Of Land and Sea

Welcome, once again, to Lebanon’s schizophrenia! It’s always about day and night, left and right, north and south – mountain and sea.

Lebanese cuisine has two faces: private – home cuisine; and public – mezze and festive food. Mezze displays that schizophrenia too, with two identities: mountain and sea.

Mezze is about gathering the wealth and abundance, the fruit of the land, and serving it in numerous small dishes and plates, ranging from tabouleh, salads and cold dishes to raw meat, cooked or fried dishes, and barbecue. It’s a necessary ritual on Sundays and party days, when lunch lasts for hours, washed down with sips of arak (local aniseed alcohol), and shared with family and friends among breathtaking scenery.

Mezze has nothing to do with tapas – those are nibbles served with a drink. A mezze is a proper meal, with no less that 15 dishes. Most of the mezze’s essential elements are not about food: the jamaa (a big group of family and friends), the scenery (by the seashore, on a cliff or high mountain, or by a roaring spring river), and the season (a mezze is best in summer with a sea or a mountain breeze). As for the food, the jatt el khodra – or the “goat’s garden,” as a friend of mine used to call it – is a huge, well-arranged platter of vegetables and greenery: a proud romaine lettuce in the middle, surrounded by red tomato, green hot pepper, fresh cucumber and green onions.  

Back to the schizophrenia, and to the fish and seafood used in both home cuisine and mezze! Lebanon has coastal cities and seaports, high mountains, and a valley (Bekaa valley) behind those mountains.

Fish-based cuisine is simple in the mountains and inland. As a mountain boy, I ate fish once or twice a month (it was the most precious thing one could bring from the sahhel, the coast), never cooked in a dish but simply fried or baked. We ate mostly “simple” fish, rather than “weird” sea creatures!

Fish cooked in people’s homes on the coast takes on a completely different dimension. It’s all about using every living creature in the sea. Coastal people know their sea, as farmers know every corner and stone of their land, orchards or woods.

So everything goes “fish”! Kebbeh samak (fish kebbeh), yakhnet samak (fish stew), tajenn samak (fish in a cooked tehini sauce), samkeh harra (fish in a cilantro hot sauce) – it’s fish in all its forms, tastes and colours.

In the coastal towns and cities of Batroun, Tyre, Sarafand, Mina, Enfe and Abdeh, fish is really an everyday meal, and every kind of seafood too: urchins, octopus, calamari and squid. People know the sea like the back of their hands, and they follow the seasons. 

The difference between the sea and the mountains – the fish and the meat – is keeping Lebanon’s schizophrenia alive!