Man'oushe ...

Reading this article made my mouth water. Stuck between eating out in the limited choices around me, or venturing into the kitchen and and watching my culinary experimentations turn black, there are two things I really miss and would do almost anything ("almost" being the operative word here) to have on a daily basis ... even though there are places around that claim they offer them, they're just not the same when not made in the levant.

1 - Man'oushe Zaatar
2 - Hommus

And now someone has finally written an entire book about the one thing that basically all lebanese (and levantines) like (by definition) ... mana'eesh.

A tribute to the national snack of Lebanon

BEIRUT: Nearly all of us who live in Lebanon have our favorite man'oushe joint and a tale to tell about it. Mine happens to be the Nazareth bakery on the corner where Monnot Street meets Sodeco Square in Achrafieh - and that's not a shameless plug. It's a ramshackle little place just down the street from the more upmarket Zaatar wa Zeit - if man'oushe joints can be upmarket that is - and it hasn't closed down in the face of the latter's surging popularity.

I like to think that's because of the thinness and crispiness of the bread when I order my regular jibne wa zaatar (cheese and thyme) man'oushe. Open 24 hours and baking constantly Nazareth, like many other tiny bakeries across the country, has its own charm and its own particular flavor. Write in and let us know yours.

But after five years here even I, as an avid fan of the quintessential Lebanese breakfast snack, never imagined that there were more than 70 different recipes for it.

Like the Arabic language, which varies enormously in dialect from Morocco to Egypt and Iraq to Yemen, the man'oushe varies in taste and recipe from neighborhood to neighborhood across Lebanon and yet remains a common feature throughout, transcending all geographic and religious zones.

Barbara Abdeni Massaad knows this. The Lebanese writer and cook with an obsession for bread making and man'oushe has spent the better part of the last five years, in between taking care of her young children, traveling the country, discovering bakeries from Deir al-Qamar to Tyre, chatting with their proprietors and collecting their recipes - some dating back hundreds of years.

"Man'oushe: Inside The Street Corner Lebanese Bakery" (Alarm Editions) is the result. A beautiful cook book filled with original and individual recipes for different types of the national snack, "Man'oushe" is also a heartwarming (though perhaps little too much so) story of Massaad's own long journey as a 10-year old immigrant to the U.S. during the war and her eventual return to the family home in the mountains of the Kesrouan and her later marriage in the picturesque old town of Byblos.

Continue reading here.

posted by Lazarus, 9:25 PM