The International Cooking Circle at the Young Women's Christian Association

Cooking Argentine empanadas:

Among the charming methods followed by the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) in Lebanon, for drawing together people of different nationalities and for creating an atmosphere founded on understanding and mutual trust, is a small cooking circle which it holds at the Association's house in Ain el-Mreisseh every Tuesday morning, at which samples of the dishes of the different countries are presented. Every such country has a rich heritage of foods differing from any other; "if we know something of it," as someone has said, "we know things about them" — the people.

A group of the ladies of the foreign embassies among us volunteers to unriddle the mysteries of the dishes, each undertaking a full demonstration and explanation of the sample dishes special to her own country.

Lebanon opened the series, offering the foreigners "tabbouleh" and "stuffed cabbage" — whose stuffing serves for more than one dish — as purely Lebanese foods; and after Lebanon came Venezuela with its eggplant purée, chicken with rice, and banana pudding; then India with its seasoned mutton; and Greece showed some curious dishes, such as the one they call (Youvarlabia Avgholemons), along with baked fish and kataifi; and Germany, apple cake and cabbage; and the British Embassy adopted kinds of cutlets and kidneys as dishes for which its country is noted..

I attended two of the meetings. At the first, some American ladies demonstrated American dishes — meat slices, potato salad, biscuits, and chocolate cake — with captivating speed; and at the second, Argentina presented the Argentine empanadas, in which the sweet and the salty mingle so gracefully, together with coconut cake and a kind of fillet (Filet). The ladies who did the demonstrating would bring from their homes all the utensils needed to make the dishes before the audience and cook them, and also the same dishes prepared beforehand, of which they offered the audience a taste.

And here is the recipe of the famous Argentine empanadas, which resemble the Lebanese dishes only a little; perhaps setting it down will be of use to those of our readers who are fond of cooking.

Half a kilo of beef
Three hundred grams of chopped onion
Three boiled eggs
One hundred and fifty grams of olives
One hundred and fifty grams of grapes
Salt to taste
Two spoonfuls of sugar
Two spoonfuls of papika
Half a cup of water
Three quarters of a cup of olive oil

Method: Put the oil on the fire until it is well browned, and add the chopped onion to it until it wilts; then cut up the meat and leave the whole on the fire for five minutes, stirring constantly. After that add the papika and the water, then, after two or three minutes, the salt and the sugar; when five minutes have passed, take it off the fire and add to it the olives, the grapes, and the chopped eggs, and mix well.

The empanada dough: Knead 400 grams of flour with a hundred grams of lard; add to this a spoonful of salt and a little cold water until the dough grows soft. Leave it for five minutes, then roll it out until it is half a centimeter thick. Spread over it a little lard and a little flour, fold it, then roll it out afresh. Repeat this three times.

When the dough has grown thin, cut it into rounds the size of a qatayef round, and place in each a spoonful of the empanada mixture prepared beforehand. Close up the discs exactly in the manner of qatayef, then fry them in oil or in Crisco.

Such are the Argentine empanadas that you taste at the close of the cooking session; and though they may seem strange to your taste, and point to the difference between our traditions and theirs, you feel, on the contrary, that you have grown more at one with what you have tasted of their heritage, and that you are no longer that distant stranger... Nor did the Arabic proverb err which says: "If you would bring two people together, set bread and salt between them" — and perhaps that is the very aim behind this circle!!