From a Lebanese Kitchen

I smell rice as soon as Anita opens her front door. She welcomes me into her South Philly row house and we pad through the wide living room into her fragrant kitchen. Brown basmati rice cooks next to a pot of green bean and tomato stew. Lunch isn’t quite ready yet; “Would you like to see my little garden first?” Anita asks.

The petite woman, about 75 with a cloud of gray curls, opens the screen door to a small back patio filled with pots and boxes and vines. She points out lettuce, tomato plants, and a tangle of sweet peas that just haven’t blossomed yet. A grape vine winds around the fence at the back wall; she uses the leaves to make dolmas. “The ones you can find in the store,” she says, scrunching her nose, “none of them are good.”

Anita moved to Philadelphia from Lebanon when she was 15. She’s lived in South Philly ever since. We struck up a conversation in a grocery store one day and, after our excitement over a shared love of Lebanese yogurt, agreed to get together for a meal. She invited me to her home (which happens to be four blocks from mine) for lunch.

“Mostly we do vegetables and grains for lunch,” she says, “Meat is like a Sunday treat.” She’ll make lentils and rice, or ‘chi chi beans’ (chickpeas), or, especially in the summer, bulgur tabbouli. “My mom always told me: always start with an onion,” she says. Whether it’s finely chopped in salad, caramelized or sautéed in a stew, it should be the base of almost any dish. Today, Anita made stew with green beans, tomato, “And I add Vidalia onion to the dish and let it cook with the vegetables.” She peeks under the lid and stirs with a wooden spoon. It’s still not done; she likes the beans way past al dente.

Along with the yogurt her mother used to make every week, there are a few dishes Anita misses from her childhood. “In Lebanon we used to eat squid and escargot,” she remembers. “After the first rain in October the escargot would come out of hiding,” she scuttles her fingertips across the counter, “They would come into the field like little soldiers.” She’d collect them and take them home for her mother to cook. “My mom would make a sauce with tahini and lemon and olive oil,” she tilts her head back, like she can still summon that exact flavor. “I would wrap mine in pita because I didn’t really want to taste the snail,” she laughs. “But I loved that lemony sauce.”

Anita took the 30-day trip to the US with her mom on an Egyptian ship. The ticket cost $800; she still remembers. She started working as soon as she arrived. Her first job, which she kept through high school, was at Superior Jewelers on Jewelry Row. She made displays for traveling salesmen, puncturing holes in cardboard or satin and fastening necklaces and rings.  She worked without benefits and with low pay. “It probably took me six months to make a hundred dollars,” she says.

In those days, she’d eat pie a la mode for lunch on her way to work. “When I first got here, I was enamored with junk food,” she laughs. Today, she’s very conscious about her health. Besides the onion rule, she forgoes her mother’s old clarified butter and extra salt habits – Anita took care of her after an open-heart surgery and until her death last year.

Ouzi at King Tut’s

Anita drops a scoop of brown basmati in a small bowl and dresses it with stew. We eat across from each other at the island in her kitchen.My tongue tingles from an unfamiliar spice. I ask what she used and she laughed, “Every spice I have!” Turmeric, allspice, ginger…but it’s the sumac that’s getting my tongue. The dried and ground red berries common in Lebanese cooking have a bite I’d compare to the pith of a lime. It’s somehow warming and tart at the same time.

I brought Ouzi (a Mediterranean special occasion dish of spiced lamb and rice with nuts and raisins served in a pastry pocket) and labneh from a Middle Eastern restaurant for Anita to try. She was a bit put off by the olive oil drizzled over the yogurt (“We would never do that,”), but somehow we still managed to work our way through most of the container. 

I walked home from Anita’s carrying a warm Tupperware full of leftovers and two stunning magenta peonies she clipped from her garden. It’s nice getting to know the neighbors.