A2 · Elementary
14 min
food and cuisineconflict and culturediasporahistory
The Table of Damascus: Syrian Food and the War That Changed Everything
La Mesa de Damasco: La Comida de Siria y la Guerra
This week, the first public trial of Assad-era officials opened in Damascus. Fletcher and Octavio use this as a starting point to explore Syria's extraordinary culinary history, how war shattered a thousand-year-old food culture, and what it means to carry your country's cuisine with you when you have to leave.
Esta semana, el primer juicio público contra oficiales del régimen de Assad comenzó en Damasco. Fletcher y Octavio usan esta noticia para explorar la rica historia culinaria de Siria, cómo la guerra destruyó un patrimonio gastronómico milenario, y qué significa llevar la comida de tu país cuando tienes que huir de él.
8 essential A2-level terms from this episode, with translations and example sentences in Spanish.
| Spanish | English | Example |
|---|---|---|
| humilde | humble | El mujaddara es un plato humilde pero muy sabroso. |
| la comida | food / meal | La comida de Siria es famosa en todo el mundo. |
| el mercado | market | Hay muchas especias en el mercado de Alepo. |
| el sabor | flavor / taste | La pimienta de Alepo tiene un sabor especial. |
| nutrir | to nourish | La comida buena nutre el cuerpo y el alma. |
| el recuerdo | memory / souvenir | Esta comida es un recuerdo de mi país. |
| cultivar | to grow / to farm | Los agricultores cultivan trigo en esa región desde hace miles de años. |
| compartir | to share | En la mesa siria, todos comparten los platos. |
A courtroom opened in Damascus this week for the first time in the history of the Syrian conflict, and I've been thinking about it all morning.
Not just about justice, though that's enormous.
I've been thinking about what Damascus actually is.
Or was.
Or is trying to become again.
Damasco es una ciudad muy vieja.
Damascus is a very old city.
Es la capital más antigua del mundo.
It is the oldest capital in the world.
Continuously inhabited for something like eleven thousand years.
Which means there have been people cooking in that city since before writing existed.
Before money.
Before almost everything we think of as civilization.
Sí.
Yes.
Y la comida de Siria es muy importante.
And Syrian food is very important.
La gente come y habla y vive.
People eat and talk and live.
Right.
And I think that's actually the thing I want to pull at today, because the trial of Assad's officials is about justice and memory, and food is also about memory.
When a country is destroyed, one of the things that survives, often the first thing that crosses a border with people, is the food.
La comida es cultura.
Food is culture.
No es solo comer.
It is not just eating.
Es la familia, la historia.
It is family, history.
Octavio, walk me through it.
What is Syrian food, at its core?
Because I think a lot of listeners hear 'Middle Eastern cuisine' and they think hummus and pita and that's the end of the sentence.
Siria tiene muchos platos.
Syria has many dishes.
No es solo hummus.
It is not just hummus.
Hay kibbeh, hay fattoush, hay muhamara.
There is kibbeh, there is fattoush, there is muhamara.
Muhamara.
I know that one.
Red pepper and walnut paste, fiery, with a kind of depth that takes you completely by surprise the first time you try it.
Exacto.
Exactly.
Y el kibbeh es carne con trigo.
And kibbeh is meat with wheat.
Es el plato nacional de Siria.
It is the national dish of Syria.
Kibbeh is one of those dishes that sounds simple until you watch someone make it.
Ground lamb, bulgur wheat, pine nuts, spices, formed into these torpedo shapes and fried or baked or served raw.
There are probably two hundred regional variations across Syria alone.
Sí.
Yes.
En Alepo, el kibbeh es diferente.
In Aleppo, the kibbeh is different.
En Damasco, es diferente también.
In Damascus, it is different too.
Cada ciudad tiene su versión.
Every city has its version.
That regional variation is worth pausing on, because Syria is a country the size of Washington State with something like eighteen distinct ethnic and religious communities, and each of those communities has its own culinary tradition.
Kurdish food in the north, Armenian influence in Aleppo, Bedouin traditions in the desert east.
The country's diversity was, literally, on the table.
Alepo es muy especial.
Aleppo is very special.
La cocina de Alepo tiene fama en todo el mundo.
The cuisine of Aleppo has a reputation around the whole world.
Before the war, Aleppo had a culinary reputation that rivaled Lyon or Bologna.
Serious food cities.
Aleppo pepper alone, that dried, slightly oily red pepper with this complex warmth, has been traded through those markets for a thousand years.
It ended up in everything from Ottoman palace kitchens to medieval European spice routes.
La pimienta de Alepo es famosa.
Aleppo pepper is famous.
Los cocineros de todo el mundo la usan.
Cooks around the world use it.
Es roja y tiene un sabor especial.
It is red and has a special flavor.
And then the war came.
Aleppo was besieged for years.
The ancient souk, one of the largest covered markets in the world, dating back to the fourteenth century, parts of it were burned.
The supply chains for those peppers collapsed.
