Selective Harvest

Kushari

maggie — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 20:48:39 +0000

20 million souls hustling and crowding, thronging grand avenues and shady alleys, buying and selling in slick modern shopping centers and ancient covered markets, honking and shouting, cutting business deals by cell phone and hauling furniture in donkey carts… Cairo is a busy place. To keep this massive and voracious population going, the city boasts a spectacular array of street food.

In working class neighborhoods, like here in Old Cairo, it is common to see kushari sold from carts wheeling through the streets and alleys.

Without a doubt, the queen of Cairo street foods is kushari, a steaming bowl of rice, lentils, garbanzos and a mish-mash of diverse shapes of pasta, sprinkled with crispy fried onions, doused with a spicy tomato sauce and eaten at any time of day or night for about 30 cents a pop.

Gleaming aluminum bowls wait for “eat in” clients, who eat standing up beside the cart or seated at the café on the corner; plastic ones stand ready for take out.

Fast, cheap, and nourishing, it was clearly born as a staple for the working urban masses. But so intensely addictive are its charms that as night falls in downtown Cairo one is likely to find well heeled businessmen and packs of trendy adolescents as well as taxi drivers and construction workers all eagerly wolfing down their kushari under glaring flourescent lights.

Downtown kushari establishments run more overhead. Lux is an chain with locations all over the city; this one is on the busy Qasr al Aini Street, surrounded by government buildings.

While Lux was once the cutting edge in kushari service, it has been outdone by snazzier new places like Abu Tarek. The kushari is still great, and I confess a preference for Lux's sawdust floors over Abu Tarek's aquarium-and-fountain bonanza.

Where does kushari come from? Political theorist and food enthusiast Sami Zubaida makes the interesting proposal that Cairo’s kushari is derived from the similar Indian kitchri, brought by British troupes to Egypt in the beginning of the 20th century. As Zubaida points out, the globalization of fast food goes back to way before Mr.Kroc fashioned the golden arches, and has often followed unsuspected routes.

First, you order at the cash register: kushari in the 20 cent, 30 cent or 40 cent sizes, take out or eat in. The management is extremely gracious.

The server stands ready at his great aluminum vats: one contains rice, one pasta, one garbanzos and one lentils. These are scooped one by one (in that order) into your bowl. The kitchen assistant then deftly scatters fried onions on top.

If initially the food itself followed British colonial efforts from India to Egypt, the more recent American empire has made its influence felt in how it is served. Instead of disappearing before the onslaught of hamburgers and fried chicken, local street foods are updating their image and presentation, and competing with international fast food on its own terms. While in the older neighborhoods kushari is still ladled out from wooden street carts and in tiny hole-in-the-wall eateries, in the swankier parts of town you can get your fix at a gleaming new kushari restaurant franchise with formica banquette seating and waiters in uniforms with baseball caps.

The bowl is served with a small dish of tomato sauce perched on top, which you pour over the kushari just before eating so the onions stay crisp. Spicy sauce and garlicky vinegar are provided on the table, to add at will. So simple, so magnificent.

Of course in Egypt fast food – even fast food as humble as kushari – is for the relatively well-off, those who have cash salaries like the legions of civil servants which largely comprise Cairo’s urban middle class. For a majority of the population which lives on under 2 dollars a day, the bright lights and glamour of a kushari restaurant belong to another world.

On Food and Cooking in Gaza

maggie — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 18:15:28 +0000

If all goes well, this month Laila El-Haddad and I will begin research for a book on food and cooking in Gaza. Part cookbook, part oral history, part documentation of the present. Please have a look here.

Kitchen Anthropology

maggie — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 18:07:51 +0000

What better way to know a place than though its inhabitants? And what better way to know people than through their kitchens?

Recently I’ve been working on what I call kitchen anthropology. It started out as practice for a project I hope to do this summer, but has taken on a life of its own.

For the last couple of months in my articles for the Atlantic I have been introducing folks from all walks of life and various parts of the country, who invite us into their homes, show us how to prepare some favorite recipe, and share a little of their stories. The idea of these articles is to make a rough portrait of Spain as seen from the kitchen. I know that when traveling I always look forward to the opportunity to hang around in kitchens, both because I like the intimate atmosphere and because I always learn something about food, culture, life. I thought perhaps you, dear reader, would get a kick out of it too.

