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THE EXECUTIVE LIFE
Executive Larder	Restaurant Review

Culinary re-education

Culinary maven Dina Sarhan thinks her Egyptian compatriots are nice. Too nice.
“The Lebanese and Syrians are very particular about their taste buds. If a dish is not right, they’ll throw it back. In Egypt, we’re nice. If we don’t like it, we don’t tell.”

Not that restauranteurs are blameless. They are, she says, “willing to spend millions on the atmosphere, the ambiance, the location, but never on the food.” Consumers continue to flock to the latest trendy spot, “and they don’t know what they’re eating, so they don’t know if it’s good or bad.”
Sarhan is on a one-woman mission to improve Egypt’s gastronomic landscape. Though her business, Dina Sarhan Culinary Solutions, offers professional consulting and training, it is perhaps her “grassroots”-level work, cooking classes for amateurs and enthusiasts, that will, eventually, have the most impact. After all, like everything else important in life – charity, education, morality – good taste starts at home.

Sarhan offers a range of classes every month. At £E 800-900 for four sessions of three and a half hours, they clearly aren’t marketed to the masses, but there are plenty of people anxious to broaden their horizons. The Executive Larder sat in on a class in September and several of the students had been waiting since the beginning of the summer for an opening.

Classes are open to everyone – even children, for whom Sarhan offers special classes taught with the help of her own children – but the majority are women. There appear to be an awful lot of well-educated young newlyweds (or soon to be) who can’t even boil an egg. One young woman claimed that the only thing she could cook was eggs, but this being her first session, The Executive Larder was reluctant to test her on it.

Though Sarhan might have hopes for her students’ future contribution to the Egyptian consumer rights movement, their own goals seem a bit more humble. When asked why they had joined a cooking class, there was a resounding chorus of “our husbands!” from three-quarters of the class.
What can the aspiring chef expect for her £E 800? (Or his £E 800. Men only account for one in 12 of Sarhan’s students, but are most welcome.)

Classes are structured around the preparation of several dishes, in our case, a nice assortment of Lebanese and Syrian dishes that would be just the thing for a young bride to impress her in-laws with. Small class sizes, no more than 10 people, ensure that everyone gets a chance to participate and Sarhan’s easy, confident manner ensures that they do. Her specially built kitchen/classroom is a well-planned space with just the right amount of room for everyone to comfortably see everything that is being demonstrated.

Unlike so many of those cooking shows on television, where tidy bowls of chopped this and minced that appear on the counter as if by an unseen hand, this class starts from the beginning – roasting the eggplants and chopping the onions. That students understand the ingredients, tools and techniques they’ll be using in the kitchen is a priority for Sarhan. And for the students as well. “It’s also the little tips,” newlywed Salma El-Shayeb says. “I would use recipes, but not follow them.”
In fact, the lessons start before the actual cooking, with tips on how and where to buