A great-grandmother's mujaddara

1 cup of dried lentils

Dried lentils, of little money and non-perishable, like the poor and resilient souls desperately seeking new shores here; parched and needing reconstitution like my great-grandmother’s family, who made their way to America on an unavoidable path from Mount Lebanon, their lack having forced the excruciating choice to immigrate.

How my great-grandmother must have seen herself in the face of each dried lentil, darker and sharper than the white navy beans used in the indulgent legume dish common to this new land, baked beans.

¾ cups of white rice

White rice, a façade of abundance with its countless grains.

How my great-grandmother must have secretly, desperately wondered – would she, could she herself know such abundance in this land, itself so abundant with resentment and hostility and others seeking the same prosperity? Could she, more of a brown rice, survive in a white rice world, with countless grains looking to do the same?

1 large onion

An onion, having many layers and full of bitter, medicinal liquid.

How my great-grandmother must have felt the weight of those layers – her core born of a faraway land smothered by the layers of assimilation. How she must have been purged of plaguing tears by the onion’s stinging juices as she chopped it to pieces, herself cut through by the dreaded desire to peel away her own skin and no longer be viewed as other.

¼ cup olive oil

Virgin olive oil, rich and green and healing.

How my great-grandmother must have prayed – begged – that the olive oil live up to its symbolism, to magically manifest the wealth it emblemized in ancient times, allowing her to escape becoming an abuser’s teenaged bride; and after this failed, how she must have stared out the kitchen window as she poured, imagining the delivery of an olive branch to bring peace to her mind and home after a flood of hardship.

Allspice and cumin, to taste

Allspice and cumin, spices so foreign to the dominating culture of this foreign land.

How she must have added them to a Levantine taste, yet not quite to the same taste as her grandmothers before her, just as mine surely isn’t quite to hers; and not to the same taste as those other immigrant cultures accustomed to such spice, though she and they were all the same threat in the minds of some of her fellow Americans.

Salt, to taste

Salt, alien to no land or culture, universal building block of all food.

How she must have so urgently longed for the indispensability of her salt to be seen – the salt in her sweat and tears provided in such great quantity to build a life and season this country.

These thoughts cook in my mind as I cook my great-grandmother’s mujaddara – a recipe that is magic, a certain formula for necromancy as much as it is for food. It’s spell brings my great-grandmother to life before me despite never having really known her, me having been too young in her last hour to even remember her.

As I cook, I see her eyeballing around seven cups of water into which the lentils go, wishing she could act with such little precision in the other areas of her life rather than constantly calculating to survive. She gets lost in strenuous thought, planning the escape for her son and herself from my merciless great-grandfather as the lentils cook in the pot, uncovered and vulnerable. She almost forgets to add the rice, spices, and seasoning after around 15 minutes, having been going back and forth between the pot and a skillet while getting lost in the back and forth of: could she survive alone as a woman in a man’s world? Could she alone provide for her son?

I see her brown the onion with the olive oil in the skillet while the lentils and rice cook. She doesn’t remove it from the heat until the onion reaches the tone of her skin, the same tone of my grandfather’s skin. She turns to my questioning grandfather, refusing when he pleads to learn some of her language, some Arabic or French.

“No,” she says with a tone that ensures no further questions.

She eyes the contrast between the pale uncooked onion ends left on the cutting board and the darkened onions in the skillet. Her son would grew up like an uncooked onion, she would make sure of it, whether he looked it or not.

I see her mix the onion and oil into the lentils and rice after most of the liquid is gone, having watched the lentils jump then sink then jump again in agony with each simmer of the disappearing water, it evaporating the same way as her hopes and dreams. She swaps these dreams for survival schemes: perhaps her escape could not mean freedom. Yes, she would have to instead give her hand to one of those white navy beans, one returning from deployment and searching for something a bit more “exotic,” like a lentil.

Watching her as she wonders how else could my beloved boy survive, I crave so badly the ability to call out to her, to make her see that survival doesn’t always mean happiness – that her son would weep on his deathbed for having so little knowledge of himself, for his bearing the agonizing impacts of a childhood in a step family who could not understand him, for passing down trauma to his beloved grandchildren rather than the sacred gift of ancestry. But even if I could reach her, what other choice could she find in the jumble of her own trauma?

She lets the mix cool and thicken a bit before putting it on a plate with raw cabbage and pita for my grandfather. She runs her hand through his wiry, ebony hair as he dives in, vowing that her son would never taste the struggles that she had, even if it meant peeling away all ties to that faraway mount except for the simple, complicated taste of her mujaddara, the peasant’s dish into which she poured her suffering, anxiety, and love, cooking it into nourishment and hiding within it a dash of an ancient past.