For cookery book writer Anissa Helou, the ingredients in a person’s toasted-pita salad speak volumes. By Andrew Humphreys
Portrait Photography TONY FRENCH
It’s hard to pin down Anissa Helou. Although she couldn’t be more helpful and is eager to meet and talk, this week she’s away in Lebanon and next week it’s off elsewhere. There’s a brief window in which the photographer can shoot her portrait. When we do sit down over a pot of green tea in her airy loft apartment the constantly ringing phone is like a demanding third person. Only once does Helou give in and pick up, to make apologies for missing a dental appointment. Too busy.
We’re here to talk mezze, which is the subject of her new book, but we could just as easily be discussing Islamic art, the Kuwaiti royal family, fishing tackle, interior design or offal, all of which have featured in her life to date. Then there’s Helou’s hair – an explosion of frizz shot through with a dramatic white streak, the nearest equivalent to which, as George Melly once noted, is Elsa Lanchester in the Bride of Frankenstein. That a legendary jazz musician should be commenting in print on the coiffure of a cookery-book writer only adds to her intrigue.
The daughter of a Syrian father and Lebanese mother, she was born in Beirut and educated at a French convent school. At 21, she moved to London to study interior design. She didn’t think she could be “accommodating” enough to design to order and so on the advice of a friend, Zaha Hadid – “You know, the architect” – she enrolled on a History of Art course with international auction house Sotheby’s.
She was appointed its representative for the Middle East and owned and ran an antique shop in Paris, dealing in furniture and objets d’art.
From 1978 to 1986 she lived in Kuwait and advised members of the ruling family on buying Islamic art. She also started her own personal collections.
“I moved into the food world by sheer chance. I was with an agent discussing a book on collecting, because I collected lots of interesting things, and we started talking about cookery books and I said, ‘ There isn’t a good cookery book on Lebanese food,’ and Caroline, my agent, said, ‘fine, do a proposal’.”
“I didn’t know anything about cookery writing,” says Helou. Two years later, in October 1994, the comprehensive Lebanese Cuisine was published. She followed it with Street Café Morocco: “One of my friends had a house in Tangiers and I visited her several times a year. That was how I got to know and love Moroccan cooking.”
In spring of 1999 she sold her Victorian house and put her collections up for auction. It took a 124-page catalogue, entitled The El Helou Collection, to describe everything. Items of note included a sizable selection of antique fishing tackle, reflecting Helou’s passion for fly-fishing. She moved into a two-storey loft in East London, of which the upper floor is wholly devoted to food: one part is filled by an industrial-sized stainless steel kitchen; one part by a long, ebony-topped table that comfortably fits 10; and one part by her desk where she writes. Above is a skylight flooding the space – British weather permitting – with direct overhead light. “I chose the flat because of the great skylight,” says Helou. “If you’re Lebanese, like me, you cannot live without light.”
From her new base she wrote Mediterranean Street Food (pub lished 2002), followed by The Fifth Quarter (2005), a pioneering book on the uses and delights of offal. This month sees the release of her latest, Modern Mezze, which concentrates on the small dishes that are central to the cuisines of Lebanon, Syria, Greece, Turkey – plus a few inclusions from Morocco. “There is no mezze tradition in Morocco,” says Helou, “but they have a lot of delicious salads and side dishes that fit very well in a mezze spread.”
The introduction to the new book includes an evocative account of childhood family outings to eat mezze at a riverside restaurant in Zahleh, northeast of Beirut. She describes waiters bringing tray after tray of small dishes to the table and scooping up the food with torn pitta bread. “As soon as one dish was finished, the waiter would replace it with another. When we got bored, we went to play by the water. When we’d had enough of playing and started feeling peckish again, we would return . The pleasure of the meal seemed to last forever.”
Helou’s “modern mezze” concept, she explains, goes beyond the dishes remembered from her childhood to include elements from different cuisines, in order to find new combinations. She also takes traditional recipes and simplifies and adjusts them. “I have always had a more modern approach to cooking. I use less lemon juice because I serve wine . I use less fat because I don’t like fat. I simplify where I can because as much as I love cooking I don’t want to spend my whole day in the kitchen.”
Helou does not do fusion. “I like the different cuisines and I don’t particularly want to debase them; I just want to make them more accessible.” Many of the recipes come from her mother, who still lives in Lebanon . There is also a great deal of travelling and on the road research – “for Street Food I went everywhere. I travelled to Egypt, where I nearly died with all the dirt. But it was great fun” – and lots of testing on friends .
The focus of recent travels is Syria, in preparation for a series of culinary tours that Helou intends to launch later this year.
She is just back from Damascus and Aleppo. “It was a planning trip to sort out where to take the group,” says Helou. “I went to Semiramis, this fantastic baklava maker in Damascus . In Aleppo, I visited a halva maker. Everybody knows halva, everybody eats halva, but nobody really knows how it’s made. Helou’s explanation of exactly how it is made involves digressions into mysterious Levantine plant roots . As she talks it becomes clear how writing a recipe book could fill two years.
The minutiae of menus and variations in ingredients is very much a consuming passion. For instance, the differences between Syrian and Lebanese cooking. “You think of zaatar [the Middle Eastern mixed spice] as thyme, sesame seeds and sumac. But that’s the Lebanese version. In Syria it’s much more complex. It’s a different colour. I’d call it brown but they call it red. It’s very finely ground and there’s a lot more in it because they have nuts, seeds and spices, and zaatar with pomegranate seeds and a ‘royal zaatar’ with pistachios.”
Precision, you sense, is important to Anissa Helou. She observes that while Lebanese make their kibbeh (a popular mezze dish) oval, in Syria they make them round. “And the fattoush,” she continues, “The Syrians fry the bread, we toast it. Sometimes they put cheese in their fattoush, but we never do that. They use pomegranate syrup in almost everything; we hardly ever do. Kebab for us means cubes of meat, for them it means kofta. Also, they have camel meat. You’d never see that in Lebanon.”
Point made, Helou pauses with an offer of “More tea?” Except we really need to be absolutely clear on this: “When people say Middle Eastern, they mean Lebanese most of the time. This is something I don’t like. There are enough differences between the cuisines to call them one or the other. I like,” she adds firmly, “to call a cuisine by its name.”
For details of Anissa Helou’s forthcoming culinary tours visit www.anissahelou.com
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