Loading ...Soup for Syria: Celebrity chefs donate recipes to cookbook cause
The idea, like so many good ideas, was hatched at a dinner party.
It was last fall in London, and the guests were talking about the plight of Syrians displaced by a continuing civil war and languishing in refugee camps in the bordering countries of Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey and Iraq, largely forgotten by the world. Barbara Abdeni Massaad, who lives 45 minutes from a Syrian refugee camp in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, described to the other guests how she’d fill the trunk of her car on weekends with vegetables and other soup ingredients and head to the camp to make soup for the refugees.
Massaad, a photographer and food writer, is the author of Man’oushé: Inside the Street Corner Lebanese Bakery, which was a huge bestseller for the Massachusetts-based Interlink Publishing Group in 2014. Interlink’s founder and owner, Michel Moushabeck, was another guest at the dinner party – and he was touched by Massaad’s action and how it had begun.
“She was in her apartment and it was freezing out – and she was thinking about the refugee families sleeping in their tents in the cold,” he recalled. “She had heard on TV the night before that children in the camp had died. She called a friend of hers who works for the United Nations, this person gave her a contact number and she went on her first visit to the refugee camp, not knowing at first how she could help.”
Week after week Massaad visited the camp, located about 45 minutes from her home, searching for a way to help to ease the refugees’ pain. Because it’s what she does, she began to take photographs and started to talk to the refugees about cooking. “The idea of the soup was hers,” Moushabeck said. At one point, she was feeding up to 50 families.
Barbara Abdeni Massaad, a photographer and cookbook author, centre, at a Syrian refugee camp in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley. The idea of a benefit cookbook was sparked by visits to the camp.
At the dinner party, Massaad said she was thinking of self-publishing a cookbook, with recipes donated by friends and neighbours, and using the proceeds to buy ingredients so she could continue her soup-making visits to the camp.
“Hearing her talk about the idea, my brain went into fast-forward,” Moushabeck recalled this month. “It was a brilliant idea but, considering the magnitude of the crisis of 4 million refugees in the countries bordering Lebanon, people who had been largely abandoned until the body of a drowned child (a boy trying to flee Syria with his family) washed up on the shore in Turkey, I was convinced that, if we could get celebrity chefs instead of her friends, we had a good chance of selling a large number of copies, in many languages, and turning it from a one-person initiative into a larger-scale movement to bring food relief and ease the suffering of the refugees.”
And so a humanitarian cookbook project, Soup for Syria (Interlink Books), was born. From the outset, Moushabeck said, “everyone was mobilized. The author and staff wanted to go ahead; they all felt the urgency of the matter.”
His daughter and Interlink cookbook editor Leyla Moushabeck – the house publishes translated fiction and books dealing with international current affairs and politics as well – contacted a handful of cookbook authors and chefs they knew to ask them to contribute recipes: Almost everyone came through. First on board were Yotam Ottolenghi, Sami Tamimi, Anthony Bourdain, Alice Waters, Paula Wolfert, Sally Butcher and Claudia Roden. Having big names like theirs supporting the project encouraged others to contribute.
Massaad collected the recipes and shot all the book’s photos –from arty pictures of bowls of soup to deeply affecting photographs of refugees she got to know during her visits to the camp. She assembled “an army of volunteers to go to her house and test recipes. It was a very collaborative effort,” Moushabeck said.
Roasted Pumpkin Soup with Cardamom. BARBARA MASSAAD
It took less than a year to assemble the 208-page cookbook, which features recipes from around the world – from hearty winter potages to chilled summer soups. Massaad herself provided a recipe for roasted red beet soup. Roden submitted a recipe for a borlotti bean and pasta soup and the Ottolenghi/Tamimi team contributed a recipe for gondi, delicately flavoured chicken dumplings in a chicken broth. Both Waters and Zeina El Zein Maktabi, a friend of Massaad’s who helped with the recipe testing, contributed recipes for carrot soup – one spiked with ginger.
The book includes several variations on lentil soup, including an Aleppo red lentil soup with a sour grape juice known as verjuice from Syrian architect and development consultant Aziz Hallaj. Jill Boutros, a winery and restaurant owner from Minnesota who lives in the mountains overlooking Beirut and the Mediterranean, contributed a red lentil soup with mint and lemon.
Moushabeck’s favourite recipe of all is Wolfert’s lentil and Swiss chard soup, which calls for brown lentils, onion and garlic, Swiss chard leaves, chopped cilantro and lemon. “While we were testing the recipes and working on the production of the book, we were going through New England’s harshest winter ever and it was a perfect cure,” he recalled. “It was delicious.”
Zeina El Zein Maktabi’s carrot-ginger soup. BARBARA MASSAAD
One doesn’t have to look far to find a refugee history in many Middle Eastern families. Moushabeck was born in Beirut to Palestinian parents who had left their homeland for Lebanon because of the Arab-Israeli war of 1948. He, in turn, left Lebanon in 1976, soon after the start of the civil war. His siblings left as well; today his younger brother owns a bookstore in downtown Northampton – and the family has a Montreal connection: His sister, Hania, co-owns Kidlink, a bookshop and toy store in Monkland Village.
