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Jordan P. Hickey | Longreads | February 22, 2024 | 3,939 words (14 minutes)
In spite of our political circumstances and global dispersion, what ties all Palestinian tables together is more than just good food; it is the notion of “home,” the spirit of generosity, the importance of family, and the value of bringing people together.
Reem Kassis, The Palestinian Table
In a large skillet, heat one tablespoon of olive oil over medium-high heat. Add the diced onion and salt and sauté for two to three minutes. Next, add garlic. Cook for two minutes. Add cumin, smoked paprika, chili flakes, cayenne pepper, and tomato paste, and sauté for two more minutes. Add the remaining tablespoon of olive oil. That’s the start.
These are the steps, the motions, that send flickering lights down a long hallway of memories—the many hands that have made this family dish, the many kitchens where Amanda Arafat has seen shakshuka prepared. The bloom of spices sends the lighter parts of her consciousness to these tender moments of the past, connecting generations in the way that only this combination can.
But it’s different this time.
This time, it’s a class. A brightly lit storefront with floor-to-ceiling windows facing a darkened street. Students in matching aprons. Ingredients pre-measured and sorted on trays. Stapled recipe printouts. Flat-screen televisions mounted on both sides of the long rectangle of a store-slash-teaching kitchen. As Amanda prods the spice mixture through the sizzling oil, a camera pointed at the stovetop broadcasts the image onto the screens, and the students at that night’s Middle Eastern breakfast class all watch, take mental notes, and wait for their chance to do the same.
Amanda effortlessly dices red bell pepper and tomato and adds them to the pan. Cranking up the gas burner, she stirs vigorously. The red mound deepens in color and releases its moisture. This posh setting in Northwest Arkansas feels worlds away from Gaza, from Cairo, from Tennessee, from Utah—places where she has connected with food and family. But these familiar steps and motions stir memories within her. Like how she and her siblings were often roused from their dreams on weekend mornings by the sound of garlic being pummeled in a mortar and pestle, or the whine of chickpeas passing through a meat grinder to become falafel. Or how nestling eggs in the sauce conjures her grandfather chastising his grandchildren “gently enough” for breaking etiquette and eating from the middle of the pan, rather than the sides. Gradually, these other kitchens take shape; the intimacy and warmth of past meals settles over the moment. In tonight’s class, however, there’s no talk about the present, and of all the people Amanda loves who populate her stories.
This is a story about what food can and can’t do; what it says and leaves unsaid. It’s also a story about the people who make it—who pour themselves into whatever dish, platter, tureen, or well-loved copper pot on the table before them. If you were to describe Amanda Arafat, it could be a simple sketch to start: she is a 29-year-old cottage baker, chef, educator, and community organizer living in Northwest Arkansas, whose one-woman business, Amanda Makes, has increasingly come to focus on Palestinian baked goods. Oftentimes, these are traditional items—flaky baklava, spongy basbousa, elongated ovals of ka’ak al-Quds—though she also experiments, transforming baklava into pistachio-topped cookies and marshmallows. She is also the co-founder of The Big Gay Market, started in June 2021 in response to anti-transgender legislation in Arkansas. Amanda is one of six children, three girls and three boys, born to a Palestinian father and a white American mother. Her father’s family has run a bakery in Palestine for over a century: Helwyat Arafat, which translates to Arafat Sweets.
Naturally, there are more details, many of them food-related, like how two-thirds of her six cats have food-inspired names—Miso, Tofu, Dumpling, Kewpie—and that an apricot tattoo just below her right elbow, next to a kitchen knife, is a memorial for another. Or that she knew, early on, that as a woman she’d never be able to work in her family’s bakery. Or that it took a long time before she felt comfortable embracing the baked goods from her home country—and by extension, her identity as a Palestinian. Together, these details come together to form the semblance of a portrait, one that feels like a stubbornly incomplete recipe.
