The 3 amazing women behind the modern cookbook classic ‘Lebanese Cuisine’

WHEN THE NEW version of “Lebanese Cuisine” came out recently, Leila Habib-Kirske began getting very specific messages of gratitude. Fans of the original not only shared their joy about decades of happy cooking (and eating!) — they also shared photos of their dog-eared, falling-apart first editions. Some were held together with rubber bands around them; some were carefully kept in plastic freezer bags. 

The book stood as a simple, spiral-bound revelation when Habib-Kirske’s mother, Madelain Farah, first self-published it in 1972, fulfilling orders by mail herself (with young Habib-Kirske’s help). Back then, recipes for the likes of hummus, tabbouleh and ful imdammas (falafel) weren’t easy to find, and “Lebanese Cuisine” became a treasured underground classic to cooks from Lebanon, other parts of the Middle East and far beyond. With a few updates, the book sold more than 100,000 copies as time went on. And today, the style of the cooking, with its emphasis on simplicity and seasonality — and with plenty of vegetarian and vegan options naturally included — feels absolutely current.

Some devotees of the recipes had inherited their mothers’ or grandmothers’ copies, with many surely planning to pass theirs on, however stained. And while in her original introduction Madelain wrote, “In the Middle East … the chief cook in an extended family is queen of her home,” the book’s reach widened as times changed; one second cousin bought each of her children a copy, with one son handing his down to his daughter. A fresh hardcover version, with gorgeous full-color photos of favorite dishes, was — and is — fully worthy of celebration. So, too, we should celebrate the three generations of extraordinary women behind “Lebanese Cuisine.”

The genesis of the cookbook seems simple enough: Grown up and living in Washington, D.C., in the 1950s, Madelain wanted to make her mother’s beloved dishes, but — whoops — hadn’t really learned to cook them. Long distance was expensive, so when it came time for maternal culinary consultations, she called her mother collect. After a number of pricey phone bills, her father suggested that mother and daughter might find another way to share this intergenerational information.

Habib-Kirske recalls helping her mother and grandmother with recipe testing. She was just a little girl, but the smells and tastes stay with her, as does the immense care put into translating almost 200 recipes from her grandmother’s old-world “take a piece and smell for seasonings” and thumb-tests for temperature into measurements and directions that home cooks anywhere could follow. She also remembers her grandmother, Laurice Farah, as “opinionated and feisty … she loved everybody and was so patient.” 

Born in 1906 in Beirut, Laurice broke her nose playing basketball and graduated from college, both things that young women didn’t much do then. Her ambition was to be a doctor. “That was really what she wanted to be,” Habib-Kirske says. “And that was just not available.” Then Laurice wanted to go abroad to teach, but such travel for employment by a single woman just wasn’t done. A parentally presented alternative: Marry a young man to whom she’d been introduced who lived half a world away, in Portland, Ore. Laurice took that gamble and, Habib-Kirske says, ended up with the love of a lifetime. 

Raising Madelain along with three siblings, Laurice clearly instilled her curious intellect, multifaceted capabilities and the longing to expand what was possible. Madelain went on to record her mother’s recipes and raise Habib-Kirske as a single mom, but these represent only part of her myriad accomplishments. As a young woman in Portland, she won beauty pageants and did some modeling. (“She was stunning,” Habib-Kirske says. “She really looked like Elizabeth Taylor.”) She went to college, then got a Ph.D. in Middle East studies, sociology, language and literature, writing a book on “Marriage and Sexuality in Islam.” Another of her many book titles: “Pocket Bread Potpourri.” Madelain spoke six languages; she was a Fulbright scholar; in D.C., she worked for the State Department; and she taught French for years, also lecturing on Middle East culture and literature. (She died in 1988.) “You just can’t make all this stuff up,” Habib-Kirske notes. “She was really an amazing person.”

Habib-Kirske says she struggled for a long time with holding herself to her mother’s standard. She laughs about how she became an accountant: “Sounds kind of boring in the scheme of things.” But, she says, “Then I realized the way she raised me was like: no barriers … If I ever said, ‘I can’t do it,’ she’d have my hide.” Working her way up in the field of finance in the 1980s, she fought to show what she and women like her could do. One representative anecdote: the (male) client from a very important business who said to her, “You’re one of the smartest people I’ve ever met, but you just need to go home and have babies.”

Now Habib-Kirske is a financial executive in the tech industry in Seattle. When she decided to reissue “Lebanese Cuisine,” she brought her longtime love of analog photography to bear — while she had no previous experience with capturing food on film, many of the luminous shots found in the book’s pages are her work. She painstakingly tested every recipe, encountering some happy rediscoveries along the way, and she also added a new one of her own, for panna cotta ma’ alward, the classic dessert scented with rosewater.

More than 50 years later, “Part of what compelled me to really get this going again,” Habib-Kirske says, “was to keep this memory — this book — alive. Which does mean a lot to a lot of people.

“The food’s really relevant,” she notes. She calls the book “really helpful,” and also just “yummy.”

“I felt like it still had a place in this world,” she says. “Even though it’s like your grandmother’s stuff.”

Stuffed Eggplant Supreme or Shaykh al-Mihshi
— from “Lebanese Cuisine” by Madelain Farah & Leila Habib-Kirske, published by Hatherleigh Press

Makes 6-8 servings; serve with rice
Habib-Kirske calls this dish “my personal favorite that runs on repeat.” For bulk spices and Middle Eastern ingredients in Seattle, she loves Big John’s PFI; she also recommends Goodies Mediterranean Market.

1 pound lamb shoulder, coarsely ground
¼ teaspoon cinnamon
Salt and pepper to taste
½ cup pine nuts
2 medium onions, finely chopped
12 eggplants, 3-5 inches in length (or 1-2 globe eggplants; see Note below)
1-3 tablespoons butter
1 8-ounce can tomato sauce

1. Sauté the meat with the seasonings and pine nuts. Add the onions, and continue sautéing until the onions are soft. Set aside.

2. Peel the eggplants, leaving a short stem (may be peeled in stripes). Brown all sides in butter until barely soft. Remove, and place on a platter. Make a slit on the side of each eggplant, and stuff with 1-2 tablespoons of the filling.

3. Arrange the stuffed eggplants next to each other in a baking dish. Pour the tomato sauce over the eggplants, and barely cover with water. Sprinkle with additional salt. Bake 20-25 minutes at 375° F. Remove the eggplants gently with a spatula onto a platter.

Note: Alternatively, 1-2 globe eggplants may be used. Simply slice the eggplants horizontally into rounds. Stack two rounds of eggplant together, and arrange in a 9×13 baking dish. Layer the filling between two slices, like a sandwich. Top each stack with a bit more of the filling. Pour the tomato sauce over the eggplants, and barely cover with water. Sprinkle with additional salt. Bake 45-60 minutes at 375° F or until soft.