garlic.
Top this with the rest of the stuffed grape leaves. Top with tomato, 3 tsp olive
oil, 1/2 cup water, and the juice of two lemons.
Bring the pot to a boil, then lower to a simmer (check the juice after one hour
and add water if dry). Simmer for a total of three hours. Eat with fresh yogurt.
If you feel fancy you can stir a little chopped cucumber and minced garlic into
the yogurt.
Serves 12.
Gh'rayba Cookies
We used to shape these cookies into crescent moons. It is also traditional to
make sambusik cookies in the shape of crescents, but those are a lot more work,
requiring a filling, etc. The beauty of gh'rayba is that they're so simple that
a child can make them in the time it takes for your mother to have a good talk on
the telephone before she notices you've messed up the kitchen. And they're made
of the sorts of ingredients you usually have around, at the front of the cupboard
where they're easy to reach. When it came time to name my novel, I thought of
these tender cookies of my childhood, the purity of their ingredients, and their
buttery sweetness with the exotic suggestion of orange blossom.
1 cup clarified butter
1 cup confectioner's sugar
1 tsp orange blossom water
2-1/2 cups flour
1/2 cup blanched almonds
Preheat oven to 325º.
Beat the butter, sugar, and orange blossom water together until fluffy. Add the
flour gradually, and mix well.
Roll walnut-sized pieces of dough into finger shapes, then curve into crescent
moons. Place one blanched almond in the center of each cookie.
Bake 20–25 minutes but avoid browning. Let cool on trays before transferring
to rack.
Makes about 25.
Arabic Coffee
In Crescent, Sirine is forever bringing coffee to her customers and
friends, and there is an important reason for this: in Middle Eastern cultures,
coffee is a marker of transition. It signals beginnings and endings. It welcomes
guests to your home, it is a stimulus to conversation, and it is a balm for the
close of a long day. It is the best way to finish a wonderful meal and a graceful
way for friends to offer one another something small yet full of flavor and
feeling. One must always accept the offer of coffee in a Bedouin's home.
As the supposedly best Arabic coffee maker around, I was required to make the
coffee for my father after dinner. Every night it was the same thing: I'd get out
the blue enameled rakwi coffee pot with the long handle, tip in one tablespoon
of coffee per cup, and then stand there, stirring and stirring by the stove,
staring down in the deep brown liquid, waiting for the foam to rise. The last
step was to drop a single saccharine pill instead of sugar into Dad's cup so he
didn't feel so bad about eating baklava with his coffee.
2 tbsp fine ground Arabic coffee
1 cup water
1 cardamom seed (optional)
2 tsp sugar (as it is no longer easy to find saccharine pills)
Place the coffee in a small, open-mouth pot. Add the water and stir to mix. Bring
o a boil, stirring occasionally. Remove from the heat. Add the cardamom and sugar
and stir. Bring to a second boil, let it settle, then bring to a third and final
boil—watch it closely; it rises quickly! Pour in demitasse cups, giving each
a topping of foam—a clear indicator of an accomplished coffee maker.
A Brief Biography of Diana Abu-Jaber
I grew up inside the shape of my father's stories. A Jordanian immigrant, Dad
regaled us with tales about himself, his country, and his family that both
entertained us and instructed us about the place he'd come from and the way he
saw the world. These stories exerted a powerful influence on my imagination, in
terms of what I chose to write about, the style of my language, and the form my
own stories took.
People often ask me about my American mother, and whether she also told stories.
Actually, my mother is not a native storyteller in the way my father is, but it
may be that she has taught me something even more valuable, which is how to
listen to stories. She made a space in our home for my father to invent himself,
and her attentiveness and focus showed me that sometimes being quiet can be just
as transformative as speaking.
I have two younger sisters and we grew up in little snow-bound houses in Syracuse,
New York, and then spent some time living among courtyards and trellised jasmine
and extended family in Amman, Jordan, before we all moved back to Syracuse again.
My father could not make up his mind about which country we should live in. In
America, he constantly reminded us that we were good Arab girls; we weren't
allowed to go out to parties or school dances. But then he encouraged us to study
singlemindedly, to compete as intensely as any boy, and to always make our own
way in the world.
My father's brothers are doctors and scholars and politicians. And it was
determined that I would receive my undergraduate degree from SUNY-Oswego because
one of my uncles taught there and could keep an eye on me while I lived in a
dormitory. When I finally struck out on my own to do my graduate work, I
instinctively sought out mentors—the next best thing to uncles, in my
mind—going for my M.A. at the University of Windsor, to study with Joyce
Carol Oates, and then my Ph.D. from SUNY-Binghamton, to work with John Gardner.
