Back to the Kitchen: A Conversation with Reem Kassis
Written by Daisy Zeijlon
One of the central aims of this project is to demonstrate the ways that home cooking has been and continues to be a source of strength and success for women. When we set out to find a twenty-first century woman whose career reflects this notion, it didn’t take long to land on Reem Kassis.
Kassis is an award-winning Palestinian cookbook author and food writer who was, for a long time, determined to stay out of the kitchen. She left Jerusalem, her hometown, at 17 to come to the United States for college. By all conventional measures she thrived in what she calls her “first career”: she earned multiple degrees in business, moved to London and built a successful career in management consulting.
Then she gave birth to her first daughter—a forced and long overdue pause during which she reconsidered what she wanted her life to look like. Having always loved writing but never having the time to pursue it, she put pen to paper with her first cookbook, The Palestinian Table, to document the rich culinary traditions of her upbringing. Her second, The Arabesque Table, was published in April 2021. She is the first to point out the irony of her second career, which she built in the room she was intent on leaving behind.
We sat down in late October to chat about her powerful, complex and ever-changing relationship with cooking.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How and when did you first start cooking?
It depends what you mean by cooking. I didn't really start cooking cooking until I came to undergrad here in the US. [Growing up], if my mother ever went out with my father, or they were both out of the house, I would feel some freedom in the kitchen. She didn't like me being in the kitchen at all. I would experiment—I remember I was obsessed with chocolate cake and churros, all kinds of desserts, nothing that was traditional. I would tinker with stuff. But I actually cooked cooked a full meal for the first time my freshman year at [the University of Pennsylvania]. It was spring break, and I was one of the few students who did not have any idea about what was going on. So I was stuck in the dorms with a bunch of other international kids. I miss[ed] home and I miss[ed] my mother’s food. I called my mother and I picked, of course, one of the more complicated dishes ever, and she walked me through making it. From there it kind of ebbed and flowed. If I was busy, I didn't cook as much, but I experimented a lot starting then.
Why didn't your mother like you being in the kitchen?
On the surface of it there was this whole, “It’s my kitchen, you're a kid, leave it clean, don't mess with it.” But I think there was a deeper level of why do you even want to be in the kitchen? Why do you want to cook? I think food is perceived in some respects as low brow—staying home is seen that way. All the women in [my mother’s] family are educated with at least an undergraduate degree, if not more. And still, the majority of them are the caretakers. They’re the homemakers. They’re the ones that cook. If they work, they work in jobs that allow them to pick up the kids after school. I think on some subconscious level, my mother wanted me to have a different future than that.
So you came to the US for school and then—tell me about your first career.
So, my father owns a business back home. At 17 I thought, “I'm going to go to the US, I'm going to study business. I’m going to come home and run my father’s business.” I thought business meant studying how to become a CEO. I got to Penn and I had no idea about finance, operations. I didn't even have calculus before I got there. So it was a very difficult first semester. But my intention had always been to work in the business field, and I ended up going into consulting. The main reason I went into that was because it's what everyone wanted to do. I was miserable. I remember the first few weeks on the job, I would walk into the office and think, I made it! This is what everybody wanted! Then within a few weeks after that, I was like, this is it? This is what everybody wanted?
I ended up transitioning, but it's not as smooth as it sounds. It's not like I went from [consulting] to cooking. I went back to school, I got another graduate degree and then worked in executive search. I then got pregnant and had my daughter, and that's really when things clicked and I went back to the kitchen.
What was it about the moment of having your daughter that prompted your career change?
I had been running since day one. I hadn’t stopped to think about what I want, what I care about, what gives me a sense of satisfaction. I was ticking boxes and in hindsight, I was ticking somebody else's boxes—not mine. When my first daughter was born, I was so exhausted from being in this race, and I decided I wanted to be a stay-at-home mom. My mother knew me pretty well and she said, “No, you're going to go crazy within a few months.” And she was right. Within six months I was like, “I love this, but I can't do this. I need to do something else.”
