Lebanese feasts. ‘‘To join them in the kitchen was a way of
handing down recipes from one generation to the next,” she tells
me at her home in Carlton, while showing me how to roll a vine
leaf. And because the people who taught Amad had come from
all over Lebanon, she was able to pick up regional variations
which now influence her menu at Abla’s. It occurs to me while
chatting to her that this is probably what made Middle Eastern
cuisine in Australia unique: migration collapses the mountainous
divides of Lebanon and the vast border-regions of Turkey into
one kitchen – it brings the recipes of numerous towns into an
appetising conversation that they wouldn’t have had back home.“T
he issue I have with Lebanese food is that they’re
not pushing the boundaries enough. We should be
further ahead,” says Greg Malouf, shaking his head.
“Why is that?” I ask. Greg and Geoff exchange
a conspiratorial smile: “Their mothers and grandmothers, of
course!” Greg mimics his most difficult customers, “Oh, my
grandmother made the most extraordinary kibbeh, now what
is this?” Geoff interjects: “But seriously, they associate food with
memories of their family, and family is fundamental to Lebanese
culture.” If food is the conduit to an imagined family home and
to a country left behind, then experimentation becomes an act of
dishonour. Abboud’s fusion Middle Eastern cuisine has long been
a source of difficulty with his family. Sitting in his new restaurant,
Bar Saracen, he says, “It still hurts my mother
when someone says, ‘Your son has a Lebanese
restaurant?’ She always responds, ‘Well, sort of.’”
Trained in Australia and France, Greg
Malouf was the first Australian chef to
experiment with Lebanese haute cuisine,
at O’Connells in Melbourne in 1991. “Oh,
there was that dish of oysters and makanek
sausage,” says Geoff. “The journalists loved it.”
Greg adds, “‘Finally something new!’” Back in
Sydney, Kasif adds a historical perspective to
this debate. “Fusion is just a way of describing
what we are doing today,” he says. “When you
think of the Ottoman Empire, that’s exactly
what they were doing – fusion! The dumpling
exists in Middle Eastern cuisine because of the
nomadic Northern Chinese who came down
from the Steppes in the Middle Ages. Turks
also got their yoghurt from the milk introduced
to them by the Chinese, not the Greeks.”
After meeting with The Maloufs, I stop
off at my Palestinian friend Sary’s house and
peruse his collection of medieval Middle Eastern
cookbooks. Leafing through the pages, we spend
the afternoon imaginatively crossing spice routes
with merchants in caravans and dining on
twice-suckled lamb with the sultans. I learned
that the world’s first written recipes were Middle
Eastern, found on stone tablets dating from the
17th century BC. But the major Middle Eastern
medieval recipe collections were written in the
palaces of Baghdad during Islam’s golden age,between the 7th and 13th centuries, the very moment when
Europe descended into the Dark Ages. The Abassid Caliphate,
like the Ottoman Empire that came after it, was gastronomically
promiscuous; its cuisine was mostly Arab and Persian but also
incorporated Greek, Indian, Turkish, Chinese and African. Like
Baghdad, then the largest and wealthiest city in the world, the
cuisine was tantalisingly decadent. I find a recipe that specifies a
live fish be kept in a tank of grape juice to enhance the flavour of
its flesh. Persians legitimated their power through public feasting
at the palaces and sultans sought to leave their mark through the
recipes they promoted in their court.
It’s a sign of the continuities between Arabic
cuisine and the Ottoman cuisine that came after
it that the Turkish conquerors took these Arabic
recipe books and housed them among their
treasures at Topaki Palace and the Aya Sofya
in Istanbul. From the 15th century onwards the
Ottomans carried the flame of Middle Eastern
cuisine, adding the stuffed vegetables, shish
kebabs and baklava pastries that we see today,
plus Arabic braised lambs and spiced stews. After
the colonisation of the Americas, chillies, beans,
corn and tomatoes made an appearance making
Turkish cuisine – with its wheat and meat from
the West and rice from the East – more fusion
than any of our wildest mod-Oz fantasies.
I see glimpses of the chefs I’ve met for this
story in the medieval recipes before me. In the
13th-century Book of Dishes, which measures
portions by the width of fingers, I see Amad,
who continues to test the readiness of yoghurt
by putting a finger in the tub for 10 seconds.
The medieval recipes that ask for soy sauce
remind me of Abboud and Kasif’s exhortations:
“We’ve always been experimental and fusion!”
I see Greg and Geoff Malouf in the words of the
13th-century scribe Al-Baghdadi, who wrote: “Of
all the world’s pleasures” – in which he includes
food, drink, clothing, sex, scent and sound – “the
most eminent and perfect of these is food.” As
Greg Malouf says, “This food should not just be
seen as inexpensive, it’s one of the great cuisines
of the world, it should be on a pedestal.” ●The landmarks
Some of the landmarks of
Middle Eastern dining in
Australia attained their
status through longevity,
while for others it’s more
about their place in the
culture. Canberra Turkish
fine-diner Ottoman
(9 Broughton St, Barton,
ACT), opened in 1992, ticks
both boxes. In Melbourne,
A1 Bakery (643-645 Sydney
Rd, Brunswick, Vic), has
been a Sydney Road staple
since 1992, while Abla’s
(109 Elgin St, Carlton, Vic),
has made the city’s best
chicken and rice since- In Sydney, Jasmin
(22 Civic Rd, Auburn, NSW)
and El Jannah (4-8 South
St, Granville, NSW)
might not be the oldest
restaurants in town, but
their hold on the tastebuds
of lovers of Lebanese food
is unrivalled. In Brisbane,
No No’s (158 Musgrave
Rd, Red Hill, Qld) is an
institution, home to
Queensland’s best falafel.
Above: a 1921 story
about “good” Middle
Eastern immigrants.
Left: the Maloufs in
1967 – (from left) Greg,
their mother May,
Andrew and Geof.70 GOURMET TRAVELLER