However I’ve resided abroad the vast majority of my life, Gaza is where I call home. It’s where my folks were brought up and where I spent summers as a kid. At the point when we’d return, we’d be invited back by our enormous more distant family. First among them was my auntie An’am Dalloul, whom we called Khalto Um Hani: ” mother of Hani,” her oldest kid and my cousin. She’d constantly show up bearing a bowl of sumagiyya, Gaza City’s unmistakable meat stew with chard, sumac, and chickpeas — and my dad’s number one feast.
Um Hani, alongside my cousins Hoda, Wafaa, and Hani, were killed in an Israeli airstrike in their private Gaza City area in November 2023.
Um Hani’s home (photograph: Maggie Schmitt)
In a moment, the family died, my cousin Nael later told me. Just a skeleton of the structure was left. He related the horrendous scene over WhatsApp — how he accumulated their remaining parts in his arms and covered them in a mass grave under weighty Israeli barrage, how he neglected to recover the cadaver of one of his sisters, and how his sibling drained to death before paramedics could contact him. Nael, similar to 90 percent of Gazans at the hour of composing, is uprooted, escaping with his kids starting with one city then onto the next looking for asylum, food, and some similarity to somewhere safe and secure. He has been getting by on canned beans for over 90 days.
Nael’s news severely affected me. I was unable to rest. I was unable to eat. I was overpowered with a significant feeling of defenselessness and misery. Was it won’t be long until the remainder of my family in Gaza could die?
As I read Nael’s texts, the recollections came flooding back. Of Um Hani cooking in her brilliant, blustery kitchen wearing the customary white hijab and light blue jalabiya. Of the pigmentation all over and her delicate olive skin. Of her imposing voice and the delicate snicker that concealed the furious and decided lady under.
Um Hani (photograph: Maggie Schmitt)
Um Hani was an anchor to me, a connection to the fatherly grandma I never met and to a city I frequently felt alienated from. She was a vault of recollections, a key to the divided world to which I had a place as a Palestinian. She helped me to make the close neglected dishes my grandma cherished, the ones my dad grew up eating, for example, adas wi batata (lentils and potatoes cooked in an earth pot with lemon and seared garlic) and samak il-armala (“widow’s fish,” or broiled eggplants with chiles and strips of new basil). Be that as it may, as destiny would have it, she never had the opportunity to tell me the best way to make sumagiyya — her strength, overflowing with sheep and flavored with dill seeds and cumin.
Sumagiyya (photograph: Laila El-Haddad)
In Gaza, sumagiyya is inseparable from weddings, family social events, and Eid Al-Fitr, the Muslim occasion that denotes the finish of the blessed month of Ramadan and its 30-day quick. The dish is constantly made for a group, stewed in huge pots and enhanced with nutty cooked “red” tahina, then spooned into bowls for companions, family, and neighbors.
I felt that feeling of local area at whatever point I was in Gaza, however not such a huge amount in Saudi Arabia, where I burned through the greater part of my life as a youngster during the 1980s. My folks were clinical experts, too caught up with tying down their kids’ schooling and fates to work over conventional dishes. The main Palestinian intifada, or uprising, was seething back home, and past ensuring we had degrees (the stateless Palestinian’s security net), their need was guaranteeing we remembered our set of experiences (“so history will not fail to remember us,” they said). Food became mixed up in the mix.
My mom was brought up in Khan Younis, southern Gaza, in the organization of her Kurdish-Syrian grandma. Thusly, her culinary collection was more Damascene than Palestinian — until she met my dad. A local of Gaza City, he frequently longed for the kinds of his life as a youngster, which put my mom in trouble from the beginning. Be that as it may, Um Hani joyfully acted the hero, sharing her solace food recipes via telephone.
Maggie Schmitt
On Eid, Baba (Father) consistently mentioned one dish specifically: sumagiyya, which Um Hani helped my mom to make. As a young lady, I returned home from school to a house thick with the smell of stewing sheep, allspice, cardamom, and tart, fruity sumac berries (for which the dish is named).
And still, after all that, I was strongly inquisitive about Gazan food and the narratives it told: of towns deleted from the guide, of spots I’d just caught wind of, of individuals I’d never met. Recipes were a kind of fortune guide to a generally undetectable, or invisibilized, universe of Palestinian history returning great before the 1948 Nakba, the year Palestinians allude to as their “calamity,” or mass ejection and dispossession. Subsequent to completing school in North Carolina, I followed that guide to Gaza, where I resided, worked, and raised my firstborn.
It was there that I understood my active culinary training from Um Hani wasn’t remarkable to me yet rather quintessentially Palestinian. Ask any Palestinian how they figured out how to flip a pot of maqlooba, and they’ll probably let you know it was through a senior’s patient guidance, not a cookbook or YouTube video. Israel’s designated spots, partition walls, and barriers might have actually isolated our families, however they couldn’t destroy our way of life. To cite Jerusalem-conceived Palestinian gourmet specialist Sami Tamimi, “Recipes rise above simple culinary directions; they typify stories, recollections and act as a demonstration of the versatility of the people who have endowed them across ages.”
Maggie Schmitt
Showing the up and coming age of Palestinians how to make a celebratory stew might appear to be trifling, improper even, considering the purposeful starvation and conceivable massacre confronting Gazans at the present time. Yet, food is as fundamental to our personality and rootedness to the land as our focuses of social information, like chronicles, libraries, theaters, and schools, which are additionally enduring an onslaught. Israel’s attack is wiping out whole bloodlines, and with them, the recollections in general and information they had.
I live in the US now, and I’ve cooked sumagiyya a bigger number of times than I can count — regardless of whether it never tastes very as hani Um’s. One event sticks out. It was May 2021, and Gaza City was being walloped in what was the fourth significant attack by Israel on Gaza in 14 years. The assault concurred with Eid, and as I watched on my screen in Clarksville, Maryland horrendous pictures of air strikes and sadness stricken moms, I unexpectedly wanted to make a pot of sumagiyya. Serving it to my loved ones that evening, notwithstanding the unfurling misfortune, was out of the blue freeing and confirming.
Last month, I again ended up in tears slashing onions and chard for sumagiyya, yet this time I was coming to respect Um Hani’s memory. Like in 2021, I was unable to turn away from the news: The recreation area where I used to take my child for night walks, the ocean side promenade where I drank sage tea with my mom, the college where I gave visitor addresses — they were all unrecognizable heaps of upset soil and distorted wire.