Paella with Elena in Madrid
Bacalao with Alvaro in Alava
Olla Podrida with Amaia in Burgos

Anything Good and Bright

maggie — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 14:03:09 +0000

The second in the series of videos about Gaza, this one about the American International School there:

Anything Good and Bright: The American International School in Gaza – better version from maggie schmitt on Vimeo.

Fishing in Gaza

maggie — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 10:37:11 +0000

Finally finished the first of the Gaza videos! This one should be up on the webpage of The Nation in the next few days.

Fishing in Gaza from maggie schmitt on Vimeo.

What is it like to live in Gaza? On the TV we only see the bombs falling. And yet every day, day in and day out, the 1.5 million residents of the Gaza Strip must continue their daily lives and try to eke out a living, despite the blockade which since 2006 has smothered Gaza’s economy and isolated it from the world, despite the massive destruction caused by last winter’s bombing, and despite all the political turmoil and uncertainty.

This video is the first of a series about life in Gaza now.

Not so long ago, the fishermen of Gaza brought in rich hauls, and fishing was one of the pillars of the Gazan economy. But one of the many unseen consequences of the Israeli blockade has been to restrict Gazan access to shared Mediterranean waters, crippling the fishing industry. This video takes us to the port of Gaza City to talk to fishermen about the personal, economic and ecological consequences of the blockade.

when sheep take the streets

maggie — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 23:37:45 +0000

Another article recently published in The Atlantic Food Channel.

Nomadic pastoralists take the town!
Maggie Schmitt

Last Sunday five hundred sheep passed through the center of Madrid. Sheep, and with them several oxen, lots of horses, and a bunch of mules: around the cathedral, up the historic main street, into the central square. It happens every year, though many urbanites aren’t aware of it and step out of the metro and into the flock with some alarm.

This is the Fiesta de la Transhumancia, a peculiar tradition which mixes slightly creepy official folklore with a vigorous defense of the cultural and ecological importance of transhumance, that is, the seasonal migration of livestock from summer to winter pastures and back. And one of the rare moments in which the rural world invades the city center.

Transhumance was the motor of the Spanish economy for six centuries, as some 3-5 million merino sheep trotted and shoved their way from the highland pastures of the North – Burgos, León, Soria – to warmer winter grazing in Extremadura and Andalucía and back again along the cañadas, grassy thoroughfares which run from one end of the central plateau to the other. While it seems likely that these same routes were used by early pastoralists long before the Romans showed up, the system of cañadas, with their taxes and way-stations, and the formal rights of shepherds to move their flocks freely were regulated in medieval times.

Long before Madrid was the capital, or really much of anything, the Calle Alcalá – now one of the main boulevards of the city – was one of these transhumant routes. In 1418 the City of Madrid signed an agreement with the Good Men of the Shepherds’ Mesta, a powerful syndicate of landowners and ranchers, allowing the flocks to pass through the center of the city. Paintings from the 17th and 18th centuries show the city transformed when the flocks came through: the streets filled with refreshment stands, dances and brothels to serve the passing shepherds, who came loaded with dough from selling their wool. Until well into the 20th century some flocks still used the boulevard in their annual migrations, but by mid-century they had given up. Then in 1996 an organization defending pastoralists’ rights appealed to the 1418 law, and demanded their right to cross through the city, now as a demonstration more than as a migration. Thus the Fiesta de la Transhumancia was initiated, and has continued since then.

It’s an odd event. Pastoralists come in their traditional get-ups from several provinces of the country, often accompanied by folkloric dancers and musicians. The whole thing looks disconcertingly like the “Pueblos de España” parades encouraged by Franco. But the motivation is different: this is not about national unity, this is about conserving what is left of the social and natural ecosystems which depend upon transhumance. The organizers are a motley crew, including shepherds, ecologists, ethnographers, horse enthusiasts and hikers. They don’t go in for pamphlets or banners, so most of the spectators don’t really know why they’re there (except that its cool to see sheep in the city), but their arguments include: the preservation of the cañadas as a public resource for hikers and cyclists as well as for transhumant livestock; the sustainability and quality of this livestock (conservation of old breeds, healthy natural feed, etc.); the preservation of traditional rural ways of life; and the recuperation of meadow ecology.

