Scholarly Interview With Mr. Charles Perry
A Wildcard Exhibit
After reading Scents and Flavors: A Syrian Cookbook, by Charles Perry, I wanted to know more about the recipes mentioned in the book as well as the culture surrounding Middle Eastern cuisine. I was able to contact Mr. Charles Perry, the author of many books regarding the Arab world. Mr. Perry is an American food historian who studied Middle Eastern culture and spent several years living in Lebanon and Syria. Mr. Perry was the co-founder and current President of the Culinary Historians of Southern California. After contacting Mr. Perry, we set up a phone interview and I was able to ask him a few questions about his book and about Middle Eastern culture.
I found his knowledge to be extremely useful in my portfolio because he lived in Syria and was able to experience the culture first hand. It was very exciting getting to speak with him since he is so knowledgable on the subject of Arabic food and many of the things he said were similar to what my mom and grandma had told me in the past. Getting to speak with Mr. Perry was also helpful because he emailed me several resources, which helped me further understand the different dishes that are served in the Arab world.
Isabelle: So you mentioned that you lived in Lebanon and visited Syria, I have never been to Syria, but my grandmother was born in Damascus. She lived in Syria in the 60’s. She was born in the 40s in Damascus, so I was wondering what your experiences were like when you were visiting and the culture you experienced.
Mr. Perry: I was visiting in, let’s see, ’62 and ’63. I was going to school in Lebanon and the Lebanese situation was very tense, I was living in a Catholic neighborhood, and eventually when the civil war broke out, most of the people from my village left and the people were all very “p-ed up” about this. I knew people in Damascus who struck me as very sophisticated people. You could have a worldly conversation with them and it was a more sophisticated place in the 19th century. It was an administrative center for the Ottoman Empire. I met several Turkish people there. I went up and studied in the city of Xhama, which is in central Syria, right between Damascus and Aleppo, and nobody told me it had the most backwards dialect in Syria, so when I got back to Damascus my friends just howled, you know, I could have eaten out for a week just by speaking Xhama dialect in Damascus. You know in Damascus, the farmers when they come out of the field and they come in the door you’re supposed to leave your shoes inside and they say “bhou dishlac” which means “come in take off your shoes”, but in Damamscus that means “die and take off your clothes.”
Isabelle: So my project focuses a lot on food, because that’s my main connection to my Syrian ancestry, since my mom is Syrian and my dad is American, so my mom has been gradually teaching me a lot of recipes and how to cook. Do you have a favorite dish of Middle Eastern cuisine?
Mr. Perry: Boy, it’s hard to say, there are so many, maybe “dawoud basha”, which is a meatball dish, or there are some elaborate dishes where they slice eggplants and line the insides of a sauce pan with is, and then put in rice and meat and things like that, and then you turn it upside down when you serve it, that might be my favorite. Typically anything with lots of pinenuts.
Isabelle: So you like Kibbeh, and stuff like that?
Mr. Perry: Yeah.
Isabelle: I was reading through your book with all the recipes and one of the things that stuck out to me the most was the lack of measurements in all the recipes, it’s similar to when my mom would be teaching me to cook and I would ask her how to do things she would just say, “add some of this or put in a little bit,” and I would say, “how much?” and she would always say “you have to feel it and you have to smell it, there’s no measurement,” so I was just wondering if you had any insight into why they practice cooking this way?
Mr. Perry: Well you have to remember that written recipes are kind of a late development. There was an ancient Roman cookbook and an ancient Babylonian cookbook, but mostly it was around the year 1000 that people started writing cookbooks first in Arabic. Most people throughout history and even today have learned cooking through apprenticeship, if you lived in a wealthy house with a kitchen or even in a restaurant, and that is the most effective way. It takes a little while, you have to watch the dish being made several times, but having been a food writer for 18 years I can tell you there are some things that are very hard to express in words, particularly textures, and there are many things that if you have seen it cooked, you recognize what it’s like when it’s ready, and it’s very hard to explain that in words. So, that’s the advantage of learning by apprenticeship, it’s very effective, the limitation of it is that you only learn the dishes that your teacher knows, whereas in cookbooks you can learn dishes from all around the world and all different social strata.
Isabelle: Yeah, that was just something that stuck out to me and I found really interesting.
Mr. Perry: And you might have noticed in my comments, that there are recipes that have exact measurements, and they are generally copied out of medical text.
Isabelle: Oh, really?
Mr. Perry: Yes, because there was no distinction between food and medicine in those days, they didn’t have very specialized medicine. And, so, when people were compiling books of medical ingredients, you know, pharmacopeias, they would often include dishes, because they would have the right ingredients and the right balance of ingredients according to their medical theory. And what they would do, I’m sure, a doctor would watch somebody make one of these dishes, take down the measurements, and put them in the book because it was a prescription, it was a medical prescription, but, you know, most recipes, they are what we would call an “aide memoire,” they’re just sort of, you remember these are the ingredients that go in this. And you likely had this dish before so you’ll be able to add ingredients to your taste, but cookbooks these days, I noticed it when I was working at the Los Angeles Times, every year, we felt we had to explain more things to the reader, because people don’t grow up with a lot of knowledge about cooking these days. It used to be that every girl learned how to cook because she was going to have to be a housewife, and they didn’t start having cook books explaining how to cook everything until the late nineteenth century because that was when you had a lot of young women who were going out into the work place and they never learned how to cook, and so when they got married, they would have to buy a book to tell them how to cook cornbread.
