Category Archives: Ingredients

Gaza “War Recipes”: Cooking as Survival and Resistance in Displacement

By Noha Atef

In Gaza’s displacement camps, cooking has taken on a new meaning. It is no longer just a routine task; it has become a form of survival, storytelling, and resistance.

Since October 2023, thousands of Palestinians in Gaza strip have been forced from their homes, taking refuge in makeshift tents, often with little more than flour, canned goods, and the clay ovens they crafted. Amid this devastation, a form of digital documentation emerged: Instagram reels of people cooking with what little they have. These are not typical food videos. They are war recipes, or wasfat harb, shared in the middle of crisis.

A steaming pot sits over an open flame.
Fig. 1. The recipe for ‘Tuna Pot,’ described by the content creator as “one of the war recipes,” is designed to maximize the use of canned tuna provided in food aid to help overcome food scarcity. Image courtesy of the author.

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Between March and July 2024, I analyzed 100 of these Instagram reels, all produced by displaced Palestinians in southern Gaza. Using a mixed-method approach that combined content analysis with close discourse analysis, I explored how food becomes a medium through which people express resilience, preserve cultural identity, and push back against the flattening gaze of humanitarian imagery.

Much of the content comes from mothers improvising traditional stews without their essential ingredients. In each video, the act of cooking transcends the immediate need to eat and becomes a demonstration of resilience. The American Psychology Association research describes resilience as the process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, or significant stress. It is not the absence of suffering, but the ability to persist despite it. In these reels, resilience is visible in the determination to recreate a dish, to feed a child something warm, to maintain rituals amid ruin.

The impact of war on the naming of dishes is particularly striking. Traditional meals, adapted with whatever substitutes are available, are often labeled as “false” or “orphan” versions. For example, maqluba, a beloved Palestinian dish typically made with chicken or lamb, is referred to as false maqluba in the camps due to the absence of meat. New dishes have also been invented based on aid parcels, often called “resilwar inventions” or “war recipes.” One such example is luncheon meat shawarma, a substitute for beef shawarma, where the canned meat is colloquially known as “war meat.”

Two dishes of eggplant fattah sit on a white board. A hand holding a spoon hovers above.
Fig. 2. An adaptation of Eggplant Fattah, a vegan traditional dish. Titled by the creator as “The Amazing Eggplant Fattah, Best Salads in the War.” The dish is elegantly plated, with a carefully chosen cooking spot to enhance its visual appeal. Image courtesy of author.

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Some recipes carry names that reflect the emotional landscape of displacement. Displacement Molokhia marks the first meal prepared by a family after fleeing their home. Tent pies refer to the first baked goods made by a woman in a tent for her family. These names do more than describe what’s on the plate. They document a collective experience and underscore the adaptability of displaced Palestinians navigating extreme hardship.

These recipes are about far more than nutrition. They serve as psychological and emotional coping mechanisms. Resilience, in this context, is not just about enduring. It is about adapting creatively under pressure and maintaining a sense of purpose and identity in the face of chaos. Additionally, the traditional dishes were emphasized as a symbol of home, which explains the garnishing of these meals despite the scarcity of food, likely done with the intention of showcasing Palestine to the world in the best possible light. Every traditional Palestinian dish was carefully garnished and neatly presented.

In contrast to mainstream media coverage that often portrays displaced people solely as recipients of aid, these reels offer a counternarrative. They present Palestinians not as passive victims but as agents of creativity and resistance. Cooking, normally coded as a domestic act, becomes political. It offers an alternative narrative to one of victimhood. It says: we are still here, we still cook, we still care. Through these everyday acts, people reassert identity, continuity, and connection in conditions designed to erase them.

