The Perfect Bowl

For as long as I can remember, what we call the “Sitti bowl” has been the most important tool in our kitchen. It’s a 4-quart Pyrex bowl, yellow on the outside, white on the inside.

“Sitti” means grandmother in Arabic, and we call this the Sitti bowl because my mom inherited it from my great-grandmother – my Sitti – in 1970. As the story goes, my parents had recently moved into the house where I grew up on East Mifflin Street in Orwisburg, Pennsylvania. Sitti had come to their new house to teach my mom how to make Syrian bread. (You probably know it as pita, but in our house, it always has been, and always will be, Syrian bread.) At the time, my mom didn’t have a bowl large enough to knead the dough, so Sitti gave my mom the big yellow bowl that day, and that’s how the Sitti bowl came to be.