In school, I started writing stories that I think shared a certain kinship with
my father's stories in that they gave me a way to imagine myself in the world.
After graduate school, I taught creative writing, film studies, and contemporary
literature at a number of different universities, including the University of
Nebraska, the University of Michigan, UCLA, and the University of Oregon. All of
these places had something new to teach me about being an American. I moved
around for work, but I think I also like to move. While there's a certain
rootlessness and solitude to nomadism, I suppose that I am, as my father asserts,
fundamentally a Bedouin. I am driven to exploration and conversation despite my
best efforts to sit quietly in one place. I would just as happily host a dinner
party as give a reading, and my chronically social nature frequently disrupts
anything like a real work ethic.
Even in my work, I am restless—while I'm prone to write novels, I am also
crazy about writing restaurant and film reviews, interviewing politicians and
profiling county fairs, and fantasizing about writing a Great Arab-American
Screenplay. My new idea is to live beside the ocean with my husband and my
nervous little Italian greyhound, and to work outside under an umbrella with a
pitcher of lemonade and a plate of cookies. Once again, I will attempt to settle
down and write for hours and hours at a time, the way I am told one must. But I
suppose that I will end up, as usual, inviting friends or family over so I don't
eat all the cookies myself. We will sit outside together, contemplating our
origins and destinations, and begin telling each other stories again.
An Interview with Diana Abu-Jaber, by Andrea Shalal-Esa
Diana Abu-Jaber's paternal grandmother hailed from Bethlehem; her grandfather
came from a Bedouin family that has long called Jordan home. Her father,
originally Syrian Orthodox, converted to Islam after moving to America. Abu-Jaber
grew up in a little town outside Syracuse, New York, raised with so many of her
father's memories that she felt as if she'd also grown up in Jordan. Life was a
constant juggling act, acting Arab at home but American in the street. The
struggle to make sense of this sort of hybrid life, or "in-betweenness,"
permeates Abu-Jaber's fiction. These days, she teaches creative writing at
Portland State University in Oregon, and she freelances as a food critic, a job
that occasionally finds her yearning for a simple bowl of cauliflower. In
addition, she writes columns and essays for publications like the Washington
Post and the Oregonian.
In a wide-ranging interview conducted in Washington during a conference at
Georgetown University's Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, Abu-Jaber
discussed Crescent, her new book project, the trials of "Memories of
Birth," and her views on the state of Arab-American literature.
What was the genesis of Crescent?
I was teaching a class in Middle Eastern culture at UCLA as a guest lecturer, in
1995. The class was filled with students who were all either Arab or Iranian
Americans and they were all very interested in identity work, in finding out
about their cultures or their parents. Almost none of them could speak Arabic or
Farsi. They didn't know, they were just really eager to learn. It was uplifting.
I was energized, and that's when I started writing the novel. . . . There really
is this little Lebanese café in the heart of the section of town they called
the Tarantula. I remember thinking—How interesting, it's Lebanese but it's
an Iranian part of town. I started thinking about how caf—s create their own
cultural environment, their own micro cultures. I knew I wanted to write about
food, I wanted to write about Arabic food. And I'm a food critic too.
Crescent is about a woman who's Iraqi-American and she's a chef. She
cooks in an Arabic restaurant in Los Angeles and she falls in love with an Iraqi
immigrant. He's kind of mysterious. He teaches linguistics at UCLA. It explores
a little bit about the question of exile. That's one of my literary
obsessions—what a painful thing it is to be an immigrant. How when you leave
your home country, you don't really know what it is that's about to happen to
you. What an incredible experience and journey it is. And how for a lot of people
it can be a real process of loss.
You've written a great deal about food. It seems to be very important to you.
I've taught these sorts of classes before, and always the favorite subject is
food—always. Belly dancing is up there, but . . . food is such a great human
connector, it's so intimate. And Middle Eastern food, when it's done well, is
amazing. I thought . . . let the food be a metaphor for their experience. And I
want people to relate to it through the beauty and the passion of the senses, the
sensory joy of the novel and the beauty of Arabic cooking. . . . I'm close to my
family, and I find that I have an almost instinctive drive to re-create family,
to re-create an intellectual and an artistic gathering. I've been trying to
explore that in my own writing. And that's why food has been such an important
metaphor. To me, that's one of the most immediate and powerful ways of creating
the metaphor of the hearth and a gathering place, a place where the collective
forms.
