Farida Haddad

Stories

Family testimony

Demonstration record

Family recipe

Seeded bread on stone

The Haddad kitchen baked a round bread with sesame and nigella when there was time, and bought it when there was not. Miriam found a card in Farida’s handwriting with no title, only: flour, a little oil, seeds, hot stone. In Tulkarem Layla’s bread is thinner. In Yerevan the tannur makes it thinner still. KinDish keeps these as related household breads rather than as one bread with a flag on it.

Recorded by Miriam Haddad

Family testimony

Demonstration record

Family recipe

The basin we could not take

Farida stuffed zucchini the way her mother had, with rice, a little meat, and a sour tomato broth. In Aleppo the sourness was lemon. In Beirut a neighbor used tamarind, and Farida took that with her to Jerusalem. She always said the stone basin was the only thing she regretted leaving. Not the house. The basin. You cannot pound bulgur properly in a saucepan, she told me, and then she did it anyway for forty years. On the card she wrote only: kousa, rice, tamarind if there is. Enough water. Cook until the house smells like Thursday.

Recorded by Miriam Haddad

Oral history

Demonstration record

Oral history

Thursday night kubbeh

My grandmother Farida would start the kubbeh on Thursday night. In Aleppo, she said, you could hear the neighbors pounding the bulgur in stone basins before Shabbat. When the family left, the basin stayed. In Jerusalem she used a metal bowl and said the sound was wrong, but the sourness she refused to change. The broth was lemon, dried mint, celery leaves, and — if she could find it — a piece of tamarind. She called the dumplings kubbeh, never dumplings, and she would tap each one twice on the rim of the pot before it went in, a habit nobody could explain. I asked her once if this was an Aleppo dish or a Jewish dish. She looked at me as if I had asked whether bread was a city. It is what we cooked, she said. Other people cooked it too.

Recorded by Miriam Haddad

Dishes cooked

Village bread

Demonstration record

خبز

A seeded round bread baked on stone. Appears in more than one Levantine story in this archive.

Kubbeh hamusta

Demonstration record

كبة حامضة, קובה חמוסטה

Sour kubbeh soup: bulgur dumplings in a lemon-and-mint broth. In the Haddad kitchen, a little tamarind entered the pot after Aleppo.

Mahshi kousa

Demonstration record

كوسا محشي, מחשי קוסא

Zucchini stuffed with rice and meat, cooked in a sour-sweet tomato broth. In the Haddad kitchen the sourness leans on tamarind.

Knowledge, not noise

A note can stay a conversation. If it is a memory the archive does not yet hold, you can preserve it as a sourced record — only after you confirm.

• Demonstration contributor

  en

  Demonstration record

  The metal bowl in Jerusalem is in the record. The stone basin is not. If anyone still has a photograph of that basin, the archive does not.

  The original remains the source.

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