Some farmers fled, some died, and the production of Aleppo pepper dropped by over ninety percent during the worst years of the conflict.
La guerra destruye todo.
War destroys everything.
La comida, las casas, las familias.
Food, homes, families.
Todo.
Everything.
Everything.
And the numbers on Syrian food security during the civil war are genuinely staggering.
At the height of the conflict, about half the Syrian population was facing food insecurity.
The country went from being a net exporter of wheat to desperately importing it.
Farmland in the Fertile Crescent, the literal birthplace of agriculture as we understand it, was abandoned or destroyed.
El Creciente Fértil es donde nace la agricultura.
The Fertile Crescent is where agriculture is born.
Es muy viejo.
It is very old.
La gente cultiva allí desde hace miles de años.
People have farmed there for thousands of years.
Ten thousand years, give or take.
The first wheat, the first barley, the first domesticated sheep.
All of it came from this region.
Syria is not just a country with a food culture;
it is, in a very literal sense, the country where food culture began.
And a decade of war has systematically dismantled that.
[sigh] Es muy triste.
It is very sad.
Pero los sirios no olvidan su comida.
But Syrians do not forget their food.
No es posible olvidar.
It is not possible to forget.
That's the thing.
When over six million Syrians fled the country, they took their recipes with them.
Into Turkey, into Lebanon, into Germany, into Sweden, into Canada.
And something interesting happened.
Syrian restaurants started opening across Europe and North America, often run by refugees, and in many cities they became among the best-regarded restaurants almost immediately.
En Madrid hay restaurantes sirios muy buenos.
In Madrid there are very good Syrian restaurants.
La gente va y come allí con placer.
People go and eat there with pleasure.
Berlin has an extraordinary Syrian food scene now.
I talked to a chef there once who'd run a restaurant on the outskirts of Damascus and had to leave everything behind in 2014.
Within three years he'd rebuilt his kitchen in Kreuzberg.
He told me the hardest thing wasn't starting over financially, it was finding the right pomegranate molasses.
The specific tartness he remembered didn't exist in Germany.
La melaza de granada es importante en la cocina siria.
Pomegranate molasses is important in Syrian cooking.
Es un sabor muy especial.
It is a very special flavor.
No es dulce, no es amargo.
It is not sweet, it is not bitter.
Es los dos.
It is both.
That tension between sweet and sour is actually a defining characteristic of Syrian food as a whole.
You get it in the fattoush, in the tamarind notes in certain stews, in the way they use sumac.
It's a cuisine that refuses to be simple.
It wants complexity, layering, a kind of negotiation between flavors.
El sumac es una especia roja.
Sumac is a red spice.
Los sirios usan mucho el sumac.
Syrians use a lot of sumac.
Es ácido y sabroso.
It is sour and tasty.
I've started using it on eggs.
Octavio found this horrifying.
Los huevos con sumac...
Eggs with sumac...
no sé.
I don't know.
Pero los sirios lo saben mejor que tú, Fletcher.
But Syrians know better than you, Fletcher.
A fair point, graciously delivered.
Now, the other dimension here that I think is worth understanding is what happened inside Syria to the food system after Assad fell.
Because the regime change at the end of 2024 didn't just mean political transition.
It meant trying to rebuild agriculture, supply chains, and markets that had been hollowed out by years of sanctions, corruption, and deliberate destruction.
Ahora en Siria hay más comida en los mercados.
Now in Syria there is more food in the markets.
Pero el precio es alto.
But the price is high.
Mucha gente no tiene dinero.
Many people do not have money.
The World Food Programme estimates that even now, with the fighting largely stopped, around a third of Syrians inside the country are still food insecure.
The infrastructure for irrigation was bombed in many areas.
Seed stocks were lost.
Livestock populations collapsed.
You can't just sign a peace deal and have the farms come back.
La tierra necesita tiempo.
The land needs time.
El trigo necesita tiempo.
Wheat needs time.
No es rápido.
It is not quick.
And the people need to come back too, and many of them won't.
Six million refugees outside the country, another six million internally displaced.
A lot of those farmers, those bakers, those restaurant owners, they've built lives somewhere else now.
Some of them have German citizenship.
Their kids speak German.
The food culture is simultaneously being preserved abroad and slowly rebuilt at home, and those two versions of Syrian cuisine are starting to diverge.
Eso es interesante.
That is interesting.
La comida cambia con el tiempo.
Food changes over time.
La gente cambia la receta un poco.
People change the recipe a little.
Es normal.
It is normal.
It's how every cuisine has always worked.
Italian food in Argentina isn't the same as Italian food in Naples.
Mexican food in Los Angeles has its own logic now.
But usually that evolution happens over generations in peacetime.
What's happening with Syrian food happened violently, in a decade, and across twelve countries simultaneously.
It's an extraordinary case study in how displacement reshapes culture.
Cuando una familia cocina en un país nuevo, recuerda el país viejo.
When a family cooks in a new country, they remember the old country.