By their nature, farmers’ markets are good places for stories. Who better to tell the story of a slightly lopsided head of lettuce, a jar of pickled jalapeños, or the light char on a sourdough loaf than the person who created it? At the Bentonville Farmers Market, on any given Saturday from April through October, there are 100-odd such vendors selling granola, biscuits, jams, jellies, gourmet dog treats, denim harnesses, Slavic heritage sourdough, apples, rag quilts, hand-dipped candles, and handmade fusilli. But none of them have stories quite like Amanda.
One morning last fall, a young white couple approached Amanda’s table, which was covered with a purple tablecloth rippling in the wind. Amanda, dressed in a large puffer jacket, welcomed them.
“So, how did you come to this?” they asked, gesturing to the za’atar focaccia, the baklava marshmallows, and the basbousa cake topped with simple syrup and almonds.
The wind threatened to scatter the white clamshell to-go containers on the table. Amanda told them her story as well as anyone else who asked.
“Just consuming it as part of my daily life,” Amanda replied. “My family actually owns a bakery in Palestine.”
In most tellings, the high points of the narrative were mostly unchanged. How she’d been born in Gaza City and lived there until she was 3; spent some of her childhood in Utah, where her mother is from; and then moved to Egypt just before she turned 9, where she then lived until she was 20. How everything she made was either directly lifted from the Palestinian culinary tradition or adapted with her own spin. If you were listening close enough, you’d realize what she told people wasn’t always the same. Children got a slightly abridged story about the bakery that her dad’s family had operated in the Palestinian city of Nablus since her great-grandfather, Ahmed, opened it in 1912. A woman, recently relocated to Northwest Arkansas from Massachusetts but whose family has roots in Syria, heard a more in-depth account; the women exchanged notes on their grandmothers’ marathon cooking sessions and the finer points of kibbeh. Another white couple, who asked what Amanda would recommend for an “an adventurous mother-in-law,” just heard the basics.
This is a story about what food can and can’t do; what it says and leaves unsaid.
But regardless of the version, she didn’t talk about what had been happening in Palestine. Maybe market-goers hadn’t been watching the news and it didn’t come up in conversation, or they sensed that the market wasn’t the best setting to talk global geopolitics.
Consequently, there was some information that she didn’t volunteer.
She didn’t tell her customers that, the day before, when she was cutting parsley for an herb and cheese focaccia, she had to pause to stop tears from falling into the parsley. How the half-cut stems and greens transported her to a kitchen in Gaza City’s al-Rimal neighborhood, nearly 10 years before, when her grandmother showed her how to make rice and parsley soup.
She didn’t say she wasn’t sure if that kitchen still existed, because for the past week, since October 7, everything had been rendered uncertain. That multi-story building, the family’s longtime apartment complex, had been targeted for airstrikes by Israeli forces twice within a few days. Much of her extended family, along with her younger brother, Ahmed, and his wife and two young children, had all fled that building.
As she spoke to people who stopped by her booth, sharing some things but not everything, a little boy dressed as Spider-Man approached. Leaning over the spread, he asked Amanda a series of questions: Why did she make the basbousa? Why did she use yogurt in it? Why did her dad use yogurt? Why did he bake? Why did she?
“You’ve given me a lot to think about,” she told him.
There were more to her words than what she said.
When Amanda was 8, she noticed that her friends’ families had a different approach to food. Other kids, she came to learn, did not wake up on Saturday mornings to the aroma of spent oil slowly perfuming the house. Their families did not favor the grocery store over the cinema; they did not structure family vacations around visits to local markets. And none of her friends’ fathers or uncles had lost bits of fingers to industrial mixers at the family bakery. It was like everyone in her family had food as a hobby—but they didn’t call it that. It was simply a part of who they were.
Amanda came to understand a greater significance to the meals than what appeared on her plate. They existed because she existed, and because her family existed. In every peaceful morning disrupted by the meat grinder and every lost bit of finger, there was dedication to tradition. A commitment, a precision she’s carried on as an adult—like coaxing recipe details from her dad’s memory, often via drawn-out text exchanges about how much salt, exactly, is in a “spoon.” That tradition is why she’s able to stand before a group of students and explain that there’s more on the plate than what meets the eye.
