Bifteck au Poivre

Pont de l’Alma

For meat lovers, nothing compares to it.  I got this recipe from the barman of the Ritz.
First get a thick filet or rumsteak. Sauté it in very hot butter. After a few minutes take it out, grind a lot of pepper over it with a pepper mill, and put it in another frying pan with fresh hot butter. Add a glass of cognac and serve.

Of the foreign communities that have made Alexandria their home over the last two hundred years, it is the food of the Levant, Shawam, Armenians, Greeks and Turks that is close to Alexandrian food. Though North African countries such as Libya and Morocco are geographically a western extension of Alexandria, there has not been much interaction by way of cuisine. In the Middle Ages and up to the 18th century, there had been a steady flow of Maghrebian merchants who settled in Alexandria and traded in grain, clothes, blankets and burnouses. With the arrival of Mohamed Ali and the opening of the port to Christian merchant vessels, trade with North Africa declined, and Moroccan presence in the city diminished. Those who remained became fully integrated and lost their cultural specificity, whether language, food, dress or habits. Though their cuisine hardly has anything in common with the Egyptian cuisine, both bake food in terracotta pots called tagen or tagine. Both also eat couscous, but while for the Maghrebians it is the national meal, cooked with tomato sauce, meat and vegetables, in Egypt it is a sweet eaten with a sprinkling of sugar on top.

By contrast, foods such as dolma, stuffed cabbage leaves, golash, yoghurt, baklava and kebabs will be eaten in Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, Armenia, Turkey and Greece. There may be a preference for cold dolma – where the absence of meat in the stuffing is supplemented with a generous dose of lemon and olive oil – in the Syrian-Lebanese community in Alexandria, and for the hot variety with a meat stuffing among the Egyptians, but both will be eaten with the same appetite and with a yoghurt and cucumber salad.

When asked about the staple ingredients of the Syrian and Lebanese diet, the Lebanese retorted indignantly, “Syrian food is SO different from Lebanese!” Perhaps, but only to the discerning palate. The average Alexandrian will note that the Syrians, Lebanese and Palestinians (of whom there was a numerous population in Alexandria, mostly Christians fleeing Ottoman persecution back home) had more or less the same food. They had a preference for greens, dairy products and pastries filled with minced meat, cheese or spinach. For breakfast they dip their bread in labneh (a creamy cheese made by straining yoghurt all night in gauze) or in olive oil and thyme. They could also have mana’eesh (a pizza-like pastry spread with cheese or thyme) for elevenses. Indeed, they pay attention to their breakfast, which the Lebanese call tarwee’a, the closest meaning of which would be in common parlance “to have a meal of ‘feel good’ food to enhance a better mood.” It set the mood for the day, and the Lebanese are a hard working people who like to earn their bread all the more to enjoy it, dipped in little plates of hummous, babghanoug, or tahini. All three eat tabbouleh, fattoush and kebbeh. All favor yoghurt, which is highly nutritious and a good replacement for milk for lactose-intolerant people. Yoghurt is good for digestion and is therefore always a companion to the stuffed vine leaves and other foods that are difficult to digest. Shawam also cook extensively with yoghurt and excel at dishes such as shoshbarak, sheikh el mahshi and kebbeh labaneyyah, but what the Egyptians have borrowed is the kebbeh cooked without the yoghurt. The Lebanese connection, by virtue of the size of the community, was very much a part of the Alexandrian daily life. Little girls intrigued by the egg shaped variety of what we called kobeba, rarely using the Lebanese version kebbeh, were encouraged to learn how to produce them. The paste, still in the raw, would be molded into a ball, then with the index finger gentle probing without perforating the patty would leave just enough room for some stuffing of pine nuts, carefully rolled back in the palm of the little hands.  The Lebanese kitchen and the Alexandrian, it  inevitably followed, had mothers and grandmothers enjoying remarkably similar habits, tastes and traditions, not least of which a morning cup of strong Turkish coffee. The Lebanese, though, will have theirs boiled and compromise the “wesh”, the darker frothy top layer, which for Egyptians is a matter of pride especially when the coffee is offered to a guest.  It must be remembered that of all the communities with which we have mixed on a domestic level of mothers and grandmothers exchanging recipes and kitchen savvy, one ingredient made it all the more digestible: the language. As Alexandrians, granted we did make do with different languages, managing a kitchen version for the less refined or educated, but with the Lebanese, both sides could dish out enjoying the common lingo. Hence, the added dimension of the interaction, not only between housewives but also between employers and domestics, many of whom will have much easier access to the disseminating process since the bar for intercultural exercise is lowered.

