Protest Food

People attending the demonstrations in downtown Beirut all remark on the carnival-like atmosphere. The peasantry and middle classes have invaded the new ritzy downtown, causing upscale bars and restaurants to shutter their doors, while the street vendors sell their wares furiously. Folks are eating, smoking water pipes, dancing, and chatting around bonfires.

The lists of street foods on offer beguile me. As a child in Lebanon, I was restricted from eating many street foods (with good reason - my mother contracted typhoid fever from a Damascus ice cream parlor). Cooked foods served hot, like roast corn or chestnuts, and foods that would not spoil, like the cracker-bread called ka'ak, were allowed. Ice cream was not! If I wanted ice cream, my uncles would take me to proper candy stores where they approved of the sanitation. When in Lebanon or Syria, try the pistachio.

Anissa Helou's book, Mediterranean Street Foods, gives recipes for some of the dishes beloved across the Arab world. Roast chicken is a street food, because they used to set up the rotisseries outside; I love the raw garlic sauce (thoum) you get with it in Lebanon. Miss Helou's recipe:

5 large garlic cloves
salt
1/3 cup extra-virgin olive oil
3-4 tablespoons strained yogurt (optional)
1 samll potato, boiled and mashed (optional)

Put the peeled garlic cloves and a little salt in a mortar and pound with a pestle until reduced to a very fine paste. Drizzle in the oil very slowly, stirring constantly as if you were making mayonnaise. Add strained yogurt or mashed potato to make the sauce milder.

A street food that is new since the end of the civil war is "manaqeesh" or "mana'eesh." It's a kind of Lebanese pizza spread with the iconic national herb mixture: za'atar and olive oil. Za'atar is a mixture of the herb za'atar, a pungent form of wild thyme; sesame seeds; sumac and salt. The taste is strong and addictive; baked into bread on a wood-fired saj oven, it's sublime.

When I was a child in the 1970s, you only got mana'eesh on baking day, when your grandmother saved the last dozen or so dough balls to make it herself. But when I first returned in the 90s I noticed that small entrepreneurs were baking mountain bread (marquq) in storefronts or even in booths at the auto mechanic's; where you have mountain bread, you have mana'eesh. Furthermore, even in my little village, a bakery opened that made mana'eesh every day. No more wood-fires, however.

By 2000 when I visited with my husband, we discovered the pleasures of cheese mana'eesh, and the nous-o-nous, or half-and-half: one side za'atar, one side cheese, fold and eat. Heaven! On a road trip to the cedars, we stopped for mana'eesh, asked for the half-and-half, and were told that was a Beiruti thing, they wouldn't do it in that bakery.

Nobody has mentioned mana'eesh in the demonstration reports, but they have to be eating a lot of it right now.

(Yes, that picture is of my own grandmother baking bread, with me as a tot in the background, Jiddi tending the fire, and cousin Asma helping out. Original photo by Elias Abu-Saba, archived here.)