This last point was one I hadn’t thought about before, and found interesting. While anyone who has driven through the vast expanses of grazing land in Spain may think that this is a very uniform, simple landscape (grass, live oak and cork trees, more grass), these pastures are in fact incredibly diverse ecosystems, with thousands of types of plants and small animals inhabiting them. But seems the biodiversity of your average meadow in Spain is plummeting. Why? Because the livestock no longer migrate, and the plants never get a chance to live out their whole cycle because they are eaten and trammeled before they can seed. Jesús Garzón, a renowned Spanish ecologist and conservationist, has recently shifted his activities from the defense of large endangered species like the Iberian linx to the defense of transhumant pastoralism. He claims that all the very different ecosystems of the Iberian peninsula have been connected since the Ice Age by migrations from the high northern pastures to the warmer southern ones, and that over the millennia all have come to depend upon this movement to maintain their equilibrium and breadth of genome. The transhumance, therefore, is not only a sustainable way of raising livestock but also an essential element of the natural cycle itself: the millions of seeds which cling to a woolly sheep are crucial for maintaining healthy plant populations.

So the street should be mobbed with concerned citizens, shouting “long live nomadic pastoralism!”, right? Alas, no. The crowd is composed mostly of surprised tourists, delighted kids, and a lot of elderly people originally from small villages who come once a year just to catch sight of the sheep, just to get a whiff of that other, rural world which feels so far away.

Eating under siege

maggie — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 23:22:25 +0000

An article originally published in The Atlantic in two parts.

Eating Under Siege
Maggie Schmitt

Once upon a time, Gaza was known for its citrus trees and its extraordinary seafood, the smell of jasmine in the evening. No longer: now it is hard to find any image of Gaza which does not reek of death, destruction and deprivation. And yet despite the seige, the bombings and the political turmoil which surrounds them, the people of Gaza continue to live and to create their small share of beauty and grace wherever they can. One of these places is in the kitchen.

What I want to tell you about is the kitchen, with women’s bright eyes flashing as they roll out the dough, and the herb garden religiously tended, and the delicate meal eaten in the shade of a fig tree. But alas, we are in Gaza, and I can’t talk about the kitchen without talking about everything else.

Food and cooking in Gaza have changed radically in the last few years since the whole area has been under seige. The borders of this tiny strip are entirely closed, allowing only humanitarian shipments of basic foods to enter – flour, sugar, salt, oil, pulses – and even these are entering at a rate which, according to the UN, only covers about half of the population’s most immediate needs, and that calculation assumes a totally equal distribution of aid, unlikely in the best of circumstances. Other goods enter through the Israeli border in a very limited number of trucks bearing a somewhat surreal selection of “necessities” determined by the Israel Defense Force’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories. This week, for example, those necessities included persimmons and bananas but excluded almost all other food products. Everything else required to sustain the Gazan population of 1.5 million can only enter through underground tunnels from Egypt, an extraordinarily expensive clandestine trade in which many have died due to the gassing and bombing of the tunnels.

Gaza has a rich agriculture of its own, producing exquisite fruit and garden vegetables, but as the Israeli “security zone” requirements increase there is less and less arable land available to farm, making it harder to fulfill Gaza’s food requirements. Moreover, as the water available in Gaza is tightly rationed, there is ever less available for irrigation and the orchards are withering. Fish, which once formed a central part of Gazans’ diet, is now scarcely available as fishing waters have been largely closed off to Gazan boats. Chicken and meat have suffered an astronomical price increase since the bombardment of Gaza in December-January as so many animals were killed; farmers estimate that it will take several years to recuperate the lost livestock populations. In short, we are talking about cuisine in a place where – despite fertile land and hardworking people – simply acquiring foodstuffs is beyond the means of the majority, and diabetes and anemia are quickly becoming endemic.

