‘Bethlehem’ Tells the Story of a People

“Imagine we meet in New York, and you tell me, ‘You know what, take me to Bethlehem with you,’” Fadi Kattan said on a Zoom call a few days ago to discuss his new cookbook Bethlehem: A Celebration of Palestinian Food. “That’s the book. It’s going around Bethlehem meeting the people, because we owe this to them.” Kattan, a Franco-Palestinian chef, restaurateur, hotelier and now, author, was born and raised in that titular city, in the Israel-occupied West Bank. He opened Fawda, his restaurant there, in 2015 and followed that up with Akub, in London, at the beginning of 2023. He began working on his cookbook long before opening the latter, and certainly could not have predicted that he’d be launching it after October 7, after the Hamas attacks on Israel, in the middle of what he believes is most accurately termed the “Israeli War on Gaza.”

Elias Halabi

In the face of destruction, rubble, hunger, and death, Kattan has given the world a jubilant glut of beauty, starting with the book’s cover. The work of Lebanese graphic designer Nourie Flayhan, it started with an idea the chef came up with. “I said, ‘Look, Bethlehem is very much known for its traditional embroidery, but I don’t want something classic. It’s not an embroidery book, it’s a cookbook; it’s a storybook.’” The result features an ornamental frame with a geometric red-and-black pattern, like those embroidered on the neck piece of a thobe, or woman’s dress. “The colors and the motifs would indicate where that dress was made,” Kattan explains.

The book is an entirely collaborative object. Inside, where the contents are organized by season, Elias Halabi’s expansive photographs show us lush natural landscapes throughout the occupied territories of the author’s homeland, while Ashley Lima’s saturated images of plated dishes are prompts to “eat this now.” Kattan has included visual and written portraits of farmers, purveyors, and cooks who are each an integral part of his culinary network, along with those of his own family members, living and dead, who have also provided inspiration for numerous recipes shared within these pages.

When we spoke about the project, he was in Bethlehem, in the historical stone house his great-grandfather once lived in. “My family are okay. They’re holding on,” he said. “It’s not easy, but it’s okay. We’re lucky. Grateful to be safe.”

Eater: First of all, how are you doing? It is now 8:30 p.m. in Bethlehem. What’s going on where you are?

Fadi Kattan: How am I doing? I don’t know. I wish I knew, but I haven’t had an answer to this question since the 7th of October, because it’s extremely confusing. We’re seeing a genocide happening 80 kilometers from where I am. I have friends, family in Gaza. We’re seeing the takeover of more and more Palestinian land in the West Bank. The Israeli Army’s coming into cities, whether it’s Bethlehem, Ramallah, Jenin, whatever.

A few days ago, I managed to get the first copies of the book. I really wanted to give it to the people in the book because they make the book. One of the people who’s not in Bethlehem is [restaurateur] Abu Mohammad, who I did the musakhan [dish] with in Sebastia, which is up north between Jenin and Nablus. But I actually couldn’t go to give them the book because the roads up north are dangerous. Charlotte, where are you based?

I’m in New York City.

Imagine, I wrote a book about New York, and one of the people [in it] lives in Patterson, New Jersey. I could take a train and cross the river and give them the book and come back. Something as simple as that here takes dimensions that have no meaning. Seeing what’s happening today in U.S. campuses, seeing what’s happening in demonstrations across the world, it overwhelms me because it’s about love, it’s about freedom. What’s happening in Gaza is not only about Gaza; it’s about the fact that a government, an occupying force, can actually decide to starve 2 million people. People are not hungry in Gaza because there’s a natural catastrophe, it’s because somebody laid siege to them. It’s because access to aid is being hindered. It’s because aid workers — and not only the people from the World Central Kitchen but also Palestinians — have been killed since the beginning of the war.

In the midst of all this, your cookbook is launching. You could easily have made it a restaurant cookbook, but you really focused on Palestinian home cooking. Did you always know this is what you wanted to do?

I’ve been writing the book for more or less two-and-a-half years. In the meantime, we opened Akub [in London]. So, the cookbook really started before. But also, I thought it was important to tell the story of who I am, not who the restaurant is.

How did you decide which recipes to include?

Even though it’s a beautiful book, it’s made to be cooked from. It’s made to be on your kitchen counter and end up having sumac falling all over it. There’s a lot of humility that comes into sharing recipes. I’m extremely grateful for this feeling because it’s a feeling of, wow, I can tell the story. I can tell people why I like arayes, which is the minced meat; usually it’s stuffed into a pita bread, but in the book, it’s stuffed into a shrak, which is that thin layered bread. I can tell the story of [how] I used to get it at a butcher in Nablus. And it’s really putting things in the reality of the context of Bethlehem and of Palestine.

I also noticed that you didn’t change ingredients to account for people’s unfamiliarity or discomfort. So, there are things like lamb testicles, which are not hard to prepare. And I did not know what molokhia, the plant, or the dish made with its leaves was, and now of course I really, really want to try it.

You know why I have the lamb testicles recipe in the book? I understand the environmental reality of meat eating, and I am 100 percent convinced that if we all went back to what our grandparents did, or what Palestinians and a lot of other societies are still doing, which is eating the whole animal, we would be screwing up planet Earth a bit less. Expecting human beings to stop eating meat is a fallacy. But when you discard a lot of an animal because you don’t know what to do with kidneys or testicles or a spleen, et cetera, then you’re actually going on and wasting in a time where there’s not only Palestinians being starved in Gaza, but there’s millions of people starving on the streets in New York and Paris and Geneva and Tokyo.

