Before she became a mother, Samantha Ellis secretly judged other parents who let their children subsist on white bread and pesto-pasta. And when her son was born she couldn’t wait to share the Iraqi Jewish food of her ancestors. Unfortunately, he had other ideas …
My family takes food very seriously. So seriously that when my mother’s family left Iraq in 1971, limited to 20kg of luggage each, they found room for not one but two rolling pins. The truth is that, having used the rolling pins, I think they were right. Born in England, I grew up on my father’s stories, too, of going to a Baghdad street stall to buy hot samoon, Iraqi bread shaped like a teardrop, with a puffy middle and a crunchy crust, with amba (mango pickle) oozing out of it. But he left Baghdad even earlier, in 1951, in a mass airlift along with most of Iraq’s Jews. I grew up in Britain, homesick for a place I’ve never been to, and will probably never see. There are now just three Jews left in Iraq.
Scattered across the world, we didn’t have much from Iraq, but we did have the recipes, which we clung to like a life raft. We didn’t just eat together but often cooked together, too. One of my earliest, happiest memories is of sitting under the Formica table in my grandmother’s kitchen at maybe three or four, and pulling the stalks off parsley so my mother and aunt could make tabbouleh. When, decades later, I was finally about to become a mother myself, I was excited about sharing Iraqi Jewish food with my son. Maybe he’d even want to be my tiny sous chef! Maybe he’d like tabbouleh as much as I did. We make it vivid green with barely any bulgur in it (I was confused when I first saw the pots of beige in the supermarket because they looked nothing like the salad I’d grown up with). Maybe he’d love ingriyi (fried aubergine slices layered with fried lamb or beef and sliced tomato, and simmered with turmeric, lemon juice and date syrup); and tbeet, which just means “overnight” because it was an ingenious dish developed to get around the restrictions on lighting fires or turning on ovens on Shabbat. The flame was kept very low, and chicken and rice were cooked through the night with cardamom, cinnamon and cloves, with eggs tucked around the chicken till they went a deep brown. I imagined if I made him kitchri, rice with red lentils, garlic, turmeric, cumin, tomato, melting onions, so much butter and melting slabs of halloumi, and thick yoghurt spooned over the top, he’d say ashteedek (long live your hands) in our language, Judeo-Iraqi Arabic, and understand me when I replied awafi (to your health).