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It took longer for her to understand what it means to be Palestinian. Those lessons, too, had gone unspoken. There were no books on Palestine in Amanda’s house. Her parents never sat her down and told her, “In 1948, more than 700,000 Palestinians were violently forced off their land. This was called the Nakba, and this is what it meant to our family, and this is what it means now.” They never said, “We tried to move to Gaza, but the violence on the border has taken a turn for the worse, so we’re going to live in Cairo now.” Instead, these moments often arrived with brutal, concussive force, like when she was 9, not long after the family had moved to Egypt. Her family was at a friend’s home for a meal, and her dad had gone to the neighborhood mosque for the midday prayer. When he came back, he seemed shaken. His brother, he told the family, had been killed. While coming home from Friday prayer, his bus had been struck by an Israeli missile.
There were times growing up, she says, when she made a point of not sharing much about her Palestinian roots. She says of her family, “We’ve definitely all had experiences where we almost wish someone didn’t find out we were Palestinian. Like we almost wish they never knew.” She was never a “self-loathing Arab,” but she was careful when and with whom she shared her heritage, fearing that it might be “the wrong can of worms for a person” and would make them think about her differently. Because being Palestinian was about so much more than the stories dominating their feeds.
As her students try their hand at shakshuka, Amanda smiles and moves from station to station, complimenting and making gentle corrections, though she was unsure about teaching a class to two dozen students. Although she’d planned the Middle Eastern breakfast menu months in advance, she couldn’t have imagined that it’d be under the pall of the past 10 days. She wondered if she’d be able to force the words out, or whether they’d come too fast and unfiltered—a frustrated outburst landing heavy on the ears of students who came to learn how to make dishes that were likely foreign to them.
But as class goes on, she finds her flow; she’s grateful to be in this space. Unlike other times, like in her Asian seafood fusion class where she makes sure to add the right amount of this or that, here it feels natural. Like she’s back in her family’s kitchen in Gaza, cooking with her grandmother.
Perhaps by being here, by teaching her students how to nestle eggs into the tomato mixture, she’ll inspire them to look beyond the pan to the broader significance of garlic and spices sizzling on the flame. Perhaps they’ll realize she is from that distant place appearing in the news and they’ll remember that this food is Palestinian, not Israeli, and that someday they will be receptive to other stories that may not be as easy to hear as the endearing ones from her childhood.
But tonight, she doesn’t tell those stories.
A few weeks later, Amanda posts a video to Instagram of two children in a refugee camp, making shakshuka over an open flame as they kneel in the dirt.
“[A] few weeks ago,” she writes in the post, “i taught shakshuka to a well-lit, air conditioned room of well-groomed people who got to go home and enjoy their leftovers, folks who will never face this kind of reality in their whole lives. and here’s a boy in a refugee camp on the very same land i was born in making that same dish over a cinder block stove in open air. i can’t not think of the dichotomy. i can’t not stare at it. i hope you can also face it if you’ve taken any of my classes.”
Because Amanda’s family is a food family, you must imagine them around a table. If everyone in her extended family sat down for dinner, the table would circle around corners and slink down stairs. But there is no table, though in this digital age, her family’s text thread is a decent proxy. Through this channel, they communicate with one another, and it’s common for them to share pictures of elaborate dishes and full spreads spanning a dining table, lit and photographed from multiple angles. Messages come in a rush of many voices, languages mixed seamlessly, Arabic spelled out phonetically.
But all that changed last October. Of the 47 people on the text thread, scattered from Japan to Belgium to Arkansas, almost a quarter of the family remains in Gaza at the time of this writing. In this channel, family members write when they can, if they can, when the connection holds long enough to send a brief missive: this is how we are, this is how we are doing. In this digital vestibule, the rest of the family waits with bated breath, because they know that if there’s news—any update at all—they’ll hear it here first. It is a space they hoped would never be a place for last words, but the words are chosen as if they could be. They write that they never meant any harm they may have caused; they tell their family that they love them.
And while these aren’t the most complex dishes to grace the text thread, they are the most remarkable, the most joyful, because they are the most improbable.