Isabelle: That’s very interesting, thank you. That was kind of a segue into one of my other questions, which was about the importance, especially in Arab culture, of mothers passing down the knowledge of how to cook to their daughters, and how that contributes to the culture surrounding food. I’ve always felt, having half Syrian and half American family, that food had a stronger emphasis in the Middle Eastern side of my family.
Mr. Perry: Oh definitely, definitely. It’s the center of social life.
Isabelle: Exactly, that’s what I was thinking, and I was just wanting to learn more about why it’s such a center-focus in the culture and why there are events planned around food?
Mr. Perry: And girls had to know how to cook in my village, a girl who couldn’t make deep fried kibbeh right, and you know it’s really tricky to get that crust just the right thickness, if she couldn’t get kibbeh right she was crying herself to sleep every night because she’d never get a husband. All the ladies in the village knew who couldn’t make proper kibbeh, and no son of their’s were gonna marry a girl like that.
Isabelle: That’s kind of how my grandmother explained it to me.
Mr. Perry: As a result, I knew a Syrian guy who was living here in California, and his parents decided he should marry a Syrian girl. So, they sent him a girl who was twenty-one, she was too old to get a husband, so she was willing to go off to America and marry a guy she had never met. And it worked out fine, they were very suitable to each other. But, one time, I was visiting and she was rolling out stuffed grape leaves, and I noticed that she started rolling out a grape leave, and then she unrolled it and took out three grains of rice. They were as regular as cigarettes, I mean they could have been made by a machine, she had practiced and was good.
Isabelle: My grandma would always tell me, when she was trying to teach me how to cook when I was younger, “if you don’t know how to cook and you can’t be a good cook, you’re never going to find a husband,” and my mom would say, “don’t tell her that.” She was much more modern viewed about it than my grandmother was. But now, I think my mom kind of sees teaching me to cook as a way to pass down her family and her ethnicity to me, kind of like, keeping my family alive. My grandma recently passed away and I think she wanted to keep that tradition going, since my grandmother taught my mother how to cook, and she always says that its the best gift that she ever gave her, so she wants to pass it down. I’ve been trying to figure out if this practice of teaching daughters how to cook is more of a skill that everyone feels they need to have to find a husband, or if it’s more of a way of keeping ancestry and family alive by passing this down from generation to generation.
Mr. Perry: Yeah, and also the food tastes so good. Oh, I love that food.
Isabelle: It is really good. I was talking to my mom and she said, “you need to ask him, which Arabs make the best food?”
Mr. Perry: Oh my God, I’m not going to get in the middle of that. I will say, though, that Damascus does the best version of the Turkish dishes. The best baklava in the Arab world is in Damascus, because they had so many Turkish people who had such clear-cut taste, since they’re always going back and forth to Istanbul.
Isabelle: Last question that I have written down is, I think you mentioned about Arabs being the first, if not some of the first, humans to ever write down recipes.
Mr. Perry: Well, people would occasionally write down recipes in a systematic way. And, you know, the Chinese, they’re obsessed with food, and there are recipes here and there. And they don’t necessarily write down how to make the dish, it’s just a list of ingredients. What happened in the Middle East, like I said in my book, was that they picked up this practice from the Persian Court, the gentlemen of the Persian Court who made their own recipe collections, and then some guy came up with the idea, he had a patient who told him, “I want the recipes of the famous guys.” So, he collected a whole bunch of recipes and created what now know as a cookbook, as many recipes as you can get to get a comprehensive picture of cuisine. And, it’s kind of like how the Europeans invented the modern dictionary. Previously, people had made their own glossaries on particular topics, or the Babylonians made glossaries where they could say, “okay, this is the Sumerian word that means that.” But, European scholars took a list of every word in the language, so they came up with the idea of a dictionary organized in alphabetical order, including every word in the language. It’s a ,sort of, universalizing way of approaching things.
Isabelle: It was just very cool to me that there were all these recipes from such a long time ago, I just thought that was really interesting. So, that’s all the questions I have written down.
Mr. Perry: I’ll tell you what I’m gonna do, I’m gonna email you a list of Damascus dishes that my friend had his mother send to him because he wanted to remember all the dishes she cooked for him. I’ll send this to you, you may recognize a lot of them, but there are probably a lot that you don’t recognize. I think it would be interesting to you.
Isabelle: I would love that thank you so much.
Mr. Perry: Alright, I’ll send it to you right now.
Isabelle: Alright thank you, and thank you so much for talking to me.
Mr. Perry: It’s my pleasure.
