Another Time, Another Place, Another Taste

Last year, we spent our holidays in Lebanon. It was the first time for my husband and children and it was after more than 20 years absence for me. Lucky we are, lucky we were !

The picture above was taken by my husband during a tour in our olive orchards. He told me that what he was seeing for the first time did not differ from what he constructed in his imagination when I used to describe the village for him. In some of the orchards, olive trees alternate with fig trees.

During this time of the year, my mother used to prepare jam with the figs gathered from our orchards. First she will dry the figs and then prepare the jam adding to it sesame and almonds. I remember the taste. I remember us in our early teenage, me and my brothers with our Peruvian born cousin, who came back to Lebanon with his parents like many Lebanese migrants around the beginning of the seventies seeking the good life, spending the summer days walking from our house to his house, listening to music, discussing our latest readings and eating my mother's fig jam. My mother was desperate, the jam was for the winter, when fruits will become scarce in the two village stores. She would laugh at our teen's appetite and do more jam until our return to school would put an end to our lazy and gourmet summer days...

Yesterday I made some jam for my family, freshly picked raspberries, blackberries and strawberries. We invited my brothers and their families, two of them live in the same city as us, and my father for a saturday morning breakfast with home made crêpes and red jam. They sat on the terrace, me and my sister in law in the kitchen supplying the crêpes. They discussed Lebanon, Politics and the recent Israeli agression. My older brother is Aounist, my other brother is Haririst (Sanyourist he corrected me) and I am none of these...The debate was intense. At some point, my husband had to moderate the discussion . I was allowed only one intervention or two when I finished preparing the crêpes. I told them to read my blog.

Then I sat with my dog beside me and left them debating again and again and I ate my crêpe with red fruits jam and remembered our summer days in Lebanon and my mother's fig jam.