Like the Ottoman, the Greek culinary interaction with Alexandrians led to similarities in the cuisine and contentions over certain foods, such as Greek and Egyptian claims to moussaka. The Greek was easily the largest foreign community in Alexandria and its members had numerous clubs, schools, hospitals, newspapers – even whole neighborhoods, such as Ibrahimieh, were Greek. Most, if not all, of those Greeks had arrived from the poor Greek islands in search of livelihood in what was a very wealthy Alexandria, and many of them did make fortunes and became among the leading notables of the city. Others turned their hand at various other professions and businesses and integrated well with the many ethnic groups that had made Alexandria their home. As they were the neighbors of Egyptian and Shawam, and their kitchens easily led to each other, they shared and mixed foods and ingredients and helped themselves to each others’ foods. Like the Copts (the Egyptian Orthodox Christians), Greeks fast a lot and during fasting they eat a dish similar to koshary, made with rice and black lentils (but no macaroni). They also have a meal that is almost identical to bisara, made with lentils and onions on top. The Greek lentils are yellowish and bigger, and the dish is more like soup, with some olive oil added. Both Egyptians and Greeks are uncommonly fond of beans: if the Egyptian bean is the fava bean, called ful, then the Greek bean is the white one we know as fassolya beida. And there is a patty similar to falafel, made with chickpeas, hummous, more like the shami falafel made also with chickpeas. Indeed, it is sometimes impossible to distinguish whether the dish is Egyptian, Lebanese, Greek or Ottoman. That is also true of golash, which seems to have been an Asian dish but which, stuffed with cheese or spinach, now belongs equally to all four countries. The Greek salad is similar to the Egyptian salad, only the Greeks will add their feta cheese while the Egyptians will be content with a vinaigrette dressing (using limes instead of vinegar when they are in season). Of course, the Egyptian flat bread, eish baladi, and the Syrian and Lebanese thinner bread, are all called pitta bread in Europe and the States, after the Greek bread or pie.  Like the Egyptians and the Shawam, the Greeks are fond of sheep intestines, which are properly seasoned and cooked over a charcoal fire: two varieties are coccorrezzi and spleenandero. There are also the typical Greek dishes, such as kofta zucchini, made with zucchini, eggs and mint, and eggs also go into the soup and are whisked till creamy, with lemon added.
 

As with the elite of other communities, including the Egyptian, the notables of the Greek community moved more towards French cuisine the higher they moved up the social ladder. So it didn’t matter to the Greek aristocracy whether they lived in Alexandria or elsewhere; they ate neither Greek nor Egyptian, but French. Regardless of class, however, certain foods are always served on certain occasions: for Easter there will be mutton, Koulourakia, and Tsoureki, the brioche with colored eggs. For New Year there will be pork, and for Christmas, the turkey will be stuffed with rice, nuts, raisins, chestnuts, pine nuts, minced meat, kidneys and hearts – a rich meal for hospitable community that, along with the Alexandrians, were among the few who ate kidneys and hearts. For dessert, there would be the traditional pastries Vasilopita and Finikia Kourabiedes.

Next to the Greek, the Italian was the second largest foreign community in Alexandria, numbering 27,000 at the beginning of the 20th century. For Christmas they had not turkey but fish and minestrone soup, followed by tiramisu and pannetone, the Italian Christmas cake. The turkey was eaten on New Year’s Eve. So while all those communities mixed and mingled, and often shared their food, their special occasions were sacred and each one held fast to its eating habits. It would be fatuous to say that the Italians introduced pasta and pizza to Alexandria; those would have come anyway, with the hamburgers and Kentucky, just as the mountain would have gone to Mahomet if he hadn’t gone to it. Their arrival was inevitable and had nothing to do with Italian presence in the city. The Alexandrians, however, did not accept the pasta exactly as it arrived from across the Mediterranean; the Alexandrian palate would not get accustomed to pasta al dente, and cooked it well. Like the Alexandrians, the Italians used garlic in their cooking, as well as rosemary and laurel leaves. Olive oil, of course, was a staple ingredient, but mainly as a dressing with vinegar (rather than lemons or limes) for salads. Fat is rarely used in cooking – hardly any butter and never any samna. Italians ate Italian food at home: fish and minestrone soup (with vegetables and white beans) on Fridays (no meat on Fridays for Catholics), ravioli, cannelloni, tagliatelli, pasticcio and polenta were the usual fare, with fresh homemade pasta brought from a special shop behind Cicurel. On Sundays gnocchi would be served, which is potatoes and flour prepared like pasta, with sauce Bolognaise. If there were guests, the meal would be more leisurely than usual, with the antipasto served first, followed by the pasta, meat, vegetable and salad, and the round Chianti bottle of red wine with a restricted long neck covered with straw accompanying the courses. Time would be spent savoring each morsel, chatting and gesticulating, and yes, having a heated conversation at times. And remember, Italians will never keep spaghetti for the following day. Any left-over spaghetti would be made into an omelette: heat the spaghetti, add the beaten eggs, and hey presto! A spaghetti omelette!

1 2 3 4 5 6 7