Body and vine: ratio over recipe in the West Bank
This is the second article from research undertaken in 2018 in the Bethlehem, West Bank. The ongoing situation in Palestine and Israel has drawn me back to little snippets of what I learnt there. A humanity that helps, somehow, to deal with the heartache.
Preparing vine leaves for freezing with Yara (definitely not nicked from the next door neighbour’s overhanging vine)
Recipe books translate a pour into grams, a fire into degrees, a squeeze into millimetres, bringing together home cooks that speak different culinary languages. A large part of why I love travelling, though, is experiencing how embedded in the body cooking can be.
This, then, is my West Bank ode to ratio over recipe, and the privilege of seeing and feeling, rather than just reading and tasting.
July, 2018, Bethlehem
It is nine in the morning. We are in Yara’s kitchen. It is a long kitchen with a cream tiled floor I know she has already mopped this morning. The air is dense – Yara has chicken gullets simmering at the bottom of a large pan placed on one of her four gas hob rings.
Yara is a large woman. If you watch and listen, you can tell she is a stiff with arthritis – every movement is punctuated with an intake of breath or an exhale of exasperation. Her hands have nurtured four sons – George, Nadeem, Samir and Fadi. She has four daughters-in-law, and eleven grandchildren. Walk into her apartment and within an hour we will be joined by at least some of them. Abu George, her husband, is the mukhtar (or the head of the family) - a title given to the eldest remaining son of a patrilineal line.
She is sat, still in her nightie, belly protruding slightly between the buttons, at the small table sandwiched between fridge and hob. The TV is playing Christian Arabic music. Adorning the table are various pots of spices. She clears a space. I sit perpendicular to her. Here I can see her work, see her hands. There is a large, round metal dish of vine leaves settled in the water in which they have been defrosting, a plastic square bowl with rice, ground beef, butter, nutmeg, allspice, salt and pepper in it, and a deep round pan with a few rolled and stuffed vine leaves, vibrant dark green and glistening at the bottom.
The rice and ground mince mixture
After a quick good morning, she shows me what to do.
You have the leaf, look what I do. I put it like this.
She drapes a wide leaf across her left palm, the darker, greener, smoother side down, the veinier side up, with the small amount of stem pointing towards her.
You take the stuffing.
She picks up a small amount of the rice and meat in her right hand from the square plastic bowl. She places it into the middle of the leaf, squeezing it gently with her fingertips, forming an elongated heap, wide enough to be a generous mouthful, but not enough to fall out of the ends.
Close it.
With her right-hand index and middle fingers and thumb, she pulls the top right part of the leaf in tight over the stuffing, without misshaping it. Then the bottom right.
Then the other side.
Top left and bottom left corners follow in the same manner.
Then roll tight. Then it doesn’t open, the rice doesn’t come out. You don’t make it tight, it doesn’t work.
Between thumb and index finger she rolls the vine leaf up in her hand, keeping everything compacted. The leaf does not split, nor the stuffing fall out. She places it into the deep pan, into which she has now placed the chicken gullets.
I’ll give you the big ones, they are easier to roll.
And so it begins – the feeling of a slightly damp and cool vine leaf draped across my left hand, its zigzagged edge tickling against my palm. The stuffing is hard in texture – the rice uncooked and the mince thawing. It is easier than I thought to mould it into a mound.
Make it [the stuffing] wider.
I rearrange the heap, covering more of the green leaf with the white grainy mixture. I turn in the corners, their dampness melding edge to edge. Do I make it taut against the stuffing – with the rice expanding in cooking, won’t it split? I roll it up, starting from where the leaf has settled on the sensitive inside of my wrist, moving upwards towards my fingertips.
I use three fingers to do this, working gently, scared to rip the seemingly delicate leaf. I panic, thinking I have, until I realise it is rogue rice remaining on my fingertips.
I watch Yara again. She uses two fingers and has done three in the time of my one. Knowing this pot will later feed her children and grandchildren, and trying, as always, to be an effective apprentice, I give it a firm squeeze before it goes into the pot. Just in case.
The pots, the left one ready for the stove with added eggs and stuffed courgettes
A skill, like being able to roll stuffed vine leaves in the hand, not on a table, is one passed between generations. The way Yara taught me is the same way she was taught - watching and doing with her mother-in-law.
She used to say put this, put that, put this on the fire. She was a huge woman. While she is sitting, she tells me put the onion on, do this, do that. When my Aunt comes, and sees me rolling malfouf [stuffed cabbage], she says ‘Wow, Yara, you are good! You are like us!’ I am happy because I know how to do the things.
Just as it’s almost impossible to write down the pinch and pour of a ratio led recipe, it’s important to recognise that these ‘traditional recipes’ change over time. There is not like-for-like skills transmission.
Tim Ingold, my favourite anthropologist (yes, it’s possible to have a favourite anthropologist) puts it well - “skills are not transmitted from generation to generation but are regrown in each.”
Learning to prepare warak dawali is a moment of growth. Perhaps this embedded sensory cookery connection to Bethlehem is what is bringing me back to these memories at the moment. Whilst my mind processes the news, the pictures, my body feels the vine leaf in my hand. It’s a reminder of the potential for growth of both life and the landscape currently so severely disrupted.