Bayrut: The Cookbook | Hisham Assaad
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Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City sitting at her dining room table, talking to cookbook authors.
Hisham Assaad: Hi, I'm Hisham Assaad, and I just produced a book called Bayrut: The Cookbook.
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Suzy Chase: This is the story of a city with energy and diversity, of multiple cultures and traditions. With ever popular street food, a thriving restaurant and cafe scene and traditional family favorites handed down through generations. My first question I'm so curious about was the spelling on the cover of the cookbook. It's B-A-Y-R-U-T on the cover, but inside you spell it B-E-I-R-U-T.
Hisham Assaad: So the official spelling in English is B-E-I-R-U-T. Well, the French spelling it's B-E-Y-R-O-U-T-H. But we wanted to go is what it sounds like or how however you want, or however you say it or pronounce it. So it's Bayrut. B-A-Y-R-U-T, which is more closer than the other spellings.
Suzy Chase: You organized this cookbook just how I like to think about cooking. Breakfast and brunch, and then street food, salads and sides, main, Sunday feast, desserts, drinks, and basics. Can you talk a little bit about how the book is organized?
Hisham Assaad: We wanted to have something from everything. It's as if you are in Beirut and you're trying stuff out, you're taking a day trip or walking tour in the streets and you will get a bit of everything. What usually people miss out on is the, partially the mains and the Sunday feasts where people cook stews and homemade food that usually is not fun in restaurants. But the rest is something that you would get almost anywhere in Beirut. And that's how you like to divide it into what meal should you have or what meal can you have at home that is coming from the heart of Beirut.
Suzy Chase: What are a couple of dishes that you can only find in homes?
Hisham Assaad: You will always find stews and at home and not in restaurants, because it's not something that is common in the menu platters or the menu spread. There's one recipe in the book it's called Rishta bi addas. It's lentils stew with homemade noodles. This is more of a homey winter, kind of out of Beirut mountain dish. And it's not very common because it represents more like a poor people's food, and it's a very delicious and rich and nutrient dish. But it kind of has the humble connotations. So it's not always present on menus.
Suzy Chase: Would you say that lentils are things that you really won't find in restaurants often, but they're cooked more at home?
Hisham Assaad: Yes. They're being introduced a little bit when people are trying to explore different ingredients and trying to do local variations of salads. Maybe I would use lentils in a salad and I would serve that in a restaurant.
Suzy Chase: You want to archive some of these recipes in the cookbook before they're forgotten. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Hisham Assaad: One of the dishes that I really wanted to archive while researching, recipes that are specific to Beirut. One of them was moufataka. Is like a fudge pudding that is made with rice. That is cooked to, until it's gelatinous or gummy, and it's cooked with sugar, tahini and turmeric so it turns yellow. And once it's cooked too much, the oil from the tahini spills out and it kind of creates this gummy texture. The porridge is cooked for around an hour and a half or two hours. So it's labor intensive. And now people are cooking it less at homes and getting it from pastry shops or sweet shops that still make it in like a big, giant pot. So this is one of the things that is fading out. And the ritual was, that was accompanying this dish is, I don't think anyone is practicing it anymore and I wrote about it in the intro of the recipe.
Hisham Assaad: People used to go and have a picnic at the beach, around the Byblos beach, which is, which is now the only sandy beach that's available in Beirut and it's polluted. So they used to go and prepare all the food and snacks that they can take that wouldn't spoil on a hot day. And they would go to the beach, have their picnic and the dessert would be [foreign language 00:05:32]. And it used to be made on, it used to be practiced on jobs. There is jobs Wednesday, it's something close to Ramadan, the prophet, Job.
Hisham Assaad: And because he was tested, his patience was tested and the food or the recipe takes a lot of patience to accomplish with two hours or an hour and a half of stirring. Even though I know I wouldn't make it regularly, but I want this recipe to be preserved and to be kept and to be talked about later on.
Suzy Chase: So I feel like Lebanon hasn't been able to catch a break for years. In the past few years, you've had to deal with an economic crisis, fuel, electricity and currency shortages, the revolution, the pandemic, and the horrifying explosion in the port of Beirut. You wrote in the cookbook that the explosion crushed whatever was left of people's spirits. Did cooking help you cope?
