How making warak anab helped me understand the resilience of my culture — and myself

After years of patiently observing the women in my life make warak anab, I decided to take on the challenge while away for college in 2014. Not to brag too much, but I picked it up seamlessly and my tips and tricks have evolved since then. My quickly acquired grape-leaf-stuffing skills are a testament to the labor and care that my family put into each giant pot of perfect, juicy, melt-in-your mouth warak anab. Like in many cuisines outside of the Western world, there is no set-in-stone recipe that gets passed down. A couple handfuls of this, a pinch of that, a mug of water, a little bit of that and a little bit of this until it tastes just right. My aunts would sit with a big pot of hashweh (stuffing) and a gallery of grape leaves for hours, rolling up each leaf as easily as sealing a stack of envelopes. Growing towers of tightly wrapped grape leaves eventually made their way into a pot that would sit on the stove for at least an hour. The house would smell like heaven, and everyone knew exactly where to find me: hunched over the pot trying to get a taste before anyone else. Back then, it was easy to assume that there would be warak anab on the table at every family gathering without thinking of the work it took to get them there. While you can still find me hunched over that pot today, I eat a little slower and never forget to kiss the hands that so graciously made the food.

The more I observed the making of warak anab and other time-consuming dishes from southwest Asia, I started seeing the connections between our cooking and how Arabs care for one another. Despite the stereotypes you’ve probably seen in Western movies and in the media, painting Arabs as angry and violent, we are incredibly kind and complex people. With over 12 million words in the Arabic language, we have 24 ways to say the word "love" and 13 ways to say the word "friend." We treat friends like family, and whenever we see you we always ask if you’ve eaten a full meal yet. Apologies from our parents after family feuds come in the form of freshly cut fruit. Presents and housewarming gifts are typically food and kitchenware. The time we spend preparing and cooking meals mimics the time and detail we put into how we tend to each other. It’s custom to make meghli, a Lebanese rice pudding spiced with cinnamon and caraway, when someone gives birth. We make hareeseh, an ancient porridge-like dish made of shelled wheat and lamb, during the winter for warmth.

I’m still learning these customs and recipes, but doing so makes me feel like I am honoring family members and ancestors who are no longer with us. It’s taught me that, despite the challenges of unwanted wars, destruction of land, displacement and the deaths of family members, nothing truly dies.

While Lebanese people call it warak anab or warak areesh, there are many different names for this time-consuming dish. Palestinians call it warak dawali, Syrians call it yebrak and Iraqis call it dolma. Whatever the name, either stuffed with meat and rice or vegetables and rice, this dish is widely loved, and many fight over whose is the best. Since my family has always made the vegetarian version, that’s what I’m used to.

Preparing warak anab requires attention to detail. I learned from my mom that buying a specific brand of grape leaves that have smaller, more delicate leaves works much better, so the bite isn’t too thick. She also taught me to pick tomatoes that aren’t too firm so that there is an abundance of liquid that goes into the mixture, which helps cook the rice inside. Every little detail that goes into the making of this dish has a purpose.

It’s not just warak anab, though: Some of our other staple ingredients, such as olives and za’atar, also signify cultural preservation and identity. From the destruction of olive trees in South Lebanon, caused by Israeli shelling, according to the agricultural minister, to the Israeli government outlawing the cultivation of za’atar in Palestine, these ingredients alone are an act of resistance and preservation for Arabs and Palestinians who have faced and still face displacement and occupation today. Learning about these ingredients and how they’re grown and cultivated provides others with important context and a deep understanding of the labor and love that Arabs have for their land.

Even though I have started to dislike the word resilience — it makes me think about why someone was forced to be resilient in the first place — I can’t help but embrace its meaning. My mom rolling grape leaves, my aunts picking from olive trees on the side of the road, my late teta (grandma) preparing seasonal ingredients for the whole family — these are all acts of preservation. Since I was a little girl, especially after visiting Lebanon for the summer while the 2006 war erupted, I was constantly aware of how fast we could lose everything. Against so many odds, we are still here. We are still rolling warak anab. We carry our traditions and culture wherever we go and we carry them with pride — even when it’s all we have left.