A Dish Called Home
Edible Archives
Food in WANA is an edible archive—a testament to the lands that have fed civilisations and the people who have kept their culinary legacies alive. It is a cuisine of movement, migration, and memory—woven together not by flags, but by soil, trade, and time.
Take one of our featured dishes: Musakhan—soft taboon bread soaked in golden olive oil, spiced sumac onions, and slow-roasted chicken—a dish as much about identity as it is about flavour. It is a ritual of the olive harvest, a celebration of the first pressing of the season’s oil, a dish that ties the people of Palestine to their land, labour, and lineage. Just as the land feeds its people, the people feed the land—tending its trees, harvesting its fruit, and honouring its gifts.
To eat Musakhan is to taste history, to partake in a meal passed down, remembered, and reclaimed. It is a dish born of necessity, reverence, and resistance, embodying the deep, unbreakable bond between food, land, and heritage.
A sip of cardamom-laced qahwa, the warm stretch of khubz, the delicate layering of Eid ma’amoul—these are not just flavours, but stories written in spice, grain, and fire.
To eat is to remember. To cook is to preserve. To pass down a recipe is to resist erasure. A meal is never just a meal; it is a map of our ancestry, a testament to those who preserved tradition through war, exile, and displacement.
Tonight, as we share this meal, let us remember: to cook is to keep a culture alive, and to eat is to honour those who came before us.
What dish carries the story of your people?