I've always loved writing, [but] I always thought I wasn't good enough. I initially started writing for The Huffington Post—a weekly or biweekly parenting blog. We were in London at the time, and Ottolenghi was getting very big. I would get upset because we'd go into his delis and it would say Israeli food. Even if he didn't call it Israeli, everyone there would. But this is what we eat at home. A lot of it is Palestinian food. We make this stuff at home in such a delicious way, [and] people should know how to be able to cook it themselves. I said to myself, “I want to write a book. This way people will know what our dishes are and how to cook them.” I didn't realize what it entailed. I didn't know a single person in the cooking world. Nobody! I went to Google “how do you write a cookbook”. I reached out to a literary consultant who reviewed my proposal and said that [I would] never get it published [without] a platform. But when my publisher got my proposal, they said they’d never seen recipes like this, and the writing’s great. From there it kind of took off into a life of its own.
To this day, I’m more content-slash-satisfied with what I do, but I still look at it with this lowbrow perception. Now I can say I'm a writer, which feels a little bit more legitimate. I have two books, I write for major publications. I guess I can say I'm a writer but even then, I hesitate. If I said I write about politics or news, I would feel like I'm doing something more meaningful, even though I know on an intellectual level that [food] is important. My friend was just texting me saying my article is the second most popular one on The New York Times. I should be excited. But I'm always qualifying it. I still can't shake this feeling that food and the kitchen is basic. It's the lowest common denominator. It’s the one thing everyone does—everybody has to eat. Not everybody has to read about what's going on across the world or understand finance or know about science and technology. Those things, to me, feel like they're important for the world to evolve. But food is kind of like, eh. I try to get rid of that feeling.
How do you engage with the broader political issues you mentioned in your writing? Is food a lens through which you can do that?
I try to do that. Sometimes I’ll get asked to develop a recipe, [and] I generally refuse if it's not pegged to a specific article. I see myself more as a writer than as a chef. Food is just the vehicle through which I get these stories across. I want [readers] to understand the story of Palestinian people that has long been overlooked or misunderstood. I grew up in a way where everything was political. Anything you wanted to talk about was [related to] the conflict and the politics of the region. Food allows you to tell that story in a less off-putting way.
This story that just came out [in The New York Times] is about olive oil. It's about my dad's village, very apolitical. But you understand through these people's histories that there was a people in this village whose town was taken from them, who were forced to be unable to attend to their groves, their movement was restricted. So food is the lens through which I'm telling you the story, but you get to understand [these people] on a much deeper level. And maybe that will let you come to your own reckoning about what you think about what's going on in the world today.
“I see myself more as a writer than as a chef. Food is just the vehicle through which I get these stories across.”
With food as your profession, do you still enjoy cooking at home? Is it still pleasurable?
No, but that's for a totally different reason because my kids don't eat! They’re so picky. The irony is not lost on me.
It’s frustrating, but on a personal level I still enjoy it very much. But that's also why [when] people ask [if I’m] going to open a restaurant the answer is an unequivocal no, because you have to be consistent all the time. It's not about experimenting. It's not about cooking for people that you love. It becomes a job. I like cooking because it's a creative endeavor. It's relaxing. It's something that allows you to experiment and to push boundaries. If something comes out good, [you can] eventually share it with other people.
You talked a little bit about writing your first cookbook. What was the process for the first one like and how was it different for the second one?
The first one, I had no idea what writing a cookbook entailed. I read a lot of cookbooks to understand how [to] write a recipe and to visualize what they would look like. The head notes and the chapter intros, that was a more creative process. From there, the publisher does the book and there's the photoshoot and all these things that to me were very new. The PR part of it was also very different the first time around, because I didn't know what I'm supposed to do to get the word out about this book. I just assumed the publisher would do everything, and they did quite a bit. And the book did quite well on its own.