The message of resilience through food was powerfully underscored by the chosen settings in many videos. While displaced Gazans often selected what appeared to be a ‘nice’ place to cook, this typically meant a spot near a surviving tree, a powerful symbol of Palestine, or one decorated with a keffiyeh. Some framed their shots tightly to avoid capturing the surrounding devastation. In many instances, people returned to the rubble of their destroyed homes (these videos and research were published prior to the brief ceasefire in January 2025), retrieved what dishes they could, and baked sweets directly among the ruins. They shared coffee and pastries in the remnants of their kitchens. Sweets, often associated with comfort, celebration, and happiness, carried a deeper message when prepared among the ruins: we love being at home, even if it’s been destroyed.

Two hands mix brioche ingredients in a small white bowl. Destroyed buildings and rubble can be seen just behind the bowl and in the background.
Fig. 3. A Palestinian woman baking brioche in her demolished home, after retrieving her kitchenware from beneath the rubble. Image courtesy of author.

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Palestinian food has always been tightly woven with questions of land, belonging, and resistance. But these war recipes reveal a new dimension: food as protest, as witness, as archive. In the absence of proper kitchens or ingredients, displaced Gazans are creating a digital record of survival, one that blends taste, memory, and defiance.

References

American Psychological Association. Building your resilience. https://www.apa.org/topics/resilience.

Heldke, Lisa. Exotic Appetites: Ruminations of a Food Adventurer. New York: Routledge, 2003.

Holtzman, Jon D. Uncertain Tastes: Memory, Ambivalence, and the Politics of Eating in Samburu, Northern Kenya. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.

Masten, Ann S. “Ordinary Magic: Resilience Processes in Development.” American Psychologist 56, no. 3 (2001): 227–238.

Scott, James C. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985.


Noha Atef is an Egyptian media scholar, educator, and consultant. She is an Assistant Professor of Journalism at the University of Galway. With a background in journalism, she transitioned into academia, focusing on digital humanities and media studies. Atef has held positions at universities and think tanks in the UK and Canada. As a consultant, she advises journalists and researchers in the Arab and Euro-Mediterranean regions on producing impactful social science research, including policy papers and industry-focused studies. Her work, published in both English and Arabic, has reached audiences across the Arab world, Europe, and Asia. She is also a recognized media commentator, providing analysis on various platforms.  

“Like the Genuine Moca”: Ersatz Coffee and Confederate Nationalism during the American Civil War

By Anne Sarah Rubin

Coffee, I must have coffee,
and if anyone wants to give me a treat,
ah!, just give me some coffee!

Although written by J.S. Bach and the librettist Picander in the 1730s, the Coffee Cantata’s homage to the world’s favorite stimulant certainly rang true in the Civil War South. Recipes for coffee substitutes pepper the pages of Confederate newspapers and reminiscences. Elite white women wrote down their personal formulas and debated the virtues of one concoction over another, while scientists weighed in on the chemical composition of different tinctures. Coffee, because it was entirely imported, was one of the first commodities affected by the Union blockade of Southern ports.[i] Doing without coffee, or cheerfully drinking an ersatz variety, became a symbol of patriotic sacrifice, like wearing homespun or a palmetto hat.

“Good Coffee Sweet Potatoes” reads the heading handwritten on the back of a Confederate $100 bond. We can imagine the writer, probably Martha Gourdin DeSaussure, at her home in Charleston during the war, following the steps she carefully enumerated. More likely it was one of the three Black women the DeSaussures enslaved who did the work: first peeling the sweet potatoes, and slicing them into strips, 3/8 or ½ inch thick, then cutting the strips “into squares so as to average the same size.” The squares then had to “dry in the sun three days,” before they could be bagged up. The final step was to “parch a good brown, grind and make as you would coffee berry.”[ii]

A group of Black freedpeople stand, with hoes, over a field of sweet potatoes. Another group sits on the ground beside them, sorting the crop.
Fig. 1. Freedpeople planting sweet potatoes on the Hopkinson plantation, Edisto Island, SC, April, 1862. Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/2010651644/

