To Give Sneak Peek
Each songwriting workshop I’ve been conducting has focused on a topic. The first topic was food, one of my favorites because it has so many possibilities! The first assignment was to pick an object relating to food and write from its perspective. Everyone picked utensil related objects – pans, cast irons, gas stove starters, etc – but had a unique perspective for each object. Some objects knew they were valuable, some wanted change for their users, and others were power songs about their purpose.
By examining food from the perspective of an object it inevitably brings up feelings, situations, and hopes that reflect us. You will be able to hear some of these songs, lyrics, and works in progress during our Concert on 10/22.
Below is my take on the topic of food as it relates to my Árabe project. “To Give” is a song about the act of sharing food with others and the accompanying essay dives into the ties between Mexican and Syrian cuisine, as well as my personal ties to food. Arab/American: Landscape, Culture, and Cuisine in Two Great Deserts by Gary Nabhan which I checked out from the AANM Library was a great resource when writing this essay. Both the essay and the song are a work in progress. I’m wanting to open a solo section somewhere and build out the vocal harmonies in the bridge in the song. I find the more I play a song and play it with others, the more the arrangement and form will reveal itself. It may sound different for the concert, you will just have to come to find out!
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My best Spanish and Arabic language skills revolve around a menu. I know how to order, how to say thank you, and always eat whatever comes out. Taste has created a bond within my family. We text pictures of what we cook on the weekends, send videos of recipes we want to try, share menus of restaurants we visit, and when we’re together our gatherings always center around food. Some of my favorites memories include tabouli and chicken strips when my brother and I are both in town, deshebrada a la Mexicana burritos on Sunday mornings, my Aunt Roxanne’s German chocolate cake for my 11th birthday, and shish kabob at Easter for which my family holds the 2011 Guinness World Record for longest skewer of kebab meat at 28 ft 8 inches.
Easter is a big holiday for Christian Arabs and Catholic Mexicans. My family hosted Easter every year and my parents know how to throw a party. In particular my Dad, who is a great cook and can best be described as mischievously fun. He used to run a restaurant in Lubbock, TX and is always experimenting in the kitchen. On Easter, he’d wake us up at 6am to set up tables in our backyard, put tablecloths on every surface and lay napkins and utensils out while we sneaked bits of food. There would be mariachis and dancing, and everyone on both sides of the family would come, as well as neighbors and friends.
We served classics like laham mishwe, hot dogs, hamburgers, giant saaj breads from the local Arabic restaurant Farah’s, juicy tabouli that sat for a day, my Grammie’s famous potato salad, menudo, tamales, and coconut shrimp - a kid favorite. But every year there was also a surprise. One year my dad got a whole pig to pit roast in the backyard which frightened our dogs who watched wearily from a corner of the yard. Another year my cousin Zach brought habanero peppers and dared us all to eat them; I could not feel my tongue for a week. The last year we hosted Easter was when we broke the Guinness World Record. We made t-shirts, the local news came, and with gloves on, everyone helped slide lamb pieces onto a 30-foot-long skewer my cousin had fabricated. My dad welded together ten small cookers to make the long grill that was stationed in our cul-de-sac, and it was quite the spectacle. It was our final big Easter party and we still have the skewer and few sections of the grill in our backyard.
Food is a gift whether it’s a huge annual event or just a few people. I think the time spent and the service of sharing is something special. Growing up my mom used to take me to Dairy Queen for chocolate dipped ice cream cones. It was never for a particular occasion, just because, and we’d sit in the window red booths overlooking the desert enjoying the cool air conditioning. As a kid, she used to save up her money and bike down to her local Dairy Queen to buy a ten-cent ice cream cone. On one of our visits the Dairy Queen was empty. We ordered our usual ice creams, sat down facing each other, and “Just the Two of Us” by Bill Withers played over the dull speakers. My mom started swaying her shoulders, the ice cream cone was her microphone, and she sang “just the two of us, we can make it if we try, just the two of us, you and I.” I giggled watching her and she responded “This can be our song” her shoulders not stopping once.
