Egypt freedom fighters

Gaza's Food Heritage

"I always watched my mother cook," says Um Ramadan, as she peels purple garlic cloves by her kitchen window, which looks out on a Gaza City street teeming with early-evening activity. "But I didn't really learn to cook until I married and my mother-in-law taught me." Her husband's family, like her own, were fishing-people from the Palestinian port of Yaffa, exiled before either he or she was born. Yaffa—now part of the Tel Aviv—Yafo conurbation—is no longer what it was, but we can still taste it. From generation to generation, its sophisticated style of seafood cookery has been passed along, a thread of memory preserved in the deft gestures of hands, the precision of palate....