Introduction

This is a book about Palestine – its food, its produce, its history, its future, its people and their voices. It is a book about the common themes that all these elements share, and how Palestine weaves narrative and cooking into the fabric of its identity. The two go hand-in-hand. Recipes are like stories: events brought to life and shared in the making and telling. They are passed from one person to the next, and in that movement, some details change, others come to the fore, while others will be left by the wayside. And stories are like recipes: a series of individual experiences blended together to create a whole. Where stories and recipes intersect is the nexus, the point, of this book. Rather than telling ‘a’ story or ‘the’ story of Palestine, then, we’re telling lots of stories. These come in the form of both our recipes and the profiles of some of the people and places we’ve met along the way.