They were not the first to flee. The Lebanese have been emigrating to more prosperous pastures since long before the civil war. The Syrians too. One country they went to in droves is Brazil. - there are about 4 million Lebanese and Syrians in São Paulo alone. Most emigrated at the end of the 19th century during the Rubber boom, intermarrying with Brazilians to produce completely integrated younger generations, most of whom don’t even speak Arabic. These younger Arab-Brazilians may not have learned their parents’ mother tongue but they certainly learned to appreciate their cooking and have kept it as their main link to a land that is often described to them as a lost paradise.
When I visited São Paulo, I went to several Lebanese restaurants. I was curious to see how traditional Lebanese dishes had survived throughout the generations and so far away from their source. I met some of the owners and what struck me most was how faithful they had remained to their dishes, leaving them mostly unchanged. Not only that, unlike most restaurateurs in Lebanon and Syria, who make a distinction between dishes served in restaurants and those that are home-cooked, they had many home-cooked dishes on their menu.
At Arabia, the fanciest of São Paulo’s Lebanese restaurants, I sat with Leila Kuczinsky, the delightful owner who spoke Arabic with the regional accent of her parents’ village in the mountains near Zahleh. She served me dish after dish to taste and her menu included many specialities like shish barak (tiny dumplings cooked in yoghurt), which I had not seen served in a restaurant before. When I expressed my surprise at seeing this homemade dish on the menu, Leila was unfazed, telling me that most Arab-Brazilian restaurateurs considered it quite normal to serve whatever they ate at home. In fact some of them, like Casa Garabed, had even turned their homes into restaurants, where they too offered dishes like kibbeh labniyeh (kibbeh cooked in yoghurt) and manaqish kishk (a kind of pizza/crêpe topped with fermented yoghurt and burghul). She added that for her, preserving culinary traditions and native dishes was a way to keep the connection to the old country.
What was even more interesting was that because of the size of the Arab-Brazilian community and their integration into Brazilian society and life, several of their dishes are now very much part of the national repertoire. Ask any Brazilian, young or old, if they want sfiha and they will immediately know what you are talking about. Admittedly, the sfiha they serve in Brazil is not like the one we serve at home. In fact, the triangular, savoury pastries filled with greens or cheese that Brazilians know as sfiha are called fatayer in Lebanon. The original sfiha, a speciality of the Beka’a valley town of Baalbek is a square, open savoury pastry filled with minced meat. An émigré from Baalbek must have started making them when (s)he arrived in Brazil and over the years, the term came to describe all savoury Levantine pastries, including fatayer, much in the way that hommus is now used in many European languages to describe different kinds of dips. Confusing? Inaccurate? Possibly, but what difference does the name make, as long as the dish survives?
