With her new cookbook, Zaitoun, Yasmin Khan shines a light on Palestine and its people. Plus seven recipes from the book
We’ve got this really weird thing going on at the moment,” notes the writer Yasmin Khan, “where Middle Eastern food has exploded in popularity at the same time as the Middle East is imploding. That was a big motivation for my book: can we join the two up because it’s great that everyone’s going crazy over pomegranate molasses, za’atar and labneh, but let’s also not forget the other side.”
The result is Zaitoun, a zingingly evocative collection of personal stories and 80 recipes from Palestinian kitchens. Calling it a cookbook does it a disservice. As with Khan’s 2016 debut, The Saffron Tales, which followed her scouring Iran for its most beloved dishes, Zaitoun deserves to be read as much as cooked from.
You’d have these exquisite experiences of joy and then you’d get stopped at a checkpoint and have a gun pointed at you
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