Making Levantine Cuisine

Modern Foodways of the Eastern Mediterranean

Anny Gaul, Graham Auman Pitts, Vicki Valosik

• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781477331880
  9781477324578
• eBook ISBN:
  9781477324592
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: Social Sciences

Melding the rural and the urban with the local, regional, and global, Levantine cuisine is a mélange of ingredients, recipes, and modes of consumption rooted in the Eastern Mediterranean. Making Levantine Cuisine provides much-needed scholarly attention to the region's culinary cultures while teasing apart the tangled histories and knotted migrations of food. Akin to the region itself, the culinary repertoires that constitute Levantine cuisine endure and transform—are unified but not uniform. This book delves into the production and circulation of sugar, olive oil, and pistachios; examines the social origins of kibbe, Adana kebab, shakshuka, falafel, and shawarma; and offers a sprinkling of family recipes along the way. The histories of these ingredients and dishes, now so emblematic of the Levant, reveal the processes that codified them as national foods, the faulty binaries of Arab or Jewish and traditional or modern, and the global nature of foodways. Making Levantine Cuisine draws from personal archives and public memory to illustrate the diverse past and persistent cultural unity of a politically divided region.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• A Note on Transliteration
• Preface
• Introduction: Making Levantine Cuisine
• Part I. Making Levantine Food Cultures
• Part II. Revisiting Foodways in Israel-Palestine
• Part III. Levantine Cuisine beyond Borders
• Further Reading and Cooking
• Contributors
• Index