My dad and I used to go out for Sunday breakfast while my mom taught my brother’s Sunday school class. I can’t remember if he was supposed to be taking me to my Sunday school class, if we were playing hookie, or if I just enjoyed the thought that we were going out to eat while they had to sit in a classroom on a Sunday - I loved it. We frequented the Village Inn diner that had perfect half booths for two, ordered pancakes and pie, and sat under the yellow tinged glass lamps. On other Sundays, we would go to Popeyes and get spicy fried chicken because only he and I are the only ones that like the spice in our family. It’s funny the things we remember and the memories food can conjure.
During the pandemic, I spent a lot of time with my grandparents. Both my grandmas are excellent cooks, experts in Mexican and Arabic cuisine respectively and I asked them both to show me how to cook one dish while I was home. My Grammie, came over one Saturday morning with her wood tortilla press, a bag of masa, onions, tomatoes, jalapeños, her own pans, and some ground beef ready to make gorditas.
“That’s not how you cut onions!” She grabbed the knife from me.
“You see the lines? You cut against the lines.”
“Oh mom I didn’t know that” my mother chimes in.
“That’s cause you don’t liiiisten.” She handed the knife back to me and I continued to cut the onions properly.
Next, she started with the rice.
“Just a bit of tomato sauce” as she tilted the can into the pan. “And don’t touch it! You don’t touch rice once it has started cooking.”
With Grammie there are no exact measurements, only the feel and look of how much is right. We moved on to the gorditas rolling masa into small balls, flattening them into coaster sized circles.
“Throw that on the cast iron. You want it to get like this, see this? Just like that” She grabbed the browning gordita with her fingers and tossed it over. Her hands are callused and impervious to heat. True cooking fingers. We made the ground beef last, adding jalapeños, onions, and tomatoes and stuffed it into the gordita shells. Ready to eat, we added rice to our plates and sat at the table.
“So mom, how did you make these again?” my mom asks grabbing a pen and paper.
“Manda knows. She listens.”
We smiled at each other and ate our gorditas.
My Sito, taught me how to make kibbe and warrak aneb a few weeks later. The first step was to put on a hairnet. Sito is a retired nurse and is serious about hygiene, so the hairnet is a requirement in her kitchen. Kibbe is a ground meat patty or little football, usually with lamb, that is fried in butter. We began by mashing the ground lamb with our fingers and liquifying onions by running them through a grinder. She taught me about the different bulghur wheat grades and the right percentage of fat needed for each dish.
“Ok, now you take about this much meat and you make a patty.” She cupped the meat in her hands, padding the edges to make an even perfect circle. I grabbed a bit of meat and made my own.
“Now who did this?!” she said jokingly. “This is not a good patty. You have to make pretty patties in my kitchen. They will fall apart, the edges if you don’t.”
I tried again.
“Yes, nice, bery nice.”
Arabic cooking is messy cooking. Her checkered apron was full of lamb bits and splashed remnants of juices that mixed together in brown gray splotches. I kept rinsing my hands and using too many paper towels trying to keep myself clean but eventually gave into the process using my sticky fingers to grab tongs and dirtying everything I touched.
We moved on to the warrak aneb which are stuffed grape leaves. The speed and precision at which she rolled grape leaves revealed the years of muscle memory that lived in her hands.
“Take a little bit of your meat, now remember the meat’s gonna expand. Lay it across your leaf and bring your leaf over here and tighten it up and roll it. As you get to the sharper end you keep moving in your leaf. Now that’s how it’s supposed to be.”
It took me more than a few tries to get them as tightly rolled to her standards, but I managed. My parents came over a few hours later and with my Gido and Aunt we ate dinner.
Learning how to cut, what to look for when buying ingredients, where to buy ingredients, learning to time the order of what to make when, and how you’ll never be a good cook if you care about the clean-up - my grandmas taught me much more than just how to make the food. I’m thankful we got to spend that time together.
Tie your hair back
Wash your hands
A bit of this, this much of that, no need to measure
See it rise
See that color
See how it smells, be quick to move, oh you’ll remember
A few moments more
Place them like this
Grab these, don’t forget that, I think we’re ready
To give
To someone else, for someone else
To have
The time to share what has been made
For life
To sustain
To fulfill an act of love
Pick a place
Take a seat
Dig in, go on, no need to wait, can’t let it get cold
Take more than that
Don’t be shy now
Try that with this, here pass that there, you’re going to eat more, right?
