Lebanese food is extremely popular in the West now. Few people have never heard of hommos, tabouleh, falafel and other of our favourites, not to mention so-called pita bread. Yet those famous dishes keep some of our preferred eating habits unknown to the outside world. For instance, no matter where you are from, I am sure you have been told from birth not to eat fruit that isn't ripe. We on the other hand are too fond of sour flavours to miss out on green fruits. Green grapes have a special name, khosrom, and are eaten in different circumstances than ripe grapes. "Jararingues", to use their vaguely frenchized name, are hard green plums that grow in the spring every year. They are hard because they're very green, and we eat them with salt. The jararingues are kept in a bowl of water near a small bowl of salt, so that the latter will cling to their wet skin when they're dipped in it. I'm not sure if this kind of plum ever gets riper, or if it does once the season has passed the way almonds do.

The western world is familiar with almonds in their stripped or even salted state, but how many have ever seen an almond the way it is on a tree? Well, it's a strawberry-sized thing with a bright green velvety skin that makes the lips itch if it's too dry. The white heart of it is deep within that thick envelope. The almond has two seasons: one at the beginning of spring, when almonds are picked before they ripen, and then the ripe season. During the first season, the heart is actually not shaped yet: if you open it, it is just a mass of transparent jelly. The envelope however hasn't reached its maximum hardness. It is soft and deliciously fresh. At that time of the year we eat the almonds whole, popping them straight from the tree into our mouths, with water and salt just like the jararingues. The season is short however, and pretty soon the almond skin becomes like soft wood -- NOT something you want to close your teeth on! That's when we crack them open, throw the envelope and savour the fresh white heart.

What about pistachios? They too are famous when salted, but have you ever tried green pistachios? It feels funny to call them that because only their very heart is the bright green colour that bears the fruit's name. When freshly picked, they have a soft leather-like skin in beautiful tones of purplish reds. Peeled off, it reveals a hard shell. If the pistachio is ripe enough, the shell is slightly open under the pressure of the fruit at its heart, which bulges out to grant us a glimpse of more crimson. When the shell is still sealed, it's safer to use a nutcracker to open it! The local name for this fruit is "festoq Halaby", "Aleppo pistachio". Every summer when the season returns, the roadside carts of mobile merchants pile up with the purple-red pyramids. Into a paper bag they go by the kilogram, and quickly do they disappear, in front of TV or while sitting around with friends. They have this kind of taste that one can't get enough of.

There are two plants, or rather a fruit and an herb that we are fond of but that Westerners don't seem to appreciate. The fruit is the medlar, a light-orange fleshy fruit with a huge stone that grows in large clusters. I remember walking down a San Francisco street and gaping with astonishment at a medlar tree that was creaking under the weight of unpicked fruit. I would have relieved their tree for them with pleasure and no charge! I actually did that just recently in New Jersey, regularly "removing" small sour apples from a tree -- delicious.
The herb is ba'le, which I believe is called purslane in English. In New Jersey, USA, just like in Versailles, France, it is a weed. To us, it is a salad herb and the star of our fattoush salad, a national dish. Next time you're removing weeds from your garden, try washing some tender purslane leaves and adding them to a salad. They're almost tasteless themselves, but they make a difference.

I have to add another plant to the list, I nearly forgot to mention it: sumac. I know that this word never goes in the USA without the word "poisoned", but I eat of it in every shape and with everything possible. I sprinkle it on my labneh (the grandpa of yogurt), on eggs, popcorn, and mix it in the salad sauce. I even sprinkle it on bare Lebanese bread, or munch it straight from the branch in its un-ground form. Sumac grows on bushes, in the shape of clusters of lentil-sized, dry berries. The berries are actually just a stone protected by a dark red velvety skin. It is the skin that has the unique sour taste, like a mix of lemon and salt, that makes it such an important element of our spice closets. The skin is ground to a rough powder, that can be used as is or mixed to thyme powder, sesame seeds and salt to obtain zaatar -- another basic and necessary condiment in Lebanese cooking. I suspect the reason why it is considered posionous in the States is that theirs is a different, non-edible species of sumac. The word at any rate is directly derived from summaq, the Arabic word we use for it.

I'm sure children the world over have their own treats they pick from nature despite parental disapproval. Lebanese kids are no exception. When I was little, trotting the countryside with my cousins, our parents didn't mind us eating rose petals (they taste as delicious as they smell) but they had something else to say about hibiscus flowers. They tried keeping us away from these large, bright red flowers by saying they were poisonous -- to no avail. It's funny because they said the same about pink laurel, which truly is poisonous, and we stayed away from it, but we knew better about the hibiscus. I would delicately bite the pollen off the long pistil; it felt powdery and funny in my mouth, and naturally left golden yellow traces all over my face and shirt. I'd then detach the petals one by one, and very carefully pull off the pistil at the base. The goal was to end up with the little crown of green sepals that forms the base of the flower, without breaking off the little white cone that adheres to it: that's the ovary. If you can pull off the pistil without breaking it, you're rewarded with the sweet nectar of the flower, that normally only bees get to taste. After licking off our prize we'd stick the cone to our nose and play Pinocchio.

Our absolute delight was the flower we call hummeyda, which springs up in amazing quantities at the end of the rainy season. Hummeyda means "little lemon", precisely what makes it such a treat: it has a thick, fleshy, juicy stem with a delicious sour taste. In English it is called Soursob; I think it is a clover flower (for two reasons: It grows among fields of clover, which seem to be its leaves, and the clovers taste practically the same -- I tried). We would gather up huge, heavy bouquets of them -- the stem is so gorged with water that the small yellow flowers really weigh nothing in comparison. We'd wash them, then bring out the salt and start munching happily, spitting out the stems once we had chewed out all the juice. Our parents kept saying that we shouldn't eat them because cats pee on them, but that only made us wash them more thoroughly.

I never tasted thistle hearts, only witnessed the long and risky process of extracting them. The thistles I have in mind are tall plants a man's height, with flowers that are literally a ball of very pointed thorns. I don't know who first had the idea of removing the thorns one by one to see what was inside, but he or she provided today's kids with yet another delicacy.

I'll end with a note not about what we drink, but how we drink. In Lebanon it is not rude to drink from the bottle, because that does not involve actually touching the opening with one's lips. To "suck" from a bottle is actually weird because that prevents other people from using that bottle, and it's just not natural to us to not be able to share it. Our drinking technique, which takes a while to master, is the following: we tilt our head backwards and lift the bottle above it, and then we tip the latter so that the water flows down into our open mouth. The competent can swallow in that same position without stopping the flow. The difficulty is in controlling the quantity, because if you let too much water into your mouth too quickly, it's going to overflow in your nose and all over your clothes, too. Kids use a finger or too to reduce the opening and make it easier. I still make the mistake of trying to drink while thinking of something else, and as a result end up with large (and I hate to say it, telltale) splotches of water on my clothes. However, I can proudly say that I managed to drink this way from the large jerricans we used to store water during my scout camps in France. The girl scouts had no idea what I was trying to do. At that point in time, I had no idea that they didn't do the same!

Article and illustrations © Joumana Medlej