Palestinian cookbook releases new edition as author reflects on food as ‘a form of resistance’

TORONTO: Written amid hopes for a Middle East peace process, “Classic Palestinian Cookery” was first released in 2001. “We really thought that peace was becoming a reality” and the book was “an expression of all this hope,” author Christiane Dabdoub Nasser told Arab News.

More than two decades later, as the book — now titled “Classic Palestinian Cuisine” — releases its 25th-anniversary edition this month, Dabdoub said that hope has faded, even as the book’s importance remains.

For her, food is a form of cultural preservation, bound up with memory and identity amid years of war and displacement.

“We are dealing with an opponent that wants to erase (our) memory and our presence,” Dabdoub said.