Zakho Part 2: What's Cooking, Kurdistan?

 The black berries came from a tree in my hostess' garden. Their dark juice stained my fingers and lips. The cherries were from the market.

The first morning in Zakho I told her my hostess, Dahlia,* that I wanted to learn to cook Kurdish food. Eyebrows raised, she said she would "allow me to watch her cook" kubbeh. I was supposed to play the role of guest, not helper. As I helped her put away the breakfast things, I wondered what I would do in the interim between breakfast and lunch. It was only 10am, yet Dahlia began gathering items to prepare lunch. Perhaps they eat lunch earlier than the characteristic 2pm lunch, I thought. Nope. Preparing kubbeh for a household required about 4 hours. And so it began.

 Dahlia poured a sack of cracked wheat into a bowl, added water, and began kneading it with her large hands. "This wheat is no good," she said scowling. "It's imported from Turkey like the other wheat I buy, but this brand is just not sticky like it should be." When I commented that everything in Kurdistan seems imported from Turkey, she nodded in agreement, saying, "But you know we couldn't buy this wheat during the 1990s (during the economic sanctions after the First Gulf War). We used to bring wheat from the village, mill it, and sort it ourselves. Then we would beat it until it was fine and soak and knead it. Women used to come help us with it, and some of them still come to our house every week, although it's been years since we made our own."

 I stuck my hands in the putty-like wheat and tentatively kneaded it. Meanwhile, Dahlia had rescued her sister-in-law who was tearing up and sniffling over her onion peeling. Plopping the dozen small onions into a food processor, Dahlia flipped the switch on and lifted her hands as if in prayer. Turning to me, she said wryly, "I thank God for whoever made this machine!"

 "Hey, cheechay," Dahlia said to me."Little bird." She had coined this nickname for me after I had trailed behind her in a crowded market space. Several times she grabbed my elbow to pull me closer to her, saying, "You are like a little bird who will get lost in this market." Handing me a plastic bowl, she ordered me to "Go outside and pick some mint." The sun was hot in my hair as I bent over the fragrant mint. I picked it absent-mindedly. Upon my return, Dahlia laughed, saying, "I see you threw in some grass and weeds in there, like the cheating farmers," she laughed. We washed the mint.

 Meanwhile, Dahlia had thawed a large cut of beef in a saucepan and was fraying the cooking meat off the bones. She took a second saucepan and combined flour, water, and the chopped mint, which would be the filling for some of the kubbeh.  To the meat saucepan she added the onions, some black pepper, and chopped basil leaves. This would be the second filling. When both filling mixtures were cool, she scraped them onto two large silver platters.

 Then Dahlia instructed me to "make nice little balls" with the dough. Inspecting a few, she shook her head, saying, "These are like stones. Make nice balls." A steady stream of relatives and neighbors passed through the kitchen, whose door always remains open. Some of the male visitors merely glanced in the kitchen, then proceeded into the guest parlor through a separate entrance. Some relatives or visitors nodded approvingly at seeing me help, while others seemed to see nothing out of the ordinary. Dahlia's brother passed through the kitchen and chuckled. "Do you have kubbeh in America?" he asked.

 After I made dozens of little dough balls, Dahlia showed me how to form the ball into a bird's nest. I was reminded of my childhood making bird's nests with Play-Dough in my Nana's gazebo back home. Then Dahlia and I packed the nest with either the meat or the flour filling and sealed the packet. The discs were arranged on the silver platters. It took us about two hours to make all the kubbeh pieces.

 Next, Dahlia emptied a carton of fresh yogurt into a sauce pan and instructed me to stir it with a whisk. After the yogurt began boiling and smelling quite sour, she added dried mint leaves. In a second saucepan she strained sour seeds called "sumaq" in boiling water. To the boiling red water she added only meat-filled kubbeh. To the yogurt sauce she added both meat and flour-filled kubbeh. Then the kubbeh boiled for maybe half an hour.

The finished kubbeh, served into shallow bowls and eaten like dumplings. "I always wonder who will eat all this food," Dahlia confessed as we rested in a semi-dark room upstairs while the kubbeh boiled downstairs. "But then people show up and it's all gone," she said chuckling. Sure enough, a pack of hungry nephews and their friends, relatives, and even a poor woman wheel-chair bound and accompanied by her son all showed up at Dahlia's table. Some of the kubbeh pieces (mine) were a little malformed, but Dahlia proudly pointed out that I had helped her make it. "Tomorrow we will make dolma," she said to me, smiling.