Middle East - Anthony Ham [74]
If klezmer takes its inspiration from Jewish Diaspora roots in Europe, the Idan Raichel Project (www.idanraichelproject.com), arguably Israel’s most popular group, casts its net more widely. Israeli love songs are their forte, but it’s the Ethiopian instruments, Jamaican rhythms and Yemeni vocals that mark the group out as something special. Although originally rejected by leading local record labels for being ‘too ethnic’, the Idan Raichel Project’s building of bridges between Israel’s now-multicultural musical traditions struck a chord with audiences at home and abroad.
Another artist to have adapted ancient musical traditions for a modern audience is Yasmin Levy, who sings in Ladino, the language of Sephardic Jews, who lived in Andalusia for centuries until 1492. The flamenco inflections in her music speak strongly of what she calls ‘the musical memories of the old Moorish and Jewish-Spanish world’. Crossing frontiers of a different kind, Yair Dalal is an outstanding Israeli oud player who has collaborated with Palestinian and other Arab musicians.
Food & Drink
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STAPLES & SPECIALITIES
DRINKS
CELEBRATIONS
WHERE & WHEN TO EAT & DRINK
VEGETARIANS & VEGANS
EATING WITH KIDS
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Iraqi Family Cookbook: From Mosul to America, by Kay Karim, fills a long-neglected branch of Middle Eastern cookery with home-style Mosul cooking adapted for Western kitchens. It won the 2007 Gourmand World Cookbook Award.
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Eating is one of the grand passions of Middle Eastern life. For all the religious, political and social issues that divide the region, an emphatic belief in the importance of good food is one thing on which all the people of the Middle East agree. And little wonder given what’s on offer.
Middle Eastern cooking draws on a range of influences, from sophisticated Ottoman and Persian sensibilities or the spare improvisation of the desert cooking pot to a Mediterranean belief in letting fresh ingredients speak for themselves. That’s why eating in the Middle East is akin to a journey through the flavours of history, telling stories of the civilisations who have called the Middle East home through the ages. But the cooks of the region long ago took the best the world had to offer and transformed Middle Eastern food into a genre all its own.
The Middle East’s gastronomic traditions may be relatively simple when it comes to a meal’s constituent elements, but excitement lies in the astonishing variety at large in its feasts of colour and complementary tastes. Innovation comes more in the form of combining dishes of almost endless variety than in tampering with the basic elements of regional cuisine. Thus it is that Middle Eastern food revels in its broad brush strokes and bold colours (think a banquet of mezze), even as it holds fast to its mainstays (think kebabs cooked to perfection with a lingering hint of charcoal). The result is magnificent.
Lebanon, Turkey and Syria are undoubtedly the Middle East’s culinary stars. Then there are the lesser-known delights of the Bedouin cooking in Jordan and the surprises brought to bear upon Israeli tables by the arrival of Jewish immigrants (for more information see the boxed text, Click here), which are also quintessentially Middle Eastern and just as likely to live in the memory of a visitor. In Iraq, subtle Persian and Kurdish flavours are wedded to an Arab love of lamb and rice, thereby adding more contours to the region’s culinary map. The Palestinian Territories and Egypt (think good, honest peasant fare) may be considered the Middle East’s poor cousins when it comes to food culture, but eat in a Palestinian or Egyptian home presided over the