In November 2016, when the cookbook author Yasmin Khan returned to her home in London after the olive harvest in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, she faced a problem: No matter how strenuously she tried, she could not write.
Her manuscript for a book on Palestinian cooking was due the next spring. But images of the Israeli military checkpoints and soldiers she’d seen throughout her travels in the West Bank and Gaza crowded her head. As a writer, she felt uncharacteristically timid, fighting an impulse to self-censor before her words reached the page.
“I felt really disturbed by what I saw,” she recalled recently in New York. “I also felt, ‘What on earth am I doing, writing a cookbook? Isn’t this really frivolous?’”
She worked through the impasse by revisiting the writing of Anthony Bourdain, whose bracing words energized her. She gave herself a pep talk: “Stop trying to sanitize, or make something pretty, when it’s painful.”
“Zaitoun: Recipes From the Palestinian Kitchen,” which is being published in the United States this week by W.W. Norton & Company, documents Ms. Khan’s travels, illuminating the beauty of Palestinian cuisine and the political realities that envelop it.
She described her work as “culinary anthropology,” using food as a medium to foster cultural understanding. “I am very interested in portraying the sum of life’s experience through food,” she said. “That means conveying the challenging bits as well as the joyous sections.”
Ms. Khan, 37, saw great beauty during two separate research trips for the book. She was enchanted by the quality of the produce. The cauliflower grew larger than any she’d seen in her life. “I’d say they’re as big as my head,” she said, with a laugh. “But I don’t think my head is big enough.”
The heads of cauliflower at the Whole Foods Market near her sister’s apartment in Brooklyn are comparatively puny. Ms. Khan chopped them into tiny florets, leaves intact, and roasted them in the oven, planting the florets gently into a bowl of soup she had made that morning from roasted cauliflower blitzed with garlic, potato and turmeric.
Palestinian food can be sorted into three categories, she explained: There is the bread- and meat-based cooking of the West Bank, which includes East Jerusalem and stretches to the Jordan River. The food of the Galilee, which sits inside Israel and includes cities like Nazareth, closely resembles Levantine cuisine, with its tabbouleh and kibbeh. The cooking of the Gaza Strip, a dense patch bordering Egypt, is largely fish-based and fiery. Among Gaza’s most treasured dishes is zibdiyit gambari, a tomato stew spiced with jalapeños and speckled with dill. The stew is thick with heat, the shrimp cooked just until their gray bodies turn flush.
What unites these different kinds of Palestinian cooking is the love of the olive, or zaitoun, and yogurt, too. Ms. Khan spooned yogurt over a hill of roasted carrots, some as purple as plums, others sunburst yellow, tossed with sesame and nigella seeds. She chalked their surfaces with the yogurt before showering them with olive oil.
Ms. Khan fell in love with Palestinian food when she first found herself in the West Bank 10 years ago, in her past life working in human rights with War on Want, a British organization committed to anti-poverty initiatives. (Ms. Khan left the group in 2011. In 2018, it was one of 20 organizations Israel blacklisted because of its support of an economic, cultural and academic boycott of Israel.) The days were distressing.
“Seeing the physical apparatus of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank was very hard to witness,” she said.
She found that food soothed the frenzy in her mind. Once the sun set each evening, she sat at dinner tables in villages and cafes, eating satin-smooth hummus and baklava with brittle flakes of pastry, their diamonds dripping syrup.
“One of the things about the Middle East is that no matter what is going on, you’re going to make sure that any guest is showered with food and drink,” she said.
A lawyer by training, Ms. Khan eventually grew exhausted with her work. “I put all my effort into that, and I just burned out at the age of 30,” she said.
She turned to food. Ms. Khan, who grew up in Birmingham, England, with a Pakistani father and Iranian mother, published “The Saffron Tales” in 2016, an Iranian cookbook tinged with the introspective notes of a memoir.
Writing “Zaitoun” was a different exercise: Rather than looking inward, as she did for “The Saffron Tales,” she viewed herself as a conduit for “Zaitoun,” vanishing and simply writing what she saw as an outsider.
She was also aware of the fraught nature of her work as a non-Palestinian author writing about Palestinian food. “I do very little commenting myself,” she said. “Anything that’s said is in the voice of Palestinians.”
She also made a point not to quote Israeli sources in the book, an absence that Ms. Khan hoped would send a message: Palestinian voices are not always heard. Listen.
“Zaitoun” is the latest entry in an expanding canon of cookbooks published in English that are proudly Palestinian in name, including Laila El-Haddad’s “The Gaza Kitchen” (published in 2013) and “The Palestinian Table” by Reem Kassis (2017). For years, the lone substantial English-language Palestinian cookbook was “Classic Palestinian Cookery,” by Christiane Dabdoub Nasser, which was published in 2000, and which Ms. Khan leaned on heavily for her research.
That Palestinian cookbooks exist at all beyond the Middle East has great resonance for Joudie Kalla, the author of “Palestine on a Plate” and “Baladi,” both published in the last three years.
“If you look deep into the books, they are about keeping our heritage alive in a world that is so desperately trying to hide us away,” said Ms. Kalla, who lives in London. “And we are not going anywhere.”
Sami Tamimi, the London-based Palestinian chef who wrote “Jerusalem” with the Israeli chef Yotam Ottolenghi — the 2012 cookbook that is often credited with stirring curiosity about Middle Eastern cuisine outside the region — attributed the growing interest in Palestinian cookbooks to a confluence of cultural and political factors.
“The market, 10 years ago, probably wasn’t ready for it,” said Mr. Tamimi, who was born in Jerusalem. Media images, he said, created the impression that all Palestinians lived amid danger and destruction. He credits social media with helping spread a more nuanced vision of Palestinian culture, allowing outsiders to “see they are normal people with normal lives.”
For Ms. Khan, highlighting the resilience she saw in Palestinian cuisine was a vital aspect of her project. She has faced challenges to her mission. In Britain, she has received occasional comments from strangers on social media telling her that Palestinian food didn’t exist.
“Palestinians, like people all over the world, face challenging situations,” she said. “But they’re also enjoying life. They’re existing.”
She had spent most of the morning in Brooklyn making mussakhan, marinating red onions and chicken rubbed with sumac. The chicken was roasted until its juices burst from its flesh, and the onions were cooked until they turned limp and sweet. Ms. Khan piled them onto a bed of naan, the bread blushing with the sumac’s magenta tint.
The dish represents the essence of Palestinian cuisine, characterized by the sharpness of its flavors. The sumac, which gives the chicken an energizing astringency, is its most crucial element, Ms. Khan emphasized: “It’s very enlivening.”
Recipes: Roasted Cauliflower Soup | Spicy Shrimp and Tomato Stew (Zibdiyit Gambari) | Roast Chicken With Sumac and Red Onions (Mussakhan)
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