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A taste of lemon juice evokes sweet memories of trips to the birkeh
I never liked shopping much, not even when I was young. And yet whenever my mother went to Souk Al-Tawileh, one of the main shopping areas in pre-civil war downtown Beirut, I always insisted on going along. It wasn’t the shopping that I was interested in but a stop at the birkeh at a drink-and-sweets stall right by a lovely 19th-century marble fountain (birkeh means fountain). My mother would order meghli, a kind of rice pudding with caraway seeds, and I would order lemonade – the real stuff, made with lemon juice, water and sugar. If I was particularly thirsty, I would follow it with jellab, a tall date syrup drink, packed with crushed ice and garnished with soaked pine nuts and raisins.
I had forgotten about the birkeh – which was destroyed during the civil war – until a recent trip to Istanbul, when I chanced upon an itinerant lemonade seller. The sight of him ladling juice into glasses for thirsty shoppers took me back to the days when I would lean against the cool marble fountain and sip my cold drink. I ordered one, curious to refresh memories of old. It was different. The Turks add the zest (the outermost, yellow rind of the fruit) to give the lemonade a stronger, slightly bitter flavour. I liked it and was emboldened to try other drinks as I walked through the narrow streets of Beyoglu. I stopped at a fresh-juice stall for a pomegranate juice, deep red in colour, sweet and very good. I looked for jellab, too, but couldn’t find any.
Still, however fine the various Turkish juices were, for me nothing beats the taste of the drinks I had at the birkeh. Every time I return to Beirut now, I ask if another birkeh has been set up in the city’s new gleaming downtown. “No, not so far,” I’m always told. But now the city centre has finally been cleared of all the tents and demonstrators… who knows?
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