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In fact, Confederates turned to almost anything that could be burned, ground, and steeped to make a bitter brown liquid. Some, like rye or chicory are still used today; others, like okra seed, acorns, cotton seeds, or sorghum fell by the wayside after the war. Each had their champion. “To see the earnest face with which each lady discussed her own particular mixture, and her great delight when some courteous old gentleman smacked his lips, and declared, he ‘had not tasted anything so like the genuine moca [sic.] for years, Madam,’ was most edifying,” recalled one Confederate matron.[iii]

An etching depicts a white woman in voluminous dress kneeling and praying in an outfitted cave
Fig. 2. This depiction of a white Southern woman living in a cave during the siege of Vicksburg prominently displays her coffeepot, a touch of home in uncomfortable surroundings. Adalbert John Volck, “Cave Life in Vicksburg,” in Confederate War Etchings, Creative Commons image from The Metropolitan Museum of Art https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/421364

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Of course, people could simply have done without. No one ever died for lack of coffee, and the vegetable and grain varieties all lacked caffeine, so they didn’t provide much physical stimulation. In fact, one advocate for acorn coffee noted that he no longer suffered from headaches, not realizing that he was no longer suffering from daily caffeine withdrawal.[iv] Psychologically, though, there was something to the ritual of drinking something hot, brown, and slightly bitter. It represented a moment of normalcy, a chance to offer some hospitality, to warm up, to momentarily forget one’s troubles.

When the war ended, coffee returned to the South. Freedmen’s Bureau and US Army rations (distributed to both Black and white Southerners in the months after the war) sometimes contained rye coffee.[v] Southern cookbooks published after the war trafficked heavily in nostalgia for antebellum abundance and rarely mentioned harder times. Maria Massey Barringer did include a recipe for Blockade Coffee (made of rye) in her 1867 Dixie Cookery, billed as “a practical cook-book for southern housekeepers,” but few other regionalists did the same.[vi] In fact, Mrs. Porter’s New Southern Cookery Book tartly noted that “those who are not particular as to quality, but only want something that looks like coffee” could try “roasted acorns, chick peas, beans, rye, cocoa shells, burned wheat bread, dried and roasted turnip, carrot and dandelion root,” but pointedly did not recommend any of them.[vii] Mentions of ersatz coffee became staples of nostalgic reminiscences, about hardships overcome without interrogating real struggles and hunger. They were given with almost a wink and a laugh—suffering for coffee was funny, actual starvation was not.

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[i] Mary Elizabeth Massey, Ersatz in the Confederacy: Shortages and Substitutes on the Southern Homefront, Southern Classics Series (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993), 72-73. Andrew F. Smith, Starving the South: How the North Won the Civil War, 1st ed (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2011), 14.

[ii] The receipt book was donated to the Museum of the Confederacy by Martha Gourdin DeSaussure, the wife of South Carolina Brigadier General Wilmot Gibbs DeSaussure. It appears to have been compiled sometime after the Civil War. Frances M. Burroughs, “The Confederate Receipt Book: A Study of Food Substitution in the American Civil War,” The South Carolina Historical Magazine 93, no. 1 (n.d.): 31–50. The recipe is on p.6 of the book, pp 44-45 in the article. The number of enslaved people is from the 1860 slave census. Porcher describes sweet potato coffee as “used on several plantations in lower Carolina.” Resources of the Southern Fields and Forests, 400.

[iii] “What the Confederates Ate,” by Clara Minor Lynn VHS, 2.

[iv] [No Title], Arkansas True Democrat, January 9, 1862.

[v] Orders for Rations Issued, 1865, Governor Sharkey, Mississippi Department of Archives and History.

[vi] Barringer, Dixie Cookery; or, How I Managed My Table for Twelve Years. A Practical Cook-Book for Southern Housekeepers (Boston, 1867), 108.

[vii] M. E. Porter, Mrs. Porter’s New Southern Cookery Book and Companion for Frugal and Economical Housekeepers (John E. Potter & Company, 1871), 379.

