The Gaza Kitchen
Please note that while The Gaza Kitchen 2nd Ed. is currently out of print, it continues to be available in Ebook format. For more information on the upcoming release of the 3rd edition visit: The Gaza Kitchen, Third Edition.
This award-winning cookbook by Laila El-Haddad and Maggie Schmitt shares with readers the little-known but distinctive cuisine of the Gaza region of Palestine, presenting 130 recipes collected by the authors from Gaza. Avid cooks will find in The Gaza Kitchen great, kitchen-tested recipes for Gaza’s many spicy stews, piquant dips, fragrantly flavored fish dishes, and honey-drenched desserts. But they will also be entranced by the hundreds of beautiful photos of Gazan cooks, farmers, and fresh-produce merchants at work, and by the numerous in-kitchen interviews in which these women and men tell the stories of their food, their heritage, and their families.
The recipes and stories are magically woven together, inspiring to read, to cook, and to eat. Telling us about the food of Gaza is key to understanding the people’s way of life, and this is what Laila and Maggie do so fantastically well.Yotam Ottolenghi
Anthony Bourdain, Claudia Roden, and Yotam Ottolenghi are among the many culinary figures who have embraced The Gaza Kitchen. The second edition features tantalizing new stories and recipes, a fresh new design in a beautiful hardbound volume, new photos, and an updated index. It contains the original, evocative foreword from Nancy Harmon Jenkins.
When Laila and Maggie launched this project in 2009, they wrote:
Why do we want to talk about food and cooking?
Because food is the essence of the everyday. Beyond all the discourses, the positions and the polemics, there is the kitchen. And even in Gaza, that most tortured little strip of land, hundreds of thousands of women every day find ways to sustain their families and friends in body and spirit. They make the kitchen a stronghold against despair, and there craft necessity into pleasure and dignity.
Gaza has a rich food tradition and a unique cuisine combining Levantine and Egyptian elements. The history of its population can be traced through its recipes, which reflect the influence of exile from all over Palestine as well as a changing society and customs. A cookbook which brings together these recipes serves as testimony to this heritage and history.
What is more, today’s kitchens can tell us much about the difficult and paradoxical realities of Gaza after three years of unrelenting siege: which products are available and where they are coming from (tunnels, local agriculture, humanitarian relief), how cooks manage with extreme shortages of gas and electricity, how families reorganize to compensate for destroyed homes and near-universal joblessness. To spend a day with a Gazan woman doing the shopping and cooking is to understand the Palestinian reality from an entirely different – more material, more intimate – perspective. It is to appreciate the strength and endurance which allows these women every day to confront a hopeless situation and to create within it small spaces of grace, beauty and generosity.
Just World Books is honored to have been able to work with Maggie and Laila in the preparation of this unique contribution to the study of the world’s food heritage.
Laila El-Haddad and Maggie Schmitt truly are story-tellers sharing the stories of the women, men, and children of Gaza in a way that illuminates their humanity, their dignity, their strength.
José Andrés, chef and founder of World Central Kitchen
This book becomes more essential with every passing day. Not just such a superb cookbook, a collection of vital recipes from a delicious yet often overlooked cuisine, but an argument for understanding. A classic of world food.Anthony Bourdain
The recipes and stories are magically woven together, inspiring to read, to cook, and to eat. Telling us about the food of Gaza is key to understanding the people’s way of life, and this is what Laila and Maggie do so fantastically well.Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi, Co-Authors of Jerusalem: A Cookbook
The best cookbooks inspire you to be a better chef. This one can make you a better person. Laila El-Haddad and Maggie Schmitt guide readers through the rich, subtle and complex flavors, history and politics of the Jews, Christians, and Muslims of the Levant… This is gastronomic writing at its finest.Raj Patel, Author of Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System
The Gaza Kitchen cookbook is a vital attempt to safeguard a rich culinary heritage that has existed in the Middle East for thousands of years. In documenting Palestinian recipes and food culture, despite the ravages of war, Laila El-Haddad and Maggie Schmitt have significantly succeeded in sharing their culinary travels while bringing dignity and pride to those who continue cooking traditional meals at home in Palestine. This book is an asset to those living in Gaza and to the rest of the world who would like to participate in protecting this rich cuisine.Barbara Massaad, Lebanese Author and Photographer of the Award-Winning Cookbooks Man'oushé, Mouneh, Mezze and Soup for Syria
These recipes are distinctively Palestinian and many also uniquely of Gaza–with more pronounced flavors, more herby, spicy, peppery, lemony, than those of their regional neighbors. We also get from this very special book a rare insight into the intimate everyday lives of engaging people…Claudia Roden, Author
The Gaza Kitchen 2nd Ed. is available in Ebook format
($27.95)
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