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The Muskegon Chronicle · Muskegon, Michigan · 30 July 2019

CP-2019-007

Celebrate delicious diversity

Sarah Henry, Washington Post

Celebrate delicious diversity — The Muskegon Chronicle, 30 July 2019
The Muskegon Chronicle · Muskegon, Michigan · 30 July 2019

Transcribed from the clipping

“It started with a meatball. Anna Francese Gass, born in Italy and raised in Rhode Island, grew up devouring her mom’s meatballs slathered in tomato sauce… ‘Heirloom Kitchen’ is one of several new cookbook anthologies championing the recipes and stories of immigrants who now call the United States (and, in one case, England) home. They are welcome reminders of the rich cultural and culinary variety immigrants bring. Some leave their homeland for love or economic or educational opportunities; others escape violence or political or religious persecution. Many are home cooks: mothers trying to feed their families well while maintaining a connection to their cultures of origin… The author, who left the corporate financial world to pursue a culinary career, traveled around the country to collect recipes with roots in Greece, Lebanon, Ghana, Mexico, Korea and beyond. She also collected stories of what it was like for each woman to leave everything behind to start over in a new land. We meet 85-year-old Palestinian Fethie Abowaznah Loutfi, a child of goat farmers, who fled with her family across the desert and barefoot from Yaffa to Jordan in search of safety. Denied entry, they continued on to Syria, and in a refugee camp there she fell in love with an Albanian refugee; they married, had a son, and decided to move to the United States in search of a better life. The couple raised eight children in New York; Loutfi worked as a member of the United Nations maintenance staff. Used to cooking for a crowd — as her Palestinian rice dish maqluba attests — she delights in feeding her family, which includes members of Muslim, Catholic and Jewish faiths. The book, organized around geographic regions, includes 100 recipes from 45 contributors. A common thread: re-creating the comfort of home through cooking. ‘Food is love. You can taste it in the recipes these women, all mothers, shared with me,’ Francese Gass says. ‘Food made from the heart and soul is the best food.’”

Context added by this archive

The Nakba in a food column: a woman of eighty-five who walked out of Jaffa barefoot, was turned back at Jordan, met her husband in a camp in Syria, raised eight children in New York and cooked on the United Nations maintenance staff. The dish she is known for is maqluba, which is also the dish a Palestinian family in Phoenix is making two years later in this archive, in a different paper, in a different state.

Cite this item

"Celebrate delicious diversity," The Muskegon Chronicle, 30 July 2019. Covering Palestine archive, CP-2019-007. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-2019-007

Elsewhere in the archive

This record is part of Covering Palestine, an archive of American and Anglophone newspaper clippings about Palestinians, 1812 to 2022. Researched and assembled by Maria Robles.

The clipping belongs to the newspaper that printed it, or to the wire service that supplied the copy. It is reproduced here for research, criticism and commentary. The city is derived from the masthead, not read off the clipping.

Something wrong here, or something you know about this clipping? The archive is still being built and corrections are wanted: maria@rozumstudio.com, quoting CP-2019-007.

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