
Olives, Lemons & Za'atar
Tom Verde
Rawia Bishara
2014, Kyle Books, 978-1-90686-884-0, $29.95 hb.
There’s carrying coals to Newcastle, and then there’s bringing za’atar to Brooklyn. Rawia Bishara accomplished the latter in 1998 by opening the doors of Tanoreen, a Middle Eastern restaurant in the Bay Ridge section of town. The establishment has been featured in the pages of Gourmet, the New Yorker and the New York Times, yet Bishara never let the attention go to her head. Her success lies in sticking close to her Palestinian-Arab roots (she hails from Nazareth) when offering up such home-based dishes as kafta (ground lamb with onions and spices), fattoush (a salad of tomatoes, cucumbers, red onion, herbs and crunchy bits of pita) and, of course, falafel (“It is to Arabs what a hamburger is to Americans,” she writes.) Bishara shares her recipes for these and other classics, together with informative and engaging sidebars and headnotes, in this beautifully produced volume that is sophisticated enough for the accomplished cook, yet features recipes simple enough for the novice.
You may also be interested in...
Nomadic Chieftain’s Biography Unveils Dynamics of Colonial Expansion
Historian Tetsu Akiyama challenges the narrative that the Kyrgyz were a “static and monotonous ‘traditional’ society’” destined to be subsumed.Editor Challenges Readers To Witness Islamic History Sans the Modern Lens In New Book
In 1516, Ottoman Sultan Selim I entered Damascus clean-shaven. What followed changed Arab-Turkish relations for 400 years.Old Documents Shed New Light on History in Book Connected to Ancient Islamic World
The painstaking work to recover history—one page at a time—is on brilliant display in this collection of essays focusing on early Arabic, Coptic, Greek, Hebrew, Latin and Sogdian manuscripts.