Toot Toot a la Beirut!

It’s toot season in Lebanon! Mulberries to the rest of us….but isn’t toot just an excellent word for them?  If I’d ever opened a restaurant in Beirut I knew I wanted to call it Toot! Or if I ever write a book about my time in Lebanon call it Toot Toot a’ Beirut…..which comes from  the title of a song by Marcel Khalife written about the excitement of traveling to Beirut. I love the play on words that song brings to mind for me. At the most basic toot sounds like the train whistles that used to sound echo through the mountains of the region. There was an extensive train network that connected the major cities and transported goods. Gorgeous abandoned train stations litter the Lebanese countryside and the trains themselves  are but discarded rusted ruins, grasses growing up between the remaining tracks. Still the phrase evokes the kind of excitement of a bygone era that I so easily romanticised as I walked around the city. Like I said above, toot is also the Arabic word for mulberry, a bountiful Spring crop out of which jams and syrups are crafted. Mulberries were also the foundation of the silk industry of Lebanon - it’s from their trees that silk worms spin delicate silk threads. Silk merchants were some of the first industrialists to take Beirut from sleepy village to bustling port city, their now decrepit palaces still taking up entire blocks near the downtown. Finally, toot (ok, I know, it’s spelled tout) means everything in French. And Beirut really is everything to me.

Before I’d ever set foot on Lebanese soil there was a bit of a mythology in my family about it. My father always said he’d hoped to retire in Lebanon. As a journalist who had periodically covered the Civil War here between 1975-1990, and then again, during the 2006 Israeli aggression, he’d fallen in love with the country. His hope of retiring here wasn’t to be, but still, he told such wonderful stories about his time, about dodging snipers dashing from one side of Beirut to the other across the Green Line, about long lunches in the Chouf Mountains at colleagues’ homes, about how being Lebanese wasn’t a nationality, it was a profession. When I lived in San Francisco he’d visit and we drive up to the arid olive groves and vineyards north of the city and as we’d drive around seem to go back to a happy place in his mind, telling me how much it reminded him of Lebanon. How magical it was.

It wasn’t until February 2016, when my airplane touched down that first time in Beirut that I understood what he’d meant. I was wowed by the glamorous skyline abutting the Mediterranean. It was busy, chaotic, and smelled of the sea. I was caught up by the energy, the generosity of the people, the beauty, the history.  My husband was posted there as a senior producer for CNN to cover the region, and in time I would find my own path, inspired by the rich culinary traditions and sublime ingredients. My time there was a whirlwind of exploration and discovery. Quickly I was embraced by those I met, becoming part of a culinary community that was eager to share their knowledge and heritage with me.

In the 5 1/2 years I spent in Lebanon it permeated my soul. I was steeped in its romantic, chaotic, and flavourful essence and emerged a different person, certainly a different chef. The breathtaking contrasts in everyday life made me feel alive: the excesses and the poverty, the astounding beauty and shocking human disregard for that beauty,  the aggressive hospitality mingled with the open hostility towards one another, the warm sea and the snowcapped mountains. As a Third Culture Kid, growing up in countries far away from my homeland, Beirut seduced me as it is sort of a Third Culture City, filled with complicated multiple identities, where home is everywhere and nowhere all at the same time. After years of traveling, I found my place in this world there. And it’s in Lebanon where my lifelong love of food and the stories behind the recipes started to make sense. I felt free to finally bring together all of the entangled pieces of me in the recipes and stories from a lifetime of travel and feeling perennially out of place. Somehow Beirut made me feel whole.