How to Cook a Book

When food is a weapon of war

I’m sitting at my desk looking at Sami Tamimi’s beautiful Boustany, his first solo cookbook, and thinking about what on earth I’m going to ask him when we chat tomorrow for Cooking the Books.

It’s not like we’ll be short of things to talk about. When we met most recently at the Ebury showcase a few months ago, the look in his eyes said everything I need to know about how to pitch our conversation.

As the Gazan people face unspeakable suffering from mass starvation right now and in plain sight, Sami continues to use his social media platform to make sure we don’t turn away. A food blackout across the food community on Instagram last week reminded us of the power of solidarity to stop us in our tracks and make us remember Gaza. How could I post a picture of my husband’s brilliant first attempt at Cod with Fish Sauce, Chillies, Ginger and Basil which utterly proves the whole thesis of Mandy Yin’s Simply Malaysian, that even the least confident cooks can cook up the prettiest and tastiest food in half an hour? It wasn’t even a question.

The collective consciousness that social media can create has plenty of form; #cookforsyria and #cookforukraine were massive movements that shifted the feed from our phones into homes and high streets. I was part of a group of self-named mamushkas who hosted supper clubs in our five neighbouring village halls in 2023, not just to raise money, but to celebrate Ukrainian food culture and remind us all of the vibrant colours, tastes and smells of life before the Russian invasion.

Boustany means ‘my garden’ in Arabic, a reflection of Sami’s roots growing up in East Jerusalem’s Old City. He writes about his grandparents’ ‘large boustan’ in Hebron, the Southern West Bank, ‘a vibrant, lush space filled with fruits and vegetables which my grandfather meticulously tended all year round’. Sami is a big thinker, and a deeply sensitive writer. His Palestinian garden is about more than recipes; it’s about ‘weaving together the stories, memories and emotions that each dish encapsulated’ for him.

But can I ask Sami to paint a picture of Palestinian food culture while photographs of starving Gazan children haunt our feeds? If the purpose of our chat is to humanise the headlines, to bring colour to the grey of those children’s faces, the ashen destruction of their homes, the pallor of their despair, it it ok to talk about couscous fritters with preserved lemon yoghurt?

Actually, I think it is.

As so many of us try to find a way to make a difference, to avoid the silence of complicity, I so badly want our 30 minutes together on Cooking the Books to remind us what a post war life can look like, what new shoots are possible in Palestine.

But most of all, while food is used as a weapon of war, I want us to remember what food culture does to dignify the human experience, every human’s experience. Surely we can’t even talk about compassion fatigue anymore - the idea of ennui in the face of such suffering is just too appalling. But the colour, smell and taste of a nation’s food memories can conjure up a collective consciousness powerful enough to give us all hope, to get involved, to make sure we don’t look away.

Listen next week to find out how I get on.