And then there’s the question of fuel for cooking. The borders sometimes allow cooking gas to enter, sometimes not. As the power facilities have been bombed several times, electricity is very sporadic. Many families have small generators, but most of the gasoline for these must also be piped in through the tunnels, which is very expensive. Faced with the frequent impossibility of finding any kind of fuel for cooking, many families have recurred to their grandmother’s memories, fashioning traditional adobe ovens on the roofs and balconies of their modern apartment buildings.

Knowing all this makes it that much more incredible to be treated, again and again, to beautiful meals in every house one enters. Palestinian hospitality knows no bounds, and since so few foreigners are allowed to enter Gaza these days, those of us who have that privilege are showered with food and drink and attentions. In this way women stake their claim on dignity and humanity even in outrageous circumstances: we will sit together and eat, we will remember the pleasure of small things, we will live despite it all.

Palestinian cuisine is as varied as the land: from lush green valleys of the north to the desert dunes of the south. As 80% of Gaza’s population are refugees displaced in 1948, within Gaza one finds food traditions from every part of Palestine. A lot of the foods, especially those found in restaurants (hummus, ful, mutabbal, mejaddra) are common throughout the Levant. Nonetheless, a specifically Gazan cuisine does persist, distinct from other Palestinian or Levantine cuisines in its generous use of hot peppers, cumin and dill, as well as sour fruits like pomegranite, tamarind and plums. It relies heavily on fish and on poor-man’s ingredients like mustard greens and garbanzos. Many of the most classic dishes are stews cooked slowly in clay pots, unique in the region. Due to Gaza’s isolation, many of these recipes are completely unknown outside of the Strip.

Fish

Old photos show the fish market of Gaza overflowing with fresh fish: Sultan Ibrahim, or red mullet; arous, similar to sea bream; samak Moussa, a large flounder; as well as tuna, sea bass, sardines, turbot, and all manner of squids, shrimps, and crabs. The current fish market is a sad shadow of what it once was: in fact the manager of the fish market estimates that the total haul of the 60 boats which set out from the Gaza city port each night only barely adds up to what any one boat used to bring in before the waters were restricted. According to the 1994 Oslo accords Palestinians are free to fish up to 12 kilometers off the coast of Gaza, but this limit has gradually decreased to the de facto 3 kilometers imposed by the Israeli gunboats, always present on the horizon. The fishermen know that the migratory routes for fish are farther out, in deeper water, but any boat straying past the 3km limit is promptly fired upon. This limits fishing to the shallow coastal waters, where spawning grounds are being dangerously overfished. Hence the fish which arrive to market are ever smaller, ever fewer and ever more costly.
(about fishing in Gaza, please see my upcoming video)

On the rare occasion, then, that a family can afford to buy seafood, they might make a zibdiyit gambari, whole large shrimp stewed in a clay pot with tomatoes, chilis, garlic, fresh dill, sweet peppers and olive oil, and garnished with toasted pine nuts or almonds.

Or else they might make the classic sayyadiye, or “fisherman’s dish,” in which chunks of fish are fried with caramelized onions, cumin and turmeric, then water and lemon juice are added and the fish simmers until nearly done. Finally, rice is added to cook slowly in this broth with the fish.

Or they might simply grill the fish, marinated first in coriander, chili, cumin and lemon juice and then stuffed with cilantro and garlic. Such grilled fish can be had at any of the sea-side restaurants in Gaza city, where families gather to smoke shisha and drink tea and watch the children fly kites on the beach.

Chicken

Festive pride of the Palestinian table, maqluba (literally “upside down”) is one of a long lineage of spiced upside-down rice dishes made from Iran to Egypt since at least medieval times. In Palestine many versions are made, using either chicken or lamb, cauliflower or eggplant. The one I was served in the Meghazi refugee camp in Gaza and am still thinking about with awe was made with chicken and cauliflower. The chicken is sauteed in large chunks with onions, and the cauliflower deep fried until browned but not cooked through. Rice is then soaked for a half an hour, drained, and mixed with baharat, a classic Levantine spice mix of black peppercorns, allspice, cinnamon and nutmeg and a bit of samneh, a clarified butter. All these ingredients are then layered into a large greased pot: first the chicken, then a layer of toasted almonds, then the cauliflower, and then the soaked and spiced rice. Water is added to cover, and the pot is set to simmer very slowly until the rice is cooked. To serve, the entire pot is turned upside down onto a large tray, making a beautiful glazed mound.

