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Sami Tamimi was born in 1968 in East Jerusalem. Yotam Ottolenghi was born the same year in West Jerusalem. They grew up on opposite sides of the same city without knowing each other and did not meet until many years later in London, where they built the Ottolenghi restaurants together and wrote both Ottolenghi: The Cookbook and Jerusalem.
Falastin is Tamimi's own book. The title reflects the Arabic pronunciation of Palestine, as Arabic has no p sound.
The book is structured the opposite way round from most cookbooks. The reportage comes first and the recipes follow from it. There are portraits of cheesemakers, a wine producer in the West Bank, women's cooperatives and cooks in Gaza, and 110 recipes that grow out of those encounters.
The food is musakhan, chicken with sumac, onions and pine nuts on bread, alongside maqluba, knafeh, freekeh and large quantities of za'atar. Written with Tara Wigley from the Ottolenghi test kitchen.
It won the Fortnum & Mason Cookery Book of the Year award in 2021.
Format: Hardback
Number of pages: 352
Language: English
First published: 2020