For the second book, the process was different in a couple of ways. The writing itself was much harder because the topic was very different. The first book, I’m just trying to transcribe my family's recipes and capture the story. In a way I knew everything I had to say. I knew every recipe I needed to include, I just had to compile it and test it and perfect it. For the second book, it was a much bigger project. It was research-based. I’m trying to portray a modern Arab table while at the same time explaining the history that leads up to it. There’s so much to cover. At the same time, this is a cookbook. It’s not a PhD dissertation, and it can’t be 500 pages, and it still has to be appealing to the average consumer. So that part was a bit more difficult.
Do you have plans for any more?
No. But that’s what I said after the first one too. It was truly my intention that it would be my first and last one.
Look, I have ideas for other books [but] I just don't particularly feel like writing one right now. I know there are people who publish a cookbook every single year but for those people I think it's a business. For me it's about what is the story I want to tell and is this the right time to tell it? Until that clicks in my mind, I prefer to work on writing different articles and having the freedom to write for different outlets.
Circling back to gender, do you think that food writing is a gendered field?
I think food in general has been something that is ascribed more to women than to men. But I think it's very hard to delineate this right now, because you have a rise in gender nonconforming people as well. I think anyone who doesn't fit into a traditional mold of let's say, a white male, has historically struggled more to make it into the food world. I think it's changing, to be honest with you. I look at most of the food writers that I know, and you see a lot more people of color, a lot more gender nonconforming people. I notice in my own work, there is demand for people who are telling a less common story. My only fear is this [is] a temporary fad that's going to disappear, and we’re going to go back to wanting your standard fare. Or are people genuinely interested in going towards a more holistic, comprehensive and understanding society?
“I think anyone who doesn't fit into a traditional mold of let's say, a white male, has historically struggled more to make it into the food world. I think it's changing, to be honest with you.”
I hope so.
I hope so. You know, they're interested in my writing for now, but who knows? Until when? Because I don't write about mainstream things.
How does your mother feel about your career?
I think she's super proud. She loves cooking and she loves writing. It was a different generation with a different set of opportunities and a lot more obstacles. Especially given that she and my dad live in Jerusalem, and that society is more paternalistic—it’s not as open. You're Palestinian in Israel, there are 1,0001 different obstacles on top of the ones you already face as a woman. So I think for her seeing what I do, it's almost like—not that she gets to live through it, but these are things she's always cared about and she sees that I'm able to do it in a way that's impactful and that makes her feel proud.
Aside from your daughters being picky right now and refusing all of your delicious food, what about their relationship with cooking? Is it important that you teach them to cook?
My biggest fear is that I'm raising my kids outside of their native homeland. My husband’s also Palestinian, so we’re trying to raise Palestinian kids in an American country. They go to school and there isn't a single other Palestinian kid in their class. Of course, we have some Palestinian friends, but my fear is always they're not going to have that connection to their roots, and I find that connection to be grounding and defining for anyone, whether you're Korean or French or Chinese or anything. These cultural roots and the values that come along with them are meaningful. I'm always afraid my girls are not going to have them. So food, it’s not the only way but it's one of the ways that I try to keep them connected. I don't like to force it down their throats—neither figuratively nor literally—but they see me cook, and they see the books and articles that I've written. They’re six and eight. So they're absorbing these things and then eventually, when they're adults, they come out. Even me, I grew up there and I didn't appreciate any of what I had until I left.
My final question: what’s for dinner tonight?
Let me check. I have a running list of what I cook every night going back to 2014. Tonight's leftovers. Tomorrow’s fajitas. Yesterday we had hashweh, which is rice with ground beef topped with pine nuts and roasted almonds. I make a big batch of it and then we have it over two days.
That's so cool that you have a list going back to 2014!
So that [started] when my daughter was born. In London we would order all our groceries, so I needed to plan out what I was cooking so I would know what to order. It's continued since.
I see how my cooking has changed. I know in 2014 I was recipe testing for The Palestinian Table, so you see a ton of very traditional recipes for lunch or dinner. Then I'm done with that and you start seeing us going back to schnitzel and pizza and spaghetti and all kinds of stuff that kids might like more. But you can pick any random day and I can tell you what we ate.
All images are from Kassis’ website.