I actually enjoy doing this recipe, and I think it’s fantastic that it uses arak, which is the distilled grape juice with onions because it also shows our diversity. It’s not a traditional recipe. It’s a recipe I invented in Fawda, and that was one of my bestsellers, because it also challenges how we perceive meat in general.

Obviously when you were working on the book and planning the launch, you had no idea that on October 7th all of this was going to happen. Now, of course, it’s impossible to imagine what it would’ve been like to release your cookbook in any other situation, because this is the situation. But I wonder what it means to you to be publishing this cookbook now.

When the cookbook went to print, it was prior to the 7th of October. And in December, I was told by the publisher that the cookbook’s done, and I should announce that it’s ready. [The publisher determines] when it’s going on the market, it’s basically from the date it’s printed until the date it’s shipped into storage for distribution. Once it’s in storage for distribution, it has to go out. It’s not going to sit there.

I was extremely confused, and I didn’t know what to do. I was like, well, how do I even announce it? And honestly, there was something else happening in the background: I was coming to a realization that in 1948 when the Nakba happened, Palestinians were so busy dealing with the catastrophe that they did not manage at the time to document and preserve things like food. Today, there are so many different Palestinians in the diaspora and in Palestine with different streaks of what they do, from art to music to cooking, that we shouldn’t lose focus on what we’re good at.

I just have a feeling the book is about something that’s disappearing. And I don’t want it to be a celebration of that. And that’s why I’m happy it’s a cookbook, because even if things in it could disappear, people will go on cooking [them] elsewhere. That’s important. Today, when I see people cook Palestinian food in Toronto and Paris and London, in Santiago, in Chile and wherever, I feel this hope that we will not disappear as a people. I’m not preserving Palestinian cuisine. The people who are preserving Palestinian cuisine are the people cooking it every day. I’m not writing about a dead fossil. I’m sharing recipes of things that are alive. I am putting [forth] pictures of people, of produce, people that are doing beautiful things and that are proud of what they’re doing.

How are the people featured in the book doing now, seven months after October 7th? Are they all still able to do what they had been doing before?

Yes, but they’re doing it much less. They’re selling much less; distribution is more difficult. Challenges are more difficult. It’s all insane.

In the book, you talk a lot about the endurance of Palestinian cuisine and the pride that’s taken in it, and how that’s a kind of resistance to occupation and displacement. And so, I wonder, do you see the cookbook also as an act of resistance? Is preservation a form of resistance?

I do think preservation is resistance. The book is not about resistance, it’s beyond that: It’s telling a true story of people of the land. One of the most disturbing things we’ve seen since the 7th of October was how dehumanized we are as Palestinians. I have no intention to dehumanize myself. I’m a human being, whether anybody likes it or not. And if someone’s grabbing the book, and they don’t know much about Palestinians [other than what] they’ve in the news, when they see those stories of people, and when they see this food and those recipes, it should be something that makes them closer to understanding that we’re human beings just like everybody else. I think any act that’s done under occupation is resistance. If you simply open your shop and sell milk in your shop, it’s resistance because you are still there, as simple as that.

There are so many foods that we see throughout the Middle East and even more specifically Levantine dishes. And there are different versions of those things depending on which country you’re in, or sometimes even which part of a country you’re in. What would you say distinguishes Palestinian cuisine?

It’s the terroir — three terroirs. If I make it simple, it’s the coast; it’s the inland with the figs, olives, and almonds; and then it’s a desert. The combination of those three makes Palestinian cuisine. It’s also the geographic location where we were on the routes of trade. The reason Gaza has chiles in its food, but it’s not in the rest of Palestine, is because chiles traded from within Europe were going through Gaza’s port during the Roman period. The reason we have the dried laban jameed [Ed. salted and dried yogurt] in the south, and you don’t have it in the north of Palestine, is because we have the desert next door and preserving salt comes from the nomadic tradition. And it’s also the diversity — cities like Jerusalem or Bethlehem have diverse populations that have had a link towards the outside for a very long time, whether it’s traders, whether it was church, whether it was commerce. So all of those make our cuisine what it is.

If there were one or two recipes that you could get everyone to make, as a way into the book, what would they be?

The mafghoussa, definitely [Ed. a zero-waste dish using the cored innards of zucchini, served cold]. And the mistaka brioche. The brioche that has the resin in it, the mistaka. That’s an easy bake. It smells so good. Your kitchen’s going to smell like heaven.

Aside from, obviously, the heritage and the history, what do you most want people to take away from Bethlehem, the cookbook?

Simple, I just want them to cook. To cook and enjoy it and play around with sumac and zucchini, and play around with pine seeds and not only pine nuts. And actually find out that there’s something called pine seeds and the black little pine seeds that are fantastic. I want them just to enjoy that, to cook and have fantastic meals.

This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

Charlotte Druckman is a New York-based journalist and author.
Additional photo illustration credits: Brick wall photo by Alexandre Morin-Laprise/Getty Images; “Bethlehem” cover via Hardie Grant Books