Not for nothing is this a holiday meal: the chicken required to make this dish has increased more than 100% in price since the bombings last January. One chicken can now cost as much as $18, as three of Gaza’s eleven chicken farms were completely levelled by Israeli tanks, two more were severely damaged, and even the farms not directly damaged lost most of their animals for lack of fuel with which to heat the henhouses. The massive unemployment in Gaza due to the complete destruction of its productive sector and the impossiblity of exporting through closed borders has reduced the per capita daily income to about two dollars a day. The ingredients for this splendid traditional dish would therefore cost more than two weeks income for an average Gazan given the current situation.

Meat

Of course, the grilled kebab is the king of street foods, served in a pita bread with grilled onions and a little plate of pickled vegetables. But traditional home-cooking tends more to the slow stews, meat so tender it melts at the touch of the fork. Sumaggiye is one of these dishes, perhaps the most quintessentially Gazan. It is a stew of beef, chickpeas and chard, married with the unique combination of lemony sumac and tahini. It is served with fried garlic and chili, and mopped up with fresh pita bread. During the holiday season at the end of Ramadan neighbors give each other bowls of sumaggiye, each family having its particular style of making the dish.

As beef is now almost completely unavailable in Gaza, this and other dishes are being made with lamb if they are being made at all. Lambs can be smuggled through the tunnels – they trot right through – whereas calves generally panic or don’t fit. The minimum number of calves necessary to feed Gaza, according to the Israeli “Red Lines” document, is 300 a week, but even before the crossings were completely closed less than 100 entered per week. Now none enter at all, though small quantities of frozen meat are occasionally allowed in.

This has grievous consequences on both sides of the border. In Gaza it means malnutrition, astronomical prices and the accumulation of power in the hands of those who run the tunnels. In Israel it means a breakdown of trade relations which were once extremely lucrative for Israeli farmers.

Farms

The seige, or as Israel calls it the “restriction of luxury products” (like paper, shoes and rice), does have some economic benefits for Israeli farmers, however. If on the one hand they have lost an enormous market, they have gained a dumping ground which serves to regulate market prices. What is or what is not a luxury seems to be determined by the surpluses produced by Israeli farms: right now, for example, the Israeli markets are glutted with melons, and at least three trucks a week of melons are entering into Gaza. There are whole neighborhoods of Gaza living largely off of melons.

Mustafa, a farmer I visited on the eastern border of Gaza who was harvesting his melons lamented that there was no market at all for them, so many had entered through the border all of a sudden. This, he mused, was probably just as well, as his melon patch was abutting the ‘security’ limit from the border, and when working there he and his sons were occasionally shot at. Their farm, like so many others, is directly in the shadow of the border wall and its watchtowers. Every once in a while jet planes drop a box of leaflets to the ground, advising them of new security limits: a couple of weeks ago the security limit was increased to 300 meters from the border, putting the melon patch in a danger zone. His children know very well up to which row of vegetables they can play, and after which row they will be shot.

During the bombardment last January Mustafa’s family was fortunate enough not to have their farm bulldozed, as some of their neighbors did, but they did lose almost all their livestock when their barn was hit by artillery fire. Some 25 goats and sheep were killed, while the family huddled in the house listening to the continuous din of the nearby watchtower firing over their farm and into the refugee camp just beyond their lands. “Where could we go?” says Mustafa’s elderly father, who clearly remembers 1948 when the refugees arrived and the border fence crossing their land was first erected. “We will live here or die here, we have no other choice.”

And so they continue to farm what land is left to them, and it’s a beautiful farm. Tidy rows of tiny pale zucchini, eggplants both white and purple, peppers both sweet and hot, some broad beans, some corn. The water pump is under a spreading mulberry tree, and mulberry-stained kids play in the shade. “Of course we’re optimistic,” says Mustafa, with a gentle smile, compassionate with my incomprension. “We have to be. The land is good, God will provide.”

Thanks to Laila Al-Haddad, Rami Almeghari, Mond Mishal and Amir Sadafi.

in the beginning

maggie — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 23:08:25 +0000

A blog for telling about the things I come across. Finally and after much coaxing.