Homecoming Fatteh

“For my first night back, we’re having chicken fatteh–a layered dish of toasted bread, chicken, onion, spices, and pine nuts covered with a velvety yogurt sauce. It’s so lush and lovely, I eat recklessly, like an amnesiac with no awareness of anything but the table, the sweet sadness of return, an the moon hanging like a sigh just beyond the long dark fields.”

Read. This. Book. If not for the recipes, then for the style. Diana Abu-Jaber is a lovely writer, and she knows exactly how to evoke the sentiment in the reader. When I read this sentence, I think of my own homecoming foods, remembering my days at boarding school when I couldn’t cook for myself. I would call my mother weeks before coming home, asking her what they were having for dinner, pressing the phone hard to my ear as though listening hard enough would bring me back to roast beef and yorkshire pudding, to spaghetti and meatballs, to rotisserie chicken and oven-roasted potatoes. When I finally arrived home, she would cook as I commanded: always lasagna, beef in tarragon mustard sauce, and swordfish with watermelon salad. I was a nomad, faded from my home. My sister barely remembered when I lived there. When I was gone, I was a ghost, a few books and an empty bed to suggest that I used to belong. Eating was coming home, and as I filled my belly with warm food, I stopped fading and became real again.

For Diana, the food that does this is this fatteh, and I can see how. Even not having grown up with it, there is something comforting about the warmly spiced, steamed chicken, the creamy yogurt sauce, the sweet bite of onion. I served the dish with roasted vegetables and tried to imagine my own homecoming, which now seems so far away…