A celebrity _ interview
Can you keep a kitchen secret? By William Dobson
In rural Devon, among the gently undulating green of the English countryside, the street name Tumbling Fields couldn’t be more apt. Here, with a little babbling brook at the end of her garden and a herd of cows grazing in the field next door, Bethany Kehdy, cook, writer and entrepreneur, has made her base and, more importantly, her kitchen; the peace and tranquility a far cry from a more chaotic upbringing, jolted between war-torn Beirut, her ancestral mountain farm in Baskinta and Houston, Texas. A 172
Sitting in her very English kitchen, freekeh, kishk and an array of spices incongruously spread across the worktops, the scent of onions being fried with garlic pervades the air. “It’s the quintessential smell of Lebanese home cooking,” Kehdy explains, “and, even now it instantly transports me back to my childhood kitchen, my teta slaving away at the stove, making tabkh as my jeddo read in his armchair, waiting to be fed.” Like so many Lebanese, it was the hand of her grandmother that stirred her appreciation for good, honest food, taking pleasure in the produce of the country. After parading another of Lebanon’s famed assets to an international audience, as a competitor on Miss World, Kehdy traveled the globe “in search of unknown opportunities.” Eventually, she found herself in England with her British husband on a bitterly cold February morning, trying to adopt a (slightly) less itinerant lifestyle. “Struggling to acclimatize to the howling wind and rain,” she says, “I threw myself into the kitchen, cooking the food of my ancestors
the only way to cope. Out of my labors, Dirty Kitchen Secrets, my Lebanese food blog, was born.” In time, Kehdy has begun to embrace British culture – if not the weather – and, so too, she says, the British are starting to embrace hers. “It’s an incredibly inspiring place, diverse and multicultural, with food available from everywhere around the world. At the same time, it feels wonderful to see people take such an avid interest in my heritage and background.” The response has been astonishing; her modern take on Lebanese and Middle Eastern classics has seen her become one of the few to make a successful transition from amateur blogger to full-time author, with a debut cookery book, The Jeweled Kitchen, coming out this July. “Ever since I can remember, I’ve had a constant urge to show people the true colors of Lebanon and the Middle East. Every nation has its pros and cons, and I’m compelled to highlight ours exactly as they are. To be able to do that for a living is an indescribable feeling.”
Added to that is Kehdy’s creation of Taste Lebanon, which offers boutique culinary tours of the country, showing it at its most raw and honest. “I take people to places a lot of locals won’t even have heard of,” she says. “It’s not just about eating, but about discovering how things are made and the importance of food in Lebanese culture.” Kehdy describes how she shows people the full diversity abundant in such a tiny country, from olive groves in the north, to wild zaatar fields in the south and everything else in between. While Kehdy’s life may be in the quiet idyll of the English West Country, her heart is still very much in her homeland, and promoting the cuisine of her country remains both her passion and her job – her “raging appetite for home” constantly steering her focus back to Lebanon. “Making and sharing the food of my heritage satiates not just my appetite, but my longing. I’ve managed to find a form of therapy and a sense of belonging.”
©Sarka Babicka
Food blogger Bethany Kehdy has turned her passion for Lebanese cuisine into a flourishing career