La comida es un recuerdo.
Food is a memory.
I interviewed a Syrian woman in Stockholm a few years back, for a piece that never ran in the end.
She'd been a teacher in Homs.
She told me that she made mujaddara, lentils and rice with caramelized onions, every Friday because that was what her mother made on Fridays.
And every time she cooked it she cried, not from sadness exactly, but from the specific memory of her mother's kitchen.
That dish held the entire life she'd had before.
Mujaddara.
Mujaddara.
Sí.
Yes.
Es un plato humilde.
It is a humble dish.
Pero es muy importante.
But it is very important.
La gente pobre come esto.
Poor people eat this.
La gente rica también.
Rich people too.
And that's actually one of the things that makes Syrian food remarkable, this democratic quality.
The national dishes aren't elaborate court food that trickled down to the people.
They're peasant dishes, market food, communal food.
The mezze table is designed to be shared.
You don't order for yourself;
you order for the table and everyone reaches in.
That structure, that philosophy of eating, travels with the people.
El mezze es muchos platos pequeños.
Mezze is many small dishes.
Todos comen juntos.
Everyone eats together.
Es muy social, muy familiar.
It is very social, very familial.
Now, the trial opening in Damascus this week, Atef Najib standing in the dock, Assad to be tried in absentia.
At one level that's a story about accountability and international law.
But in my head it's also a story about what kind of Syria gets rebuilt.
Because you can't separate the food from the politics.
The agricultural east was deliberately starved during the siege years.
Food was weaponized.
Humanitarian aid was blocked.
Choosing who eats is a form of power, and in Syria it was exercised with extraordinary brutality.
Sí.
Yes.
El hambre es un arma terrible.
Hunger is a terrible weapon.
En la historia, muchos gobiernos usan el hambre para controlar a la gente.
In history, many governments use hunger to control people.
The UN documented it in detail.
Sieges of Ghouta, Madaya, Homs.
In Madaya in 2016, people were starving to death in a town twenty miles from Damascus while the world watched.
Photographs of skeletal children.
That's the backdrop against which this trial is happening.
And it's also why food reconstruction in Syria isn't just an agricultural or economic issue.
It's a justice issue.
Cuando la gente tiene comida, tiene dignidad.
When people have food, they have dignity.
Sin comida, no hay nada.
Without food, there is nothing.
Es la base de todo.
It is the foundation of everything.
You said it simply and you said it right.
There's a word I want to come back to, actually, something Octavio said earlier that I thought was interesting.
You used the word 'humilde,' humble, about mujaddara.
In English 'humble' and 'humiliation' come from the same Latin root, 'humus,' meaning earth or ground.
And the word for the garbanzo bean paste that's everywhere in Syrian food, hummus, also comes from the same root, in a roundabout way.
Earth food.
The food of people close to the ground.
Espera.
Wait.
En árabe, 'hummus' solo significa garbanzo.
In Arabic, 'hummus' just means chickpea.
Es muy simple.
It is very simple.
Es solo el nombre del ingrediente.
It is only the name of the ingredient.
[chuckle] Which is a very good corrective to my little etymological adventure.
The dish is just named after what's in it.
Though I still find the coincidence with 'humus' pleasing.
Tú y las palabras, Fletcher.
You and words, Fletcher.
Siempre.
Always.
Pero mira, 'humilde' viene del latín.
But look, 'humilde' comes from Latin.
Y en español es una palabra bonita.
And in Spanish it is a beautiful word.
And that's actually where I want to land for a second.
'Humilde.' You used it about a dish, not a person.
In English we'd struggle with that.
'Humble food' works, but it doesn't carry quite the same warmth.
What does 'humilde' really mean when you use it about something like mujaddara?
Humilde significa simple y honesto.
Humble means simple and honest.
Sin pretensión.
Without pretension.
Una comida humilde no quiere impresionar.
A humble dish does not want to impress.
Solo quiere nutrir.
It only wants to nourish.
Without pretension.
I love that.
So in Spanish you can give a plate of lentils a kind of dignity by calling it 'humilde,' you're not diminishing it, you're actually honoring it.
The humble dish versus the humble person.
Same word, but the register is completely different.
Exacto.
Exactly.
En español, 'humilde' es positivo.
In Spanish, 'humilde' is positive.
Es bueno ser humilde.
It is good to be humble.
Y es buena una comida humilde.
And a humble dish is good too.
And that word, that little adjective, tells you something real about how Spanish-speaking cultures see the relationship between simplicity and value.
Which feels like a good place to end, actually.
Syrian food, at its best, is humilde in exactly that sense.
It's not trying to impress you.
It's trying to feed you, hold you, remind you of something essential.
And that quality is why it survives displacement, war, diaspora.
You can carry a humble dish anywhere.
Sí.
Yes.
Y cuando cocinas la comida de tu madre, tu madre está contigo.
And when you cook your mother's food, your mother is with you.
Es siempre así.
It is always like that.