Kidlink plans a large window display to promote Soup for Syria, a handsome jacketed hardcover, and the book will be sold there as well as in other Montreal bookstores. It can also be ordered directly from soupforsyria.com. The Canadian price is $37.50.
Contributors are tweeting about the book and already, although the official publication date is not until Oct. 12, 15,000 copies of the book have been sold – 5,000 more than the initial print run. Another 10,000 copies are being printed. A trailer with footage from Ottolenghi, Waters and Boston chef Ana Sorton is being assembled “that I hope will go viral,” Moushabeck said.
Activities linked to the book’s publication include soup parties, people taking soup to co-workers at the office, benefit concerts and plans to sell the cookbook at farmers’ markets, he said. A “get involved” section of the website suggests actions people can take.
Interlink Books plans to donate the profits from sales of the North American edition to the United Nations refugee agency UNHCR, which has given an assurance in writing that 100 per cent of the donation will go to fund food relief efforts, Moushabeck said.
Interlink’s United Kingdom partner, Pavilion Books, will donate its profits to the UK branch of UNHCR, and talks about co-editions are in progress with French, German and Dutch publishers, Moushabeck said. He hopes to get more foreign-language publishers on board when he attends the Frankfurt Book Fair in October. Partner publishers can donate what they choose to whatever organization they like, he said, as long as all donated funds go to food relief for Syrian refugees.
“Refugees cannot be abandoned to hopelessness,” Moushabeck said. “If we can inspire people to do what they can, then we will have done our job.”
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Contributors on why this cookbook matters
Contributors to the cookbook Soup for Syria were asked for two things: a soup recipe and a few lines saying why it’s important to them to be part of the campaign. Following are excerpts from some of their obsertvations:
“Soup is elemental, and it always makes sense, even when the world around us fails to.” – Chef and TV personality Anthony Bourdain, who shot to fame with his memoir, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly.
“Soup is the ultimate comfort food: nurturing, sustaining and all good things. One recipe is a drop in the ocean but, if awareness of the plight of the Syrian refugees is raised with each batch made and shared, then that is a force for good. As well as being a delicious meal in and of itself.” – Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi, London-based chefs, restaurateurs and authors of Plenty, Ottolenghi and other popular cookbooks. Both grew up in Jerusalem.
“Whether we are in times of crisis or times of peace, gathering family and friends together around the table and sharing food is one of the most powerful and life-affirming acts we can do. And there is nothing more comforting and nourishing than a bowl of warm soup.” – Alice Waters, chef and owner of Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Calif., author and food activist.
“Soup for Syria is a touching visual account of one’s experience through the hardship of war. May this book bring a light of hope to everyone’s heart and body and may peace be found very soon.” –Paula Wolfert, author of several books on cooking and the winner of numerous cookbook awards. A specialist in Mediterranean food.
“There is hope that this marvellous collection of soup recipes from chefs all over the world will remind us of those in Syria who have lost their homes and so much more. Let us all make soup to create some relief and provide more outreach to those that are in need.” – Ana Sortun, Boston restaurateur and cookbook author with a special interest in the spices of the eastern Mediterranean.
“In Farsi, the word for chef is ash-paz—someone who is capable of making ash, or herb soup. The ash dishes of Iran are held very dearly, and the act of making them is often regarded as an act of love or dedication. I would like to think that as you make this recipe you will remember those who are in exile from Syria, who have no kitchen or soup pot or indeed anyone for whom or with whom to make soup.” – Sally Butcher, who runs a Persian deli in southeast London, Persepolis, and wrote Veggiestan, a vegetable lover’s tour of the Middle East.
“My hope is that this project is a success and the book helps to keep the plight of Syrian refugees in people’s minds and that it will raise funds to alleviate their awful living conditions until their future is settled. Pasta e fasioi (Venetian dialect for ‘beans’) is an old peasant dish in the Veneto. The soup varies from one city to another – wide tagliatelle are used in Vicenza, whole wheat noodles called bigoli in Verona, lasagne in Este and Padua, and thin fettuccine or small tubular pasta in other parts. I am so glad that it is part of this humanitarian project.” – Claudia Roden, a Cairo-born, London-based author and cultural anthropologist best known as the author of Middle Eastern cookbooks.
“I’ve always believed that there is no better way to banish differences and bring people together than through sharing food … and soup is, perhaps, the ultimate shared dish. It’s a small enough thing, to contribute a recipe, but perhaps the many small voices that have joined together in this lovely book can, together, sing a loud message of hope.” – Greg Malouf, a Michelin-starred chef known for his contemporary Middle Eastern cuisine.
“This is a wonderful project, a big-hearted, warm-hearted attempt to bring comfort and solace to those who need it most – women and children, forgotten casualties of Syria’s raging conflicts. But it’s more than that: Soup for Syria is an archive of great recipes for every soup imaginable, as well as a compilation of Barbara Massaad’s brilliant photography that shows not just suffering, but also the innate human will to triumph over suffering.” – Nancy Harmon Jenkins, writer, traveller and authority on Mediterranean cuisine.
Source: montrealgazette.com