Eating Like an Ausey

This is the last piece I have written that I will post on here, so everything after this post will be new stuff. Which means it may be awhile, but I'll try. Contrary to popular belief, I don't just sit at my computer all day writing essays and poems and such. Each on of these pieces I've posted are evidence of weeks of stress and sweat and pain and irritation and moments of nearly tossing my computer out the window. Writing is hard work. It never just comes, and when it does, it is usually among the first thing to be thrown out on first revision.

I wrote "Eating Like an Ausey" for my creative writing class last winter semester. I don't know that it's my finest writing, but it was one of those "inspired" pieces that I wrote the night before it was due.

"Eating Like an Ausey"

I’ve been taught from the time I was in nursery that family history work is among the most important ingredients in building God’s kingdom. I didn’t think too much about it, for I figured quite a bit of my work had already been done by my relatives, and I’ve always felt I was doing my part to live up to my family’s heritage. It wasn’t until I took one look my mom’s pedigree chart that I realized how little I know about a unique line on her mom’s side of the family.

To look at me, one would think all my family comes from Europe. Perhaps it is my pale skin, freckles, red hair, and blue eyes. A large portion of my family, however, traces back to Lebanon only three generations before me: the Ausey’s. They were one of the few Christian Lebanese in their day, which created much turmoil for them, yet they refused to deny their strong belief in Christ. My great-great-great-grandfather hid the family Bible under the floorboards in the porch to save it from the Lebanese soldiers who were burning all the Bibles in Lebanon. My great-great-grandfather sought religious freedom and wanted to come to the United States so badly that he stowed away on a ship bound for America. He only got as far as Turkey before he was found and kicked off the ship. There he worked until he gained passage to America. In North Dakota, by now in his twenties, he bought land and earned money, then sent for his betrothed. She came to America at the age of thirteen without knowing a word of English to marry a man she hardly knew and didn’t like. She had three children, one of whom was Sophie, who married and had five children. One of the five was Yvonne, who married and had Annette, my mother. Through this line the Lebanese recipes have been passed, some of which, particularly the fataya and cabbage rolls, haven’t been written down in years.

A frequent reminder of my Lebanese ancestry comes when my mother cooks one or more of the several Lebanese dishes that have been passed down through my family for generations. These meals have become such a regular part of my life that I sometimes forget the significance they hold.

Kibbi is a main Lebanese dish that slightly resembles meatloaf. It is usually made with lamb, though through the ages, our family recipe has adapted to the American culture and now calls for beef. Mom also swears the meat was eaten raw, but while my family gets meat from the local grocery store and not from a cow they raised themselves, we stick with cooking the meat before we serve it. Although I don’t like walnuts, kibbi is the one food I can eat without picking the walnuts out one by one. Mom has always made sure the kibbi is full of walnuts, probably to keep us from bothering to waste so much time separating the meat from the nuts. The walnuts hardly bear any flavor, however, because the cinnamon mixed with the meat has such a strong flavor. Strange, I know—beef and cinnamon. But kibbi is not kibbi without cinnamon.

For some strange reason, Mom has always cut the kibbi diagonally so that the pieces of meat are not square like a piece of cake, but rather take the shape of a diamond.

“Why do you have to cut it like that?” I asked not even a year ago.

“I don’t know,” Mom replied. “That’s just how we’ve always done it.”

And perhaps that is the answer to how we cook most of our favorite Lebanese dishes.

Steaming ground beef mixed with onions and garlic, hidden inside a triangular pillow of fluffy, golden bread—this is fataya. The juices of the meat create a kind of gravy and soak into the bread so that even after the meat is eaten, the bread still tastes of beef, garlic, and onions. The bread is so soft that I rub it against my lips before taking a bite; it is like a baby’s cheek—round, smooth, unscathed by hungry jaws. Although each fataya is slightly larger than my palm, I cannot make myself eat just one. Each time we make fataya I eat three or four, and even then my mouth is never satisfied. Dad squirts ketchup on each bite, but I eat it plain, for I have heard that the Lebanese prefer the taste of the herbs, seasonings, and fresh ingredients to the sauces and dips of many other cultures’ foods.

Several meals my mom has cooked over the years have included Lebanese food without me even realizing it. I would have never thought, for instance, that cabbage rolls would be Lebanese. Dad’s mom always made cabbage rolls she called halukis, but I always knew them to be Yugoslavian. They were big, about the size of a sub sandwich roll, and packed with bitter herbs that always made me gag in my youth. I would eat them every Christmas just because everyone talked about how good they were, but I never liked them. Mom’s cabbage rolls were different, however. Lebanese cabbage rolls are small—the size of a finger—and, like many of the Lebanese dishes my mom makes, contain a hint of cinnamon.

“They’re supposed to be made with grape leaves,” Mom tells me every time she makes cabbage rolls. “That’s how my grandma used to make them.” Mom wraps the meat and bulgur wheat in cabbage and squishes them in a pot as I watch, taking mental notes so that one day I can make cabbage rolls just like her.

Of all the Lebanese dishes Mom makes, the most common is lubia and rice. As a little girl, I hated the chunks of tomatoes in the lubia, and I hated green beans, yet I always said I loved lubia because it was Lebanese food. Whenever Mom made lubia and rice, I’d pick out the chunks of hamburger to eat, and then sprinkle cinnamon and sugar on my rice, a tradition that stemmed from my Russian ancestors. Years later I acquired a taste for the lubia, and I stopped dousing my rice in cinnamon and sugar, but even still I did not eat the meal the way it was meant to be eaten. My lubia always went beside my rice, never on top the way the rest of my family would eat it. Although I would put both dishes on my fork at once to eat them together, I never put my lubia on top of the rice.

“Why do you eat it that way?” Mom would ask every time we had lubia and rice and for dinner.

“I don’t know,” I reply. “That’s just the way I’ve always done it.”

I have learned that in Arabic bread is called “esh,” which means “life.” All Lebanese meals include bread, which is quite often flat bread, like a pita pocket. Unless fataya is part of the meal, we eat our Lebanese food with pocket bread, which, although it doesn’t have much flavor, it is one of my favorite types of bread. It sometimes serves as a kind of utensil for lubia and rice or kibbi. But more often than using it as a means to eat some of our favorite Lebanese dishes, we spread peanut butter between the folds of the bread. Mom refuses to participate in such a ritual, swearing that “Grandma is rolling in her grave right now.” The tradition of peanut butter in the pocket bread during a Lebanese meal started with my grandfather, but it has somehow seeped into our family and taken root so strongly that although peanut butter is not part of Lebanese cuisine, it has become part of our Lebanese heritage.

After the dishes are done and the burners on the stove have been rubbed clean by a scouring pad, the Lebanese food is no more than another meal that Mom makes occasionally. I don’t think of those Lebanese ancestors to whom I owe my life. So what is the point of these family recipes being passed down from generation to generation? What sets the cabbage rolls apart from halukis? What makes kibbi so different from meatloaf? I never understood, nor did I care to ever find out.

Only once I started researching Lebanese recipes on the Internet and showering Mom with questions about my Lebanese ancestry did I realize that the dishes Mom makes are unique to my family. Not one kibbi recipe mirrored my mom’s. I never even found a recipe for cabbage rolls, and the fataya recipes I found don’t compare to my family’s recipe. But these recipes were passed down to Mom from Grammy, who got them from Grandma Sophie, who got them from her mother. The legacy of unique Lebanese food continues in my family even now.

Without realizing it, every time I eat Lebanese food, I am eating religious freedom. I am burying my Bible in my porch. I am stowing away on a ship. I am marrying a man I do not know or love. But I am doing it for posterity.