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Anne Sarah Rubin is a Professor of History at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, where she was the 2016-2017 Lipitz Professor of the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences. She was also the Associate Director of the Imaging Research Center from 2017-2020. Her most recent book is the co-edited memoir, The Perfect Scout: A Soldier’s Memoir of the Great March to the Sea and the Campaign of the Carolinas (University of Alabama Press, 2018). Dr. Rubin’s first book, A Shattered Nation: The Rise and Fall of the Confederacy (UNC, 2005), received the 2006 Avery O. Craven Award from the Organization of American Historians, for the most original book on the Civil War era. Her study of the place of Sherman’s March in American culture and history, entitled Through the Heart of Dixie: Sherman’s March in American Memory was published in September 2014 by UNC Press. The project also has a multimedia component, which can be found at http://www.shermansmarch.org. She is currently working on a project called A Mouthful of Nothing: Food and Famine in the Civil War South, 1860-1868.

Food, Community, and Resistance in Hyperinflationary Venezuela

By Oriele Benavides

The Venezuelan crisis of 2014-2015, broadly characterized by a drastic drop in oil production and prices and harsh international economic sanctions, caused absolute disorder and intensified a diaspora that continues today. Effects included hyperinflation, beginning in 2015, that reached stratospheric levels when it hit 103,008% in 2018. At that moment, the government’s rhetoric presented the situation as an “economic war,” offering a framework that emphasized a polarized vision on the matter, while shifting focus away from its own responsibility in the managing of the crisis. The production and distribution of food was one of the sectors most affected by the crisis. In the collective memory, these harsh years are remembered via ingredients that came to represent time: the year of the mango, the year of the cassava, the season of the eggplant or the Chinese bean, and so on.

Two initiatives took place during this time that used food to draw commonalities in the face of destruction. These examples underscore the value of what French sociologist Claude Fischler calls “commensality,” the human tendency to eat together, which, according to Fischler, is “one of the most striking manifestations of human sociality.” They also point to a collective dimension that is activated to ensure the same existence of this “commensality.”

A handmade sign features red and black text promoting La Alpargata Solidaria.
Fig. 1. Image from La Alpargata Solidaria Facebook group. Image courtesy of the author.

The first, “La Alpargata Solidaria,” began in October 2015 in the Venezuelan capital of Caracas as a network of economic solidarity and responsible consumption. Its name refers to a Venezuelan proverb: “put on your alpargatas, because what’s coming is joropo.” “Alpargatas” are the local peasant’s footwear par excellence, a symbol of rurality in a country that has been drastically urbanized since the oil boom of the twentieth century. The joropo, on the other hand, designates the festivities of the countryside and its frenetic music and, by extension, its dance. The phrase “a ponerse las alpargatas porque lo que viene es joropo” thus refers to fast and intricate national music as a metaphor for ensuing difficulties and challenging and frantic dance as a way of naming tricks to overcome them.

An orange circular logo features two dancing figures.
Fig. 2. Image from La Alpargata Solidaria Facebook group. Image courtesy of the author.

The network, which at its largest reached about 180 families, was mainly organized around a monthly “collective consumption” that distributed vegetables from one of Venezuela’s oldest cooperatives, Cecocesola. The vegetables were weighed and sorted to be distributed equally among all participants. The consumo became an intense day of activity, lasting up to seven hours, with a parallel market of local products, childcare for caregivers, a music team curating the playlist, and a shared lunch prepared on-site using ingredients from the consumo, which varied according to Cecosesola’s monthly production. Even though the cost of the products purchased through Cecosesola was barely below the market price, I think it was clear to those of us who persisted in the initiative that the real reason for being there was to preserve the certainty that we were able to create something in community, even under the circumstances. Beyond, or rather around, the food crisis, the “Alpargata Solidaria” became a platform for care and solidarity at the beginning of the emptying of the city and rampant precariousness. The initiative lasted until the pandemic, which wiped it out, like so many other collective experiments.

