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Day of Honey: a memoir of food, love, and war
coming February 15, 2011
A luminous portrait of life in the war-torn Middle East, Day of Honey combines the intellect of Slouching Towards Bethlehem with the pleasures of Eat, Pray, Love.
In the fall of 2003, Annia Ciezadlo spent her honeymoon in Baghdad. Day of Honey is her memoir of love, war, and the hunger for food and friendship—a communion to feed the soul as well as the body—in times of war.
Living in occupied Baghdad, Ciezadlo longs for normal married life. She finds it in Beirut, her husband’s hometown, a city slowly recovering from years of civil war. But as the young couple settles into their new home, discovering the pleasures of food and family, the bloodshed in Iraq extends to Lebanon and reawakens the terrible specter of sectarian violence.
Not since George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia has there been such a fearless, intimate portrait of civilian life during wartime. In lucid, fiercely intelligent prose, Ciezadlo describes the years she spent breaking bread with Shiites and Sunnis, warlords and refugees, matriarchs and mullahs. From secret Baghdad book clubs to home cooking with her Lebanese mother-in-law, she takes us into the heart of the modern Middle East at a historic moment when hope and fear collide.
Ciezadlo illuminates the human cost of war with a rare ability to anchor the rhythms of daily life within larger political and historical context. Day of Honey is a brave and compassionate portrait of the extraordinary people who became part of her life in Baghdad and Beirut—a moving testament to the power of love and generosity to transcend the misery of war.
Annia Ciezadlo was a special correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor in Baghdad and The New Republic in Beirut. She has written about culture, politics, and the Middle East for The Nation, Saveur, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The New York Observer, and Lebanon’s Daily Star. Her article about cooking with Iraqi refugees in Beirut was included in Best Food Writing 2009. She lives with her husband in New York.
FROM THE INTRODUCTION:
Some people construct work spaces when they travel, lining up their papers with care, stacking their books on the table, taping family pictures to the mirror. When I’m in a strange new city and feeling rootless, I cook. No matter how inhospitable the room, no matter what chaos is raging outside it, I construct a little field kitchen. In Baghdad, it was a hot plate plugged into a dubious electrical socket in the hallway outside the bathroom. I haunt the local markets and cook whatever I find: fresh green almonds, fleshy black figs, fresh-killed chickens with their heads still on. I cook to comprehend the place I’ve landed in, to touch and feel and take in the raw materials of my new surroundings. I cook because eating has always been how I understand the world. I cook foods that seem familiar and foods that seem strange. I cook because I am always, always hungry. And I cook for that oldest of reasons: to banish loneliness, homesickness, the persistent feeling that I don’t belong in this place. If you can conjure something of substance from the flux of your life—if you can anchor yourself in the earth around you, like Antaeus—you are, at least for that meal, at home in the world.
AN EXCERPT FROM DAY OF HONEY:
A terracotta bowl of chicken livers taxied down onto the table, bathed in lemon juice and garlic. They started ordering meze in combinations I’d never imagined, Jabberwocky food, mythical portmanteau creatures from a parallel world: slices of sausage, thick like pepperoni but spicy like chorizo, stewed in sweet pomegranate syrup. Little saucers of hummus with tender spoonfuls of sautéed lamb and pine nuts nestled in their belly buttons. Tiny glasses of crystal-clear arak that clouded into milky iridescence when you added ice. A pickled baby eggplant stuffed with chopped walnuts and hot red peppers and slicked with olive oil.
What is this? I asked.
“This is makdous,” said Hanan. “It is good to eat it with wine or arak.”
Who thinks of such things? What god leant down and whispered in what mortal ear to put walnuts inside an eggplant? And then to eat it with wine? I wanted to cry. I ate all four makdouses and ordered four more. The aquamarine smell of anise fogged upward from the arak.
“Should we order kibbe nayyé?” someone asked.
Sudden quiet. Everyone looked at each other. Some shook their heads sorrowfully—don’t say we didn’t warn you—but others nodded and elbowed each other with shining, conspiratorial eyes.
It appeared: raw lamb ground with spices and cracked wheat and patted into a mound the size of a large man’s hand. Scored with a fork and topped with roasted pine nuts, hedged with raw onion slices and sprigs of mint. Hanan anointed it, pouring the green olive oil over the small mountain until it pooled on the plate. Then hands descended from all directions, one of them mine, ripping off rags of bread and tearing into the raw meat like lions. The kibbe slid into my mouth, smooth and almost buttery, until the kick of the spices unfolded. Watching the others, I took a bite of mint, and one of raw onion, and the two sharp blades of flavor flayed open the bloody taste of raw lamb.
Drunker now. Hanan leaned over the table toward me. She was shouting something and smiling; I couldn’t hear. She said it again: “How do you like Beirut?”
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