Dishes from my Egyptian childhood

People often ask if my work and the food I cook are influenced by my Middle Eastern roots. My usual response is no – my installations rarely draw inspiration from the food I grew up eating. I’m known for making fountains out of chocolate and food that looks like furniture, and not for my stuffed vegetables or kebabs. My work in New York seems worlds away from my upbringing in Cairo. 

I am an Egyptian-born immigrant to New York. I moved to the United States alone at 17 for college, and did everything in my power to stay. For the first few years, I worked all sorts of odd jobs and applied for every scholarship available to secure my place in the US. I had plenty of sleepless nights worrying about my immigration status and how I was going to pay rent. While I had something of an idyllic childhood and a loving family growing up in Cairo, I also had a burning desire to run away. When I was about nine years old, I qualified for the running team. I was a lanky little girl with twig-like legs and could run as fast as lightning. When I made the team, I remember thinking, “These skinny legs are going to run me all the way out of here,” and, sure enough, they did. 

It’s not that I didn’t love where I came from, but I always felt like I needed to forge my own path. Because of this, my idea of home has always been loaded. On the other hand, I’ve been in this country all these years, and also still don’t feel American. New York is comfortable for me because there are a lot of us here – people from all over searching for something they couldn’t find back home, wherever that may be.

Since having a baby, I’ve been thinking more about my origins and my identity. I want my son to grow up speaking Arabic, my mother tongue. I want him to be able to properly pronounce “Eid” – his middle name – a common, agnostic Egyptian name that means “celebration”. I would also love for him to embody the lightheartedness and humour that Egyptians are known for in the region. 

It’s becoming clearer to me that while I spent all these years growing further away from my roots, the place I come from has indeed influenced my life’s work. The spirit of hospitality is an integral part of my culture. I once read that the origins of Middle Eastern hospitality stem from the willingness to house and feed rogue desert travellers who passed through town. I relate. I grew up in a house full of people. I remember the feeling I would get when guests were about to arrive. I would listen for cars pulling into our small street. Then our dog Leo would bark – he had different bark tones and I could hear the difference. This was his welcome bark, very different from his suspicious, beg or play bark. Then our big, heavy iron door that leads into the garden would make a creaking sound, and finally I’d begin to hear chatter and glasses clinking. While my sister would lock the door to her room, I would slide down the wood stair railing, swoop into the kitchen and get in the way of whoever was cooking. The electricity and excitement, the feeling of a ripe night about to unravel, the endless possibilities… It was a contagious, addictive and electrifying buzz. 

It’s taken me all these years to understand that while my work is not necessarily inspired by the cooking of my childhood, it most definitely is informed by the spirit of my people.

At the dinner parties my parents hosted, there was a repertoire of dishes that they would cook. My father was much more of a cook than my mother. But although my mother didn’t particularly enjoy cooking, she did have a few fall-back dishes, such as koshary as far (rice and lentil casserole), ta’ameya (falafel), and fattah (rice and meat over tomato sauce). I have spent my entire adult life giving my mother a hard time for being a less than stellar cook. I’ve told her that part of the reason I became a cook myself was because I had little appetite for what she would cook for us as kids. So there is a certain level of irony that all these years later, and after running so far from where I come from, I find myself standing in my New York City kitchen asking my mum to make me one of her old dinner-party specials, a dish that takes me right back to my childhood and those garden parties: stuffed courgette with yoghurt sauce (or koussa bel zabady, in our Egyptian dialect) as my baby crawls around. 

Stuffed courgette with yoghurt sauce (koussa bel zabady)

1. Wash the courgettes and slice off the tops. Hollow them out with a corer, leaving a small margin at one end. Save the cores to line the pan you will cook the courgettes in.

2. Wash the rice very well. Bring a pot of salted water to the boil. Parboil the rice for five minutes. 

3. Add the partially cooked rice to a bowl with the lamb mince, olive oil, mint, seven spice and white pepper. Season well with salt.

4. Prepare a deep pan that will fit all the courgettes comfortably in a single layer. Line the bottom with the saved courgette filling.

5. Stuff each courgette with the mince filling and leave about 2cm empty near the top. Do not compress or fill too tightly.

6. Cover the pot and cook on medium-low heat for 10 minutes. Then add one cup of boiling water and continue cooking while covered for 25 minutes.

7. For the sauce, in a medium-sized pan, whisk the yoghurt, cornstarch and garlic together over medium heat. Whisk in the egg white. Add the water and bring to the boil. Add salt to taste. If the sauce is too thick, add a little more water.

8. Place a few courgettes on each plate and top with a large spoonful of yoghurt sauce. Garnish with toasted pine nuts, chopped parsley and pomegranate seeds.

@lailacooks