There is still food, but these days, its presence is less about abundance and more about survival. There is a stark difference between who sends photos and who does not. Family members outside Gaza, presumably eating well and able to walk to the grocery store whenever the notion enters their mind, aren’t sharing photos. The food posted to the text thread isn’t elaborate, dressed up, or spread across a table. It’s food cooked in an improvised oven made of mud, decorated with seashells. Bread made from 50-kilo bags of flour discovered at the family bakery. Fried fish. Pizza. And while these aren’t the most complex dishes to grace the text thread, they are the most remarkable, the most joyful, because they are the most improbable. They’re celebrated not because they’re beautiful, but because it means the family ate well that day—because they made something out of nothing.
If everything you know is passed through word of mouth and from generation to generation—if the land and olive trees are gone, and the places that birthed recipes and stories are gone—stories are all that’s left. Maybe that’s the reason why, on a morning in early November, Amanda walks to the front of a crowd on the campus of the University of Arkansas and says everything she needs to say. She tells them about her uncle, Amjad, who was killed; her uncle’s youngest daughter, Hala, 5 years old, who was killed the following year; how the IDF raided her parents’ home when her mother was pregnant with her; and how her brother is still there, unable to provide his children with food, water, and medication. She tells the near-silent crowd everything that her family has suffered simply because they are Palestinians. She leaves nothing unsaid.
Amanda’s brother, Ahmed, escapes from Gaza. He and his wife and children are in Egypt, safe for now. One day in late November, they are able to speak. It’d been nearly two months since she’d seen her brother’s face. For much of that period, she’d only gotten snippets in the family text thread about how he and his family were faring. On a video call, he tells their story; they talk for five hours.
Before getting on the call, she texted him to ask whether he felt relief to be out of Gaza, but he said it’s not like that. That in leaving Gaza, he’d left everything—their family, his job, the life that he and his wife worked so hard to build. He’d also left the bakery. But when they’re face to face, looking at each other on-screen, they don’t just talk about this. They also talk about pistachios. She tells him that she’s grinding pistachios for baklava cookies that she’ll sell at a market tomorrow. He tells her that she ought to grind them to 80 percent, not 100. She says that, well, they’re her cookies. He tells her that the bakery gets pistachios in such great quantities from their suppliers that they’ve got to be careful about broken shells. She tells him that she’s not on that level of production. He tells her about the work that he’s been doing with halawet el jibn, a Syrian dessert made of sweet cheese you don’t often see in Middle Eastern bakeries these days.
If everything you know is passed through word of mouth and from generation to generation—if the land and olive trees are gone, and the places that birthed recipes and stories are gone—stories are all that’s left.
She remembers a younger version of her brother: A co-conspirator and confidant in pilfering ice cream and leftover bamieh, a tomatoey okra stew, from the family’s refrigerator. A little boy whose misadventures in the kitchen left a trail of scorched pots and pans rendered nearly unusable. How remarkable, she thinks, that the boy who once couldn’t cook a thing has become this young man, this “MVP” as she calls him, at the family bakery. She looks into his eyes and sees someone who has come into his own in so many different ways. Maybe, one day, hopefully, they’ll be able to work in the bakery together—established gender roles be damned—because she knows that she wants this knowledge. Who knows how much more Palestinian culture there will be for her to absorb in her lifetime?
It’s November 25. The Big Holigay Market is in full swing. Amanda stands behind her table. The day feels ordinary, but it’s not.
Amanda smiles at people walking by. But there’s a chasm between this moment and what’s happening on the other side of the world. As she chats with people about her baklava cookies and ka’ak al-Quds, or Jerusalem bagels, she can’t stop thinking about her brother, who is racing to secure emergency passports for his wife and children, to find an immigration lawyer for his wife, and to track down diapers and other necessities. Egypt offers no reprieve; there’s a good chance that they may never be able to return home, that they may never see their families again.
