Like other children of immigrants, Reem Assil grew up in two worlds. By day, she code-switched to an all-American girl, albeit one with ambiguous brown skin, and channeled Julie Andrews when she starred in a school production of Mary Poppins. At home the family spoke Arabic, studied the Quran, and attended Palestinian cultural events. Her awareness of America’s legacy of white supremacy and economic injustice grew as she endured high school, one of “a handful of Brown kids,” as Assil writes in her new book.
She came of age during the anti-Arab fervor of the 9/11 era, and left school to work as an organizer in San Francisco. Knocking on doors and marching in protest helped build a community that also got together to play soccer, dance, and cook. Over the years she realized that “working with food had become a source of emotional, even spiritual, comfort.”
Through La Cocina, the nonprofit food business incubator working to solve problems of equity in business ownership for women, immigrants and people of color, Assil started a farmers market stand featuring a dome-shaped griddle made for her in the mountains of Lebanon. She baked mana’eesh, the za’atar-topped flatbread sold on the streets of Beirut, and within a few years opened her dreamed-of Arab corner bakery in Oakland.
The award-winning chef’s first book, Arabiyya, tells her family’s story of struggle during the colonial transformation of the Arab world and offers a wide range of recipes that show the reader how to “host like an Arab” with an abundance of good food and, sometimes, hard talk. Part of it is having a few things ready to eat when unexpected guests arrive.
This simple snack of spicy chickpeas uses pantry staples from the Arab kitchen and keeps for a month, but only if you don’t eat them all right away.