Hisham Assaad: Cooking was my refuge. I got the deal to work on the book and I decided to put myself in the kitchen just to cope up with things. And then things started to unfold and things started to get worse. But being in the kitchen helped me zone out. Take some time off and be on my own. It was hard though to write about all of this. During the day I would be in the places that were affected. I would be with people who were affected. And by night I have to go back and produce a book to talk about the beauty of Beirut. And this is why you get paragraphs of the reality of what we are going through so that doesn't feel disconnected from the time the book was produced. I worked on it during 2020 and 2021. And we are still in a very tight play in terms of the economic crisis and the justice due to after the port explosion.
Hisham Assaad: And every day is still a challenge. Although there were days that I couldn't enjoy cooking, I would just cook something to eat and to stay alive. I've been working on myself since the beginning of the year to try and enjoy cooking as much as possible. And in September and August, I was in Spain and France trying to promote the book and I cooked in places and restaurants over there. And I remembered how much I enjoy being in the kitchen, being zoned out of all of the reality outside and just being immersed and food and making food and serving that to people. And I remember the joy behind that again.
Suzy Chase: In the book, you talk about how the food has evolved to represent each era. How has the pandemic and economic crisis shifted the way people consume foods?
Hisham Assaad: The pandemic didn't really affect because it came after the crisis had started happening. And with the devaluation of the currency, a lot of people who are paid in local currency and not foreign one, had a problem with buying ingredients that kept getting more expensive. People started going back to growing foods at home, as much as possible. To get fresh vegetables, things that are getting out of hand. But it's all because of the economic crisis.
Hisham Assaad: A lot of things became unaffordable to a huge chunk of the population. Meats and chicken were off the menus. People resorted to vegetables. Cooking the most out of things to avoid waste. Pastas and grains are what we resorted to. Rice, pastas, things that were still supported by the government or subsidized. So this is changing how we perceive food, how we deal with food. We became vegetarians and it's not something to celebrate, but that's an outcome of a crisis.
Suzy Chase: I read that locally made spirits and wines are on the rise too.
Hisham Assaad: Yes. This is something that I see as a silver lining. A lot of local production ma became more popular in terms of spirit. We already have a great wine selection of wine and varieties of wine. But we're having whiskey, gins, vodkas, and other spirits. A lot of snacks haven't produced in the country to replace whatever was not imported because it became really super expensive to have the chips, the snacks, the biscuits, and some of them are really getting high quality production.
Suzy Chase: In Beirut, the feast you prepare for breakfast, isn't just one plate of a certain food, but rather an assortment of dishes. What is your go-to breakfast?
Hisham Assaad: For me, when I'm on my own, obviously I would not put this huge spread, but I would have a piece of bread with labneh some [zata 00:10:14] and olive oil. Maybe I would just have a piece of toast or sourdough bread with hummus, not Lebanese, but I'm using, I love using the local ingredients with things that are not conventional. Or just a simple fried egg with suma and all spice.
Suzy Chase: In the cookbook you wrote, you're a labneh-aholic. Me too. I cannot get enough of it. So over the weekend, I made your recipe for labneh and veggie dip on page 30. Can you describe this recipe?
Hisham Assaad: So you wouldn't really find this recipe in restaurants or in a lot of restaurants. It's called Beiruti Labneh or Labneh Beiruti because usually the Lebanese restaurants is just the plain one with maybe a little bit of garlic and dried mint and olive oil. I love making my own labneh. You make it a little bit thicker if you like, if you're making it from scratch and it makes it whole. The vegetables much firmer or firmly. If it's thicker, it's much nicer to scoop out and thicker labneh, if it has a little bit of tang in it, it makes the whole difference.
Suzy Chase: If you want to determine how authentic the recipes in a Lebanese cook are, the first thing you look at is the recipe for tabbouleh. What are you looking for?
Hisham Assaad: So I wrote in the description of the intro of the recipe, that this is my quality control. Knowing that tabbouleh has been there since, I don't know when? For centuries, probably. It has evolved. And the way they made tabbouleh back then, it was a lot of bulgur wheat and a little bit of parsley and tomatoes and it was served as a main dish. But nowadays the tabbouleh that we have here is a lot of parsley, a little bit of tomatoes, and they replaced it with quinoa sometimes, which is a contemporary take on the recipe. But I wouldn't call the quinoa tabbouleh the authentic recipe.