It’s hard to put on a smile sometimes. There are days when she makes traditional Palestinian meals, and there are days at home when everything seems to come out of a to-go container. There are days when she reads everything, feels everything, and then there are days when all she wants to read are books like Eat Your Heart Out, a YA thriller about zombies, the horrors of which are a welcome distraction from her own.
What’s made it easier, however, are the people around her.
This very market, created by Amanda and a friend, Grayce Wylder, started off in 2021 as a backyard baked goods and art sale for LGBTQ vendors, but quickly flourished into something that Amanda says she hadn’t set out to make: a community that has embraced not just her queerness, or her Arab-ness, but her whole self. In this space, she can say what she wants to say, she can bake what she wants to bake. She can be herself without feeling like she needs to prove anything to anyone. And she can connect to her identity through food.
It took a long time before she felt comfortable embracing the baked goods from her home country—and by extension, her identity as a Palestinian.
“I have a right to be proud of it,” Amanda says. “When I sit down and critically think about my experiences in the Middle East, and all of the beauty of it, I’m angry at myself for denying that to myself for a few years.”
Later that day, a middle-aged white woman approaches the table. “I recognize you from my classes!” Amanda exclaims. The woman, Rebecca, had taken Amanda’s Asian seafood fusion class, and her twin daughters also attended the Middle Eastern breakfast class. They chat about the classes, about the market. About Amanda’s miso chocolate chip cookies and ka’ak al-Quds. About za’atar: “I actually got it from Nablus,” Amanda tells her. ”The quality is incredible when you get it from the source.”
Rebecca tells Amanda that she had started to follow her on Instagram. She reads Amanda’s posts on Palestine, her family’s trauma, the marches, demonstrations, and speeches. Even if she doesn’t always comment, Rebecca tells Amanda that she supports and sends love to her and her family.
Amid the bustle of the market, they embrace for a long time.
It’s a new year, and another class is making Middle Eastern breakfast. Outfitted in matching aprons and sipping adult beverages, Amanda’s students watch a screen while her hands chop a jalapeño on the cutting board for ful medames, or Egyptian fava beans. As she finishes with the pepper, Amanda turns her attention to the garlic.
After acknowledging that there’s a good bit of garlic in the dish, “as it should be in Middle Eastern cooking,” she says, Amanda then slips a handful of cloves into a silicone garlic peeler. As the cloves slip their skins, the garlic in the air invokes the past.
“I remember growing up anytime I tried to cook,” she says, her eyes on the cutting board, “the main feedback I would get from my dad—a very quiet, a very silent, strong man—would be: ‘not enough garlic.’”
On this evening, she gives this food a second life.
After Amanda finishes the demonstration, the room hums with focused, low-key chatter as her students begin cutting, boiling, and stirring their dishes. She walks from station to station, listening to others talk about their own families and why they connect with these dishes, her microphone broadcasting snippets of conversations as she compliments and suggests. On this evening, she gives this food a second life. Because even if these people have no direct ties to Palestine, when they try to recreate the recipes in their own homes—when they seek out the ingredients from the few Middle Eastern grocery stores that the region has to offer—the culinary tradition is given a new future.
Eventually, the evening comes to a close. The students pack up their leftovers, the dirty pots and pans are magicked away by a trio of helpful assistants, and the lights go out. Time passes, events blur and resolve over the next several weeks. Amanda’s brother and his family find their way to Memphis, where they stay with Amanda’s parents. She also meets her niece and nephew for the first time. There will be happy, bittersweet stories like these, but they will be few and far between as the world turns away, and Palestine crumbles, reduced to an idea consumed by fire.
But for that evening, the table as Amanda knows it—as her family knows it—grows just a little bigger.
Jordan P. Hickey is a Northwest Arkansas-based freelance journalist whose writing appears in The Washington Post, Garden & Gun, Arkansas Advocate, among others. The former editor of Arkansas Life magazine (RIP), he’s been named writer of the year by the Arkansas Society of Professional Journalists, the International Regional Magazine Association, and the Great Plains Journalism Awards.
Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Fact-checker: Julie Schwietert Collazo
Copyeditor: Krista Stevens
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