A few spoonfuls more
Finish that plate
Salud, sahten, to health, it is a pleasure, an honor, a duty, to give
No matter when
No matter where
We gather round the table
Set with care, with stories
It’s where we begin
To give
To someone else, for someone else
To have
The time to share what has been made
For life
To sustain
To fulfill an act of love
Both Arabic and Mexican food have a rich history of raw ingredients unique to their regions, specific agricultural techniques, and of course cuisine innovation due to colonization and immigration. Zócolo spice marketplaces are fashioned after Arabic open-air souks. Tiswin also known as tesguinos is a fermented corn beer that can be found both in northwest Mexico and the Maghreb region in the Arab world, and many Arabic spice mixes including baharat, ras al hanout, and zaatar are very similar to the Mexican mixtures used to prepare mole.
The most popular example of cross-cultural food innovation is probably tacos al pastor which are made using meat that has been cooked on a rotating skewer or shawarma. The second generation of Syrian immigrants in Mexico in the early 20th century started putting this meat on tortillas, changed lamb to pork, and added pineapple to make tacos al pastor. After World War II, tacos al pastor moved from smaller towns to bigger cities in Mexico and eventually the U.S. where they are a standard Mexican taco on menus.
Burritos are rumored to have been created in El Paso’s sister city of Juarez and can at least be agreed to have originated in northern Mexico. Flour tortillas used to make burritos have colonial roots as flour is not native to Mexico, unlike corn tortillas which date back to 3,000 B.C. in the time of the Aztecs and Mayans. The burrito folk story goes, that a man named Juan Mendez sold tacos in Juarez during the Mexican Revolution (1910 – 1921). Mendez would use a donkey to transport tacos, wrapping them in flour tortillas and packing them underneath a cloth to keep them warm. The “food of the little burro” grew in popularity becoming the burrito.
Four Syrian men even claim to have invented the ice cream cone. One of the four men, Leon B. Holwey’s daughter recounted that her father immigrated to the U.S. around 1893 so his family could display an intricate mosaic room at the Chicago World Fair. When a cream vendor ran out of dishes at the fair, Leon rolled a thin waffle into a cone shape thus creating a new way to consume ice cream. He moved to Detroit in 1924 and opened an ice cream cone factory.
To make all these dishes, having access to ingredients is essential. It was hard to get some Arabic groceries in El Paso when my grandparents were growing up. Unlike Mexican ingredients which you can find at any grocery store in El Paso and even in gas stations, Arabic families had to order from Sahadi’s in Brooklyn. I go to Sahadi’s all the time. I first stop at the huge jars of dried fruit and wait patiently for the grouchy older man to scoop some apricots for me, make my way through the back and grab the pitted kalamata olives or french green olives, and then go to the prepared foods counter and get a spinach fatayer and a football shaped kibbe which never make it home. Sahadi’s opened in 1895 in Manhattan’s Little Syria and moved to the current Atlantic Avenue location in Brooklyn in 1948. My great-Sito Aziz used to fill out the Sahadi’s order form for everyone in El Paso and mail in the order. She was trilingual speaking Spanish, Arabic, and English so she could facilitate everyone’s needs. They would order bulghur and other dried goods all the way from Brooklyn so they could make their specialties. It was a communal event to prepare and plan together.
When I’m in New York, finding the right ingredients can take time, but worth shopping all day and taking multiple trains to find exactly what I need. I recently bought a red metal tortilla press to make gorditas in my apartment and have found which grocery stores have green chilies, which ones have good asadero cheese, found a butcher that will grind lamb for me, and make Sahadi’s trips for all my Arabic spice needs. Sometimes I slip in next door to the Damascus Bakery to get some ghraybeh cookies, knafeh, and the shredded wheat looking baklava for dessert. I live down the street from a Mexican bakery that has excellent slightly greasy tortilla chips, pre-made masa, fresh tortillas, tamales on the weekend, and pan de huevos pastries.
I’m not able to go home for every holiday or make every birthday party or family gathering, so eating the same food in my apartment makes me feel connected. When I can eat with family, I want to remember what care, love, and work has gone into the meal. Food has a network that really encompasses social, economic, ecological, cultural, and historical elements. It requires patience, it is a way to give thanks, and it is an expression of love, even if the person behind the counter is yelling at you to give them your order already.