How do you situate your writing in the context of everything that's been done
globally on exile? What's the interplay between the concept of exile and
immigration?
I feel that especially in the political gestalt we're in right now, exile has
become a particularly pointed question, more so than immigration. Immigration,
at least from the Arab-American point of view, was just more innocent and—I
don't want to say naïve—but it had a kind of hopefulness and optimism that
wasn't as charged by issues of race and politics as it is now. Particularly for
Palestinians and Iraqis, a lot of them are not choosing to emigrate, but rather
they're fleeing political persecution or they've lost their homes. It's an act
that is not entirely of their own volition. I'm very interested in what the loss
of a homeland means for someone.
I haven't read a lot of people who've gone specifically into this question as
Arab exiles. There's a critic whose work I really like who talks about that,
Homi Bhabha. Some of the things he said about exile were very meaningful for me.
He talked about how for contemporary immigrants and exiles, what you can have in
your life, instead of home culture, is a new tribe. That you look to other
writers and intellectuals and artists who are experiencing the same sorts of
political exigencies and angst and maybe they're not even literally exiles, but
they feel exiled from their communities and they come together in a modern
regrouping, a new kind of tribal gathering. That has been a very poignant way of
looking at exile for me. When you're faced with not being allowed to return to
your homeland, perhaps there is a way that you can resituate yourself. And
Edward Said is very emblematic of someone who does that. He makes a home in his
writing and in the academic community, and when I read his work, I feel an
intellectual home that's there. It's incredibly comforting to me.
How does race play out in your new novel?
It's an issue. When I started writing it, I had the idea of working from the
Othello story. I wanted to sort of retell Othello, where instead of having
Othello be the Moor, he's Arab. So I really had the idea of race very strongly in
my head. The Iraqi professor I described as being very dark. However, I rewrote
it and I took all the direct allusions to Othello out.
Why did you rewrite it?
When I wrote it the first time, I really was trying to rewrite Othello. But
it's a very hard story to transplant to a modern version because it's so dramatic
and it relies so much on the idea of villainy and heroism. When you try to do
that in a modern context, well, it's almost like Freud wrecked it for everybody.
After Freud there are no more villains. We understand each other too
much—unless of course, you're Arab. We have too much understanding about the
unconscious and about family history, so everything has to be subtler and more
complex. And so, the closer I got to the characters, the more I saw, well, the
villain really isn't a villain, actually he's suffering too. And the hero isn't
that great. It all just sort of dissolved as I was working on it. But the
vestiges that I kept of Othello were that the Iraqi professor was very
dark, that he looked dark, and that the Iraqi-American chef was very white and
American. She also had an Arab father and an American mom, so she was doing that
kind of straddling. And I wanted to talk about . . . and I do this in the novel
. . . about her conflicting feelings; if I don't look like it, does that mean
that I'm not it? It's the curse of the first generation—the children of
immigrants. You're straddling generations and you straddle cultures. And like so
many people who are cultural mixes, we kind of submit to the lie that is the
whole notion of race—because race is based on appearance. And appearance is
tenuous at best. I happened to come out looking like this. My sisters look much
more traditionally Arab . . . but actually I'm the only one among my sisters who
can speak Arabic. Race has nothing to do with who we are and it's not a reality.
It's a complete social construction, but we cling to it. We cling to it as some
kind of a signifier, and it basically signifies nothing.
Why did you decide to write a short story about Afghan women for Good
Housekeeping?
I feel like the best political work I can do is to try to put a human face on
people who are culturally erased. Rather than try to be didactic, or deliver
some kind of message, I just try to go for the human element, and try to be
really personal and intimate. We had started bombing Afghanistan. Part of the
problem is that nobody sees Afghan people on TV. We don't get to see the culture.
We need to have some stories from within. . . . It's set in America, but it's
really about a family of Afghan women and their experience. You learn to provide
editors and readers with a bridge to your subject. That is something that has
taken me quite a while to learn how to do. But if you provide the bridge, if you
provide the connection—in the Good Housekeeping story it's an ESL
teacher, and I think with Arabian Jazz it was humor—that's the way to
. . . make it accessible. . . .
You seem to provoke a lot of strong reactions.
I have always, always, no matter what I've written about, had people who wanted
to take hits out on me. There is something about the way I write, or something
that just incenses people. There are people who like my writing too. . . . I
often feel that it doesn't even really have to do with what I'm saying, or how
I'm saying it. It's the topic, and also that people perceive me
personally—because of my name, or my heritage—as being one of them, one
of the troublemakers, one of the scary people.
