'A dish created from scratch'

History professor Amal Ghazal has prepared a new course, Food for Thought: History and the Culinary Cultures of the Islamic World. (Bruce Bottomley Photo)

While in Algeria a year ago, history professor Amal Ghazal made a few discoveries about North African eating habits.  For starters, a few days into her visit, she discovered that the meat she had been regularly served was camel—accorded her as the food presented to an honoured guest.  But what really surprised Prof. Ghazal, who is from Lebanon, was how it difficult it was to get "local" bread. 

No matter how conservative the Islamic dress of the women walking in the street, she says, they can be counted upon to be carrying baguettes rather than round-shaped Algerian bread.  Part of the legacy of French colonialism, it seems, is that this icon, the baguette, has been fully normalized as a household staple.

The reasons why such historicultural shifts happen will be just one of the items on the menu in Prof. Ghazal's new course, Food for Thought: History and the Culinary Cultures of the Islamic World (HIST 3515).

"I wanted to teach something cultural, and fun," she says.

"I teach Modern Arab Intellectuals and History of the Modern Middle East—teaching (those courses) is fun, but the subject matter is not so fun," she says (though she adds, "it can be very dramatic").

Prof. Ghazal, a self-confessed foodie, says that food can serve not only as a "window into Islamic customs," it can also serve a political purpose—dismantling stereotypes about Islamic cultures.

It is harder to hold dehumanizing views of Muslims, she says, once you realize that "they do the stuff that everybody does."

The history of food is also another way in to the historic connection between "Islamic civilization and later European civilization," going back to the Crusaders who were "shocked by the exotic food" that they encountered in the Middle East.

Prof. Ghazal is also interested in how certain foods or cuisines become "nationalized"—that is to say, identified as native or natural to a particular nation-state.  Examples of this include the way that couscous, hummus and falafel are now staples of Israeli cuisine, or how tomato sauce with yogurt is a differentiator between Lebanese/Syrian and Turkish food.

While she expects that teaching the course will, indeed, be fun, as with cooking, most of the work is in the preparation. You might say that this class is a dish created from scratch.

"There are a hundred syllabi on the web for 'Modern Middle East' classes," she says.
"For this, I'm by myself."

She says that, over the course of the term, she will have her students collect "recipes that come with a story," and assign them the task of researching that story.  She would like to end the term with a banquet, at which the students would come prepared to explain the history of the various dishes at the meal.

So how much food history is enough? The frequently homesick professor confesses that immersion in her native cuisine is a way to cope. With enough attention and time spent, she says with a laugh, "maybe I'll stop feeling nostalgic!"

Most classes just end with an exam. But Dr. Ghazal's new class wrapped up with a banquet. Each of the students contributed a dish. Below, a sampling.

(Bruce Bottomley Photo)	(Bruce Bottomley Photo)
(Bruce Bottomley Photo)	Dr. Ghazal, middle, with students Jacob Posen, Kate Dalgleish, Roqaya Abdel Hameid, Cassie Brown, Rema Faddoul, Erin Henschel, Amro Alkhudair, Patrick Howard, Zaid Al-Dayriyeh.