Imad’s Syrian Kitchen: The Sunday Times bestseller full of the delicious flavours of Syria, with authentic recipes and true stories of life as a refugee

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Amid this is an extensive series of recipes that offer a bustling tour of Syrian cuisine. Many of the dishes that have become signatures at Alarnab’s London restaurant feature, including the falafel, which are strikingly shaped with hole in the middle for a ‘crispier texture’. There are six chapters to the book in total, covering spice mixes, recipe basics, starters, mains, desserts and drinks. The Bread and Salt Between Us offer you more than forty recipes. From the fresh tabbouleh that she learned from her mother and sisters to the rice pudding for her future husband. About the author:Besides being a chef, Marlene Matar is also a highly accomplished culinary teacher. She studied at Beirut’s L’Academia Italiana Bella Cucccina, Montreal’s Ecole Professionnelle de Cuisine Chinoise, and received a Grand Diplôme in cooking and pastry from Le Cordon Bleu in Paris. Scents and Flavors: A Syrian Cookbook (Library of Arabic Literature (63))

This is clearly a book that’s been designed to demonstrate how easy it is to recreate traditional Syrian dishes in a domestic kitchen. Throughout, the recipes are simple and straightforward, with almost all the ingredients obtainable in your local supermarket. The front cover calls it a ‘love letter from Damascus to London’, which is apt. Syrian cuisine remains relatively unexplored in the UK, and Imad’s Syrian Kitchen ​offers a vibrant introduction to it. If I had any other choice, I would have definitely taken it. [Fleeing] wasn’t the easiest but it was somehow the safest,” he says. “When I was in Syria during the war, people were saying, ‘It’s not safe to go out of the house because maybe you’re going to die’. But I needed to feed my family, if I stayed in the house they would die from hunger. There’s no good choice or bad choice, but maybe it’s the only one you can make. Imad’s Syrian Kitchen is part recipe book, part human story about how a successful businessman found himself fleeing for his life, crossing 10 countries, and turned by necessity into an illegal immigrant in the UK. By some turns of good fortune and enormous resilience, he rebuilt his life and that of his family, and opened an excellent restaurant where diners can enjoy his Syrian menu. Now, readers can try out some of the recipes at home too which will take you from a range of marvellous meze and salads, through mains and onto dessert. The book is worth buying simply to read Imad’s story and to understand more about his terrifying journey from Damascus to London, to think about holding those we love close and to take nothing in life for granted, but to be grateful for every privilege we enjoy. Then cook some of Imad’s life-enhancing food. In some respects, the recipes in Imad Alarnab’s debut cookbook, named after his recently relocated Kingly Court restaurant in London’s Soho​​, are secondary to the author’s story of journeying as a refugee from his hometown of Damascus in Syria to London in 2015. “Being a refugee is exhausting,” he writes, emotionally, at one point. “It’s emotional. It’s depressing. It involves so much waiting, unable to do anything, completely at the mercy of a constantly changing series of people who mostly don’t seem to care.”

A love letter from Damascus to London

This book presents the history of the migration of people from the Middle East to the Caribbean. This is not just a cookbook, but also a collection of told stories and insight into Syrians and Lebanese’s growing up in Trinidad and Tobago. Liz Clayman is the contributor to the great photographs in this book and is a New York food and hospitality photographer. Saha: A Chef’s Journey Through Lebanon and Syria [Middle Eastern Cookbook, 150 Recipes] About the author:Mayada Anjari is an active home cook. She is a mother of four children and lives in Jersey City, New Jersey. Imad’s Syrian Kitchen is divided into chapters which are interspersed with further details about Imad’s journey to the UK as well as information about Syrian cuisine. Amidst the recipes are essays about his love of Damascus, his love for his wife and daughters, and a moving piece about his beloved mother who died shortly after he left Damascus.

Cooking Syrian food now makes him feel “connected” to his home country, of course, “but it also makes me feel part of this unique community in the UK”. Arriving in London, he says: “I felt safe, I felt ‘I can be different, I can be myself, no one cares’. Everyone’s so different, it makes all of us lookalike.”Once the fighting started, food, that once brought him so much joy, lost all meaning. “I don’t know how to describe it, but the food tasted like blood. I know it’s disgusting, but nothing tasted the same. When you live in fear for your family, when your daughters are not safe to go to school, food will taste [bad], nothing can make you happy.” You will find hearty peasant dishes or delicately spiced specialties from ancient palaces, all of which are intricate and delicate in flavor but not too complicated to make at home. Touching stories and rich and interesting recipes from Lebanon and Syria that embody the spirit of modernity and antiquity, taste, and color are beautifully depicted in the cookbook. This illustrative and lavish design is full. It was just something I felt like I needed to do, because you get to make a lot of people happy. Especially at that time, they needed something to be happy about,” says the 45-year-old, who would feed as many as 400 people at a time.

Famous cookbook authors and chefs the world have come together to help food relief efforts to alleviate the suffering of Syrian refugees. Many individuals have contributed the recipes in this beautifully illustrated cookbook of delicious soups worldwide. About the author:Itab Azzam was born in Sweida, Syria, and moved to the United Kingdom in 2011. She is an award-winning theatre producer, filmmaker, and the team behind BBC Four’s Syrian School. Itab is one of the producers of the Peabody and BAFTA-winning documentary seriesExodus: Our Journey to Europe. Additionally, she has produced independent films, includingAntigone of SyriaandQueens of Syria. She currently lives in London.Whenever we mention the names of dishes like hummus or fattoush, we will immediately think of Lebanese cuisine because mainly traditional dishes in Syria originate from many other world regions, especially after the Islamic era. However, these dishes also make up a part of traditional Syrian cuisine.