Antoun Issa (bite-sized)

On journalist Antoun Issa's menu: Ashta without rice, burnt chicken drumsticks, and cheesecake with chocolate. 

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TFM is produced and edited by Lauren McWhirter with original music by Russell Torrance. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:05

Ashta is your first Ashta pudding without rice is your first food memory. So how do you first of all how do you make it without rice? I don't know. Ask her.

SPEAKER_00 0:14

If I knew how to make it, I'd make it. I asked her the other week. I'm like, can you make this thing? And she forgot. Like, what are you talking about? Like the the Ashta without the rice, I used to make it as kids all the time. I haven't had it in so many years. Um well she makes it. Uh and um it's I guess you know it's got a fl it's very floral. Uh I think it's our version of custard. It's uh it's very floral, it's a bit more white than custard, custard's got a yellow um colouring to it. Uh, and it's got um, you know, rose uh water, orange blossom, um, and then when you let it cool, it just creates this really thick skin on the top, which I absolutely loved because you just dig your spoon in and you have the softness of the texture underneath blended with this kind of like hard custody top, with this floral I need it right now, but uh it's uh yeah, that's my first memory, and those, and you know, she used to pour them in these very 80s-looking crystal checkered bowls. Um and uh yeah, that's that's like that's the memory of like happiness for me.

SPEAKER_01 1:16

What um and so when would she make it? Just randomly, you know.

SPEAKER_00 1:20

When you come home from school, it would just be there on the table. There were like six or seven plates, and then there's four of us kids, and so you know, it'd be a competition to who could eat the most.

SPEAKER_01 1:28

So we have a version of this also in our culture, it's called Arizogalo, and it was also my mum would also put it in the cut, glass. They were never crystal. I don't think they were crystal. They weren't crystal. Um I linked this food memory to a Lebanese film memory box. Did you ever see that? It was an art house film. Um it's about a transmission of memory between generations, focusing on a mother's teenage diaries and tapes from the 80s. Was Ushta the easiest and earliest way into a world that your mother came from, into her stories of Lebanon?

SPEAKER_00 2:02

Yeah, I think so, but I think it's more than that because um actually I don't think it's I don't think it was from her background. I've got to ask her and clarify that. She learnt a lot of her cooking with her mother-in-law, my grandmother in Australia. Here. Yeah. So this is the Anat part. This is the part three. And in part three, this is where food becomes really sensitive. I mean, food is always in this book. That's another theme. I'm actually glad I'm talking to you about this. It's a theme in this book that's kind of like subtle and h and and not as prominent, but it's there. I always reference the food.

SPEAKER_01 2:31

So she would have had Ashtar in back in Lebanon.

SPEAKER_00 2:34

No, I don't think I'm not sure. I've got to ask her, but I know she got most of her cooking uh skills from my grandmother in Australia, and cooking was her way of healing. She formed, she came from Lebanon broken, she was obviously incredibly depressed before we knew what depression was. Um, and she was, you know, crying every day, her family was still stuck in the wall, there was no, you could you couldn't speak to them. She couldn't speak to her own mother, right? And so she was in deep depression. And my my grandmother here um, you know, just took her under her wing and and and it was in the kitchen where mum learned how to heal, and she healed with my grandmother.

SPEAKER_01 3:16

So your second food memory is burnt barbecue chicken drumsticks. Oh, I like this one. I like this one because of the audience, the people that are involved in this story.

SPEAKER_00 3:24

Right. Tell me about it. So when in the 80s and the 90s, I hope you have like Gen Z listeners, because I eighties and 90s in suburban Australia was a different world.

SPEAKER_01 3:35

Well, this story is a bit the castle movie Meets the Griswolves Meets. Yeah. He died with a falafel in his hand.

SPEAKER_00 3:40

It was such a pleasant, it's such a pleasant time. There wasn't any internet, you had, you know, telecom at home, no mobile phones, pre-mobile phones. Like, and all you had were each other, your people in the neighborhood. That's who you had in your social network. That is it. And because of that, you had, you know, my dad built this brick makeshift barbecue, which is really impressive for him because it's not really that handy, um uh in the backyard in our outer suburban, semi-rural home. And, you know, we were like one of three ethnic families in the whole town. It was a very white town, and all our neighbours were white by this Maltese lady, which is I think why she gravitated to my mum so much. Um and you know, he'd just throw, he know, he'd come with this village vibe. This is how life was in the village in Lebanon. So he came with his like village kind of like vibe of like neighborhood, neighbours are your family kind of mentality. Um, and you know, we had a gate between us and the next door neighbor. Oh the the the board, not on the street. Right. We would just go back and forth. Like it was like they would they wouldn't come through the front door, they'd come through the back door. Like it was, it was just it was a village. Our court was a little village and it was really beautiful. And he would always throw these barbecues and have um, and it was like a really good, you know. I always see Australia as like a pot that's still melting because it's still very new and we're all migrants from different places. And the melting happened in this kind of suburb and in this neighborhood, in this court, where dad, you know, we would have my very Lebanese relatives who could still at that stage their English was even worse than what it is. Uh I mean it's better now, but it's it was terrible, right? And you had all these Anglos from the neighborhood, and we just all just like eat, and they have never seen Lebanese food before, right? They're baked beans, white bread, hundreds and thousands, and veggie mite. So, you know, they were just in love with the food that we had to offer them, except for the burnt charcoal chicken. And so I remember the burnt charcoal chicken because like it would be black on the outside, I'd dig in, and then it'd be pink on the inside. And I'm like, I don't think this is and I was like four or five years old, and like this isn't working, Mum. It's nothing they stopped doing that. But it was just, you know, I remember the smoke, I remember the I just remember the joy, and I just remember, you know, everyone in the neighborhood just being around and just it just loving what was what was there.

SPEAKER_01 5:57

Your third food memory is cheesecake with chocolate icing. This is something that mum made.

SPEAKER_00 6:02

Hmm. It is. And uh she'd been experimenting for a while, I think in the 2000s, with um cheesecakes. And um when I went overseas, I went overseas in 2011-ish, um, for about a decade, and you know, Gallivant around the world, Lebanon, Washington, Europe, being a journalist. And uh every time I'd come home, I'd walk in and I'd open the fridge and she knew I loved the chocolate icing iteration of her cheesecake. There would be a cheesecake with chocolate on top, and she would never say anything. She would never, you know, pre-worn on the drive home from the airport, she wouldn't say anything. She just would wait for me to open the fridge and find it in there. No one had touched it. None of my other siblings with the grubby hands got to it before I got to it. And it was just, and this comes back to food being an expression, like it's just it's a communication.

SPEAKER_01 6:54

And she would leave it in the fridge for you to discover, wouldn't he?

SPEAKER_00 6:57

It's a communication tool.