There's this great word in German, Nestbeschmutzung, which means, essentially,
fouling one's own nest. And I guess Arabian Jazz struck a nerve.
You need to find a certain amount of strength or simple self-confidence in order
to laugh at yourself. You have to feel at ease. It makes me sad in a way that
people do feel this kind of tense fearfulness about the way that they and their
culture are written about. I was very taken aback by some of that response.
There's also the sense that . . . Arab-Americans have been so maltreated by the
media, their image has been so dark, that I think there's a real anxiety about
the artistic representations that are out there. "Is this just going to make us
look worse? You're exposing us, you're making us even more vulnerable. What we
need to do is be quiet, we need to close ranks. We need to really control what's
being said about us." I think a lot of that fearfulness was stirred up by the
novel. I understand it, I really do.
But silence has a price.
I feel like if there's a choice . . . between speaking and suppressing yourself
that inevitably you have to speak. Audre Lorde once said, "Your silence will not
protect you." That's a really hard lesson to learn, and sometimes you have to
learn that the hard way. It's an instinct to try to hide if you're feeling like
you're under attack. And you learn that, unfortunately, what looks like the easy
way is often a really bad choice. If you silence yourself, if you try to be
good, if you try to be polite, or toe a party line, you end up paying for that in
the long run. You pay for it . . . with your homeland, or with your soul, or
with your artistic vision.
What are you working on now? Another novel?
I'm actually working on a food book. It's a food memoir. It's a memoir told
through food. It's fun to work on. I've been really enjoying myself. Each chapter
is about a certain kind of Arabic dish. Then I use that dish to talk about my
father's love affair with food and how we were raised in this totally
food-obsessed family, and the implications that the dishes had for us. How each
one symbolized a different stage in our evolution as a family, as immigrants.
A longer version of this interview appeared in Al Jadid, Vol. 8, No. 39
(Spring 2002). Copyright © 2002 by Al Jadid.
Discussion
Questions
1. Most love stories cast very young women as the "love interest," or else they
feature older married women looking for an escape. The protagonist of
Crescent, Sirine, is thirty-nine and unmarried. Do you think the author
chose this age and situation deliberately? Why? Did it surprise you? What does
it imply for the rest of the story?
2. Could you tell, from the way this love story unfolds, that the author is a
woman?
3. What is the purpose of the tale that Sirine's uncle tells? Did you find it a
distraction or did it help to inform the rest of the story? What do the tales of
Abdelrahman Salahadin's several different slaveries and "drownings" mean or
evoke?
4. Diana Abu-Jaber has been a restaurant reviewer for the Portland
Oregonian. Do you think making her main character a chef was just an
opportunity for the author to weave in her own love of food and cooking? Or is
there something else going on here?
5. Both Han and Nathan have pasts in Iraq that remain shadowy for much of the
novel. Does this make Han more attractive or more threatening? What about Nathan?
Did you find yourself filling in the blanks of their past, and were your guesses
right or wrong?
6. When Han finally tells the story of his childhood in Baghdad, the emotional
gravity of the novel suddenly shifts. Why? What has changed? How does it affect
your sense of involvement with the characters? How does exile affect Han's sense
of identity?
7. The relationship between Sirine and Rana is complicated and highly charged.
What do you think each of these women really thinks about the other? Why does
each of them seem to see the other woman as some sort of challenge to her own
identity? Do women actually use each other this way-as mirrors to reassure or to
challenge their images of themselves? Is that good or bad?
8. Virginia Woolf once said that literature would change once two women in a
novel could actually be together in a room, without any men, talking to each
other. Crescent is full of such moments. What role do they play in the
novel? How would you compare the relationships between the women, between the
men, and between the women and men in this novel? Are they all convincing? Are
they equally important? What about the relationships between members of different
generations?
9. What was your reaction to Sirine's memories of her parents' death? How do you
feel about her parents' desire to save the world, and its effect on Sirine?
Combined with the story of the American woman in Baghdad, and the film crew in
the desert in Sirine's uncle's tale, do you think the author is sending us a
message or messages about Americans abroad, or about how Americans are perceived
in other countries? What is she saying and do you think it's true?
10. Do you have a different view of the Middle East after reading this novel? A
different view of America?
11. What are the various ways in which the title is echoed through the book? What
does it evoke for you, in the end?
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