“Aguantar la pela” is a Venezuelan idiom that has variants in other Spanish-speaking nations. It means to tolerate with fortitude the blows of a misfortune that is perceived as arbitrary and is expected to be temporary. Around the same time of the Alpargata, also in the heyday of the use of certain social platforms, a group with that name emerged. The “pelas” at that time were many, but again, this community began to organize itself through the sharing of recipes that substituted unattainable, missing, or scarce ingredients. In this way, a peculiar collective recipe book emerged, permanently nourished by the more than 70,000 participants, featuring a menu consisting of mostly vegetables and some cheaper proteins: plantain larded meats, carrot mayonnaise, cakes without flour or eggs, cassava, pumpkin or beet arepas, sardines cooked in every possible way, and many more dishes. In addition to addressing the decline in per capita calorie consumption and the absence of basic processed products such as sugar, flour, or oil, the site was characterized by a nostalgic and communal desire to recreate everyday flavors that had suddenly become inaccessible.

Jacques Lacan, who, like Sigmund Freud, resists the idea of a collective unconscious, nevertheless says that certain idioms concentrate forms of jouissance that are shared by a society. It does not seem trivial to me that the names of these two experiences are based on popular Venezuelan expressions. Their character reveals how colloquial language sediments the collective intelligence with which people resist precarity and violence, even if this resistance ultimately fails. They are gestures that, planted at the intersection of language and the symbolic dimension of food, encode a desire to continue living in community. Both “La Alpargata” and “Aguantando la pela” were ways of imagining (and enacting) survival that went beyond mere necessity, even if they were born out of extreme hardship. It was as if the language and communal practices around food outlined the situated strategies through which life—in all its excessive dignity: flavors, metaphors, companionship—is grounded and sustained.

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Oriele Benavides is a PhD candidate at Princeton University. With a background in Latin American literature and psychoanalysis, her research interests include Latin American novels, feminisms and social movements. Her work has been published in Mitologías Hoy, El Taco en la Brea, Mentekupa, and Latin American Literature Today, among others.

Curry Goes to War: Indian Army Field Rations in World War Two

By Pradeep Barua

The Indian Army participated in both  world wars in the twentieth century. During the First World War (1914-1918,) 1.3 million Indian soldiers fought for the British Empire. Another two million men joined the Indian Army and fought for the allies in World War Two (1939-1945).[i] In the latter case, feeding this massive army in various theatres of war, ranging from the jungles of Burma (Myanmar) to the deserts of North Africa to the frozen Apennines of Italy, proved to be a major challenge for the Army.

Alongside the challenges of the battlefield and terrain, the Indian Army was also a multi-faith army comprised of Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs. In addition to religious differences, Hindu and Sikh soldiers were subject to caste considerations. Food and rations had to be prepared along strict guidelines to adhere to caste and religious sensitivities. Two cooks or Langris were assigned to a company of soldiers (about 100 men). Depending on the company’s composition, the cooks would be Muslim, Hindu or Sikh, and of a particular caste as needed. The presence of the Langris ensured that food for the different religions and castes was provided for in the right way. The Indian Army also supplied stackable cooking pots, so soldiers could prepare their own meals in the field. This was especially important to high caste Brahmin Hindu soldiers who had to prepare and eat their own food in order to preserve their caste status.[ii]

Frontline British soldiers had access to 24-hour ration packs that included tinned bully beef, spam, steak, kidney pudding and sausages. These were not acceptable to Indian soldiers, and it was subsequently a challenge to keep them fed on the frontlines. To aid in this, dehydrated lentils, fish, vegetables, and fruit were provided to Indian soldiers engaged in combat.[iii] Indian soldiers, like their British counterparts, also foraged for fresh eggs, fish, and poultry as the situation allowed.