Suzy Chase: In the cooking notes you wrote, I have deliberately broken down the spice mixes in each recipe into individual spices. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Hisham Assaad: If you go through some of the recipes, you would find that there's a long list of spices. And we need just little pinches of everything. When I was preparing the recipes, this is how we go at home. We don't have the ready mix, spice mixes. There is the Lebanese seven spices, or you would find that in the UK or the U.S. labeled as baharad. To get what we cook at home, I decided to break it down into the individual spices. You don't really need to worry that much, and you can use seven spices or the baharad instead, but because I didn't, I haven't tried it myself, I went into the specifics.
Suzy Chase: So would you mind reading the first part of the acknowledgements
Hisham Assaad: To Beirut, the city that has given me incredible memories and experiences and enough heartaches and traumas to last a lifetime. Writing a cookbook in the middle of both global and local storms was tiring. Despite it all, I am proud to have finally produced this book so we can celebrate the city through food.
Hisham Assaad: It's always a heartache just to remember that. And living here every, with everything that is happening and with everything that is discouraging us from going further, it makes it hard to sustain it day to day life. And nowadays, a lot of friends have been leaving the country to find opportunities elsewhere, where they can grow and live a more stable life. Staying here at the moment makes it really harder to cope with everything.
Suzy Chase: This cookbook though is, as you called it, a celebration of Beirut food and culture. And I think that that gives us hope that there's going to be a brighter day.
Hisham Assaad: Yes. And in one part I wrote about how, despite it all, and I don't want to be romanticizing our struggles, but despite it all, we always find a way to grow. Just like the fig tree that grows out of the harshest environments. We will find a place to put our roots back and grow tall.
Suzy Chase: The last part of the acknowledgements you wrote, documenting these recipes is what I intend to do, in case we forget that we used to put pine nuts in our kibay stuffing.
Hisham Assaad: Pine nuts have been one of the things that people are not able to buy anymore. They've become so expensive that people are just omitting them. At first, we started replacing them with almonds that are cut into the shape of pine nuts. And then nuts were out of the scene completely. So for the young generation, that is just exploring food and going out and seeing that the food is presented in a certain way, might not know that, at a certain time, this is what the recipes looked like.
Suzy Chase: Now to my segment called dream dinner party, where I ask you who you most want to invite to your dream dinner party and why? And for this segment, it can only be one person.
Hisham Assaad: Why does it have to be just one?
Suzy Chase: I don't have enough time to go through like 15 people.
Hisham Assaad: Because what I like to think in my head that this is the personality I give off. It's something between Jamie Oliver and Nigella Lawson. I would go with Nigella.
Suzy Chase: And I would too. Why?
Hisham Assaad: I love the way she presents herself. She's not afraid to deal with ingredients with all of her senses with she, the way she tastes food on video or the way she goes elbow deep in the recipe that she's making. And she just looks gorgeous at the same time. I love those bits when she, at the end of her, one of her shows where she sneaks into the kitchen or the fridge and just eats something. Exactly. I love those.
Suzy Chase: I do too. I had her on my podcast a few months ago with her latest cookbook. And it was hard for me to keep composure, because I just want to say, I love you. I love you so much.
Hisham Assaad: Yeah. That's how I would be if I had that dream dinner party with her.
Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media?
Hisham Assaad: I am everywhere. You can find my name, Hisham Assaad, just Google me. I'm @Hisham_AD on Instagram, on TikTok. You can find my website called https://cookin5m2.com/. It's also mentioned in the book, where you can also find links to find me elsewhere. And you can shoot me a message at any time, asking about anything related to the book. I would be happy just to have a chat and talk about it.
Suzy Chase: To purchase Bayrut the cookbook and support the podcast head on over to CookerybytheBook.com. And thank you so much Hisham for coming on Cookery by the Book podcast.
Hisham Assaad: Thank you so much for having me.
Outro: Follow @CookerybytheBook on Instagram. And thanks for listening to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book.
