How I came to write this Syrian Cookbook.

Years ago I watched my Sitto (meaning grandmother in Arabic) cook and bake her wonderful Middle Eastern foods. Sitto came from Aleppo, Syria as a young girl.  Arab cooks typically learned these dishes mother to daughter and side by side through the generations.  I remembered Sitto preparing these wonders while we were busy growing up and later working.  That’s probably why I never reached out to try and learn the dishes while growing up. 

After I was newly married and halfway across the country I realized how much I missed these Middle Eastern dishes but there were no written recipes to help me make them. In fact, at the time, I couldn’t even get the spices I needed as I was far away from my Syrian-Lebanese community.  I knew I had to do something to keep these recipes and traditions alive for future generations before they were lost.  I began to write down everything in my own notebook, checking and re-checking with my grandmother until I had perfected her dishes.  My mother would send needed “care” packages of spices and grains which were unavailable in the Midwest at the time. (no internet then!) It wasn’t easy, but I’m so grateful that I had Sitto’s advice, along with my Syrian mother-in-law’s, as I was attempting these dishes for the first time.

Years later, in talking to young Arabs, they too mentioned that their grandparents weren’t always living with their generation, some were away at school, so the cooking techniques and unwritten recipes were not necessarily passed on to them. They remembered and missed those Middle Eastern meals and wished they had followed their own Sitto around in order to learn how to make these wonderful dishes. It was at about this time that I concluded the need for a cookbook of traditional Syrian recipes for these younger Arab cooks and for those anxious to try Middle Eastern foods.  I began writing these recipes from my notes with these goals in mind:  the book should be simple to follow, with lots of tips for newer cooks, it should have an adherence to tradition but with a modern, updated approach. It took a few years, because I knew that my own notes may not translate to something many people could easily read and use.  As I refined and clarified, my cookbook “Sitto’s Kitchen” was born!