Whether it was lentils, fish, or meat, the favorite form of preparation was a curry. It was slow cooked in a pot and served on an enameled metal plate roughly 12 inches across.[iv] The slow cooking tenderized hard dehydrated lentils, dry fish, and even tough cuts of meat. Crucial to the curry was the addition of a blend of powdered spices that each Indian soldier carefully hoarded and carried into the frontlines. A base curry spice blend included turmeric, cumin, and coriander. To this, people added other spices such as chili, black pepper, cinnamon, or nutmeg depending on regional preferences. The curry was usually eaten with a flat wheat bread called the chapatti, which was made every day by the Langris. The curry and the chapattis became synonymous with Indian troops in various theatres of conflict. Many civilians in the combat zones, who were assisted by Indian troops, fondly recall the food that the Indian soldiers shared with them. In Italy, for example, villagers today remember with gratitude the curries and chapattis that Indian soldiers distributed among them to relieve starvation during the Italian campaign in World War Two.[v]

Food traditions of the Indian Army developed at the regimental level. The regimental messes evolved and enshrined curry recipes over periods of up to a century.[vi] This knowledge was passed on to the regiment’s battalion cooks. On festive occasions these dishes were cooked in the rear areas and transported to soldiers in forward positions.

What follows is a small representation of curry recipes unique to Indian Army Regiments:

Assam Regiment:

The battalions of this regiment fought mainly in Assam and Burma during the Second World War. An iconic dish is Machoor Tenga Jhool or Fish Sour Curry.

A bowl of red curry with seafood.
Fig. 1. Machoor Tenga Jhool or Fish Sour Curry. Image courtesy of author.

Jammu & Kashmir Regiment:

The battalions of this regiment also fought in Burma during the Second World War. Its iconic dish is Rogan Josh or Mutton Curry.

A bowl of brown curry with mutton.
Fig. 2. Rogan Josh or Mutton Curry. Image courtesy of the author.

Sikh Regiment:

The battalions of this regiment fought in all the major theatres of war that the Indian Army participated in during the Second World War. Its iconic dish is Sarson ki Saag aur Makki ka Roti or Mustard Greens Curry and corn flat bread.

A plate of green curry with a flatbread.
Fig. 3. Sarson ki Saag aur Makki ka Roti or mustard greens curry and corn flat bread. Image courtesy of the author.

Ultimately, the Indian Army regiments enshrined regional customs and traditions. Food served an essential purpose in maintaining these regional identities. The Indian soldiers’ curry rations played a vital role in ensuring that the Indian Army’s morale and well-being was in the best condition during the Second World War.

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[i] See Pradeep Barua, The Late Colonial Indian Army: From the Afghan Wars to the Second World War (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2021).

[ii] “An Army Marches on its Stomach,” National Army Museum, UK, https://www.nam.ac.uk/explore/army-marches-its-stomach

[iii] Kristen Ann Ehrenberger, “Dehydrated Rations for Indian Soldiers in the Second World War,” H-Nutrition, 22 June 2017, https://networks.h-net.org/node/134048/discussions/182894/dehydrated-rations-indian-soldiers-second-world-war

[iv] “Tales From the Supply Depot: Indian Army Enameled Plate,” 18 May 2015, https://hatchfive.wordpress.com/2015/05/18/indian-army-enamelled-plate/

[v] War and Chapati: The Role of Indian Soldiers in Italy during WWII, documentary produced by Assocoiazione Universarte and directed by Harvinder Singh, https://globalhistorydialogues.org/projects/war-and-chapati/

[vi] Regimental Zaikas: Indian Army Regimental Dishes (Bangalore: ASC Centre and College, 2019).


Pradeep Barua is Professor of History at the University of Nebraska at Kearney. He is the author of several books on South Asia and military history including Gentlemen of the Raj, The State at War in South Asia, The Military Effectiveness of Post-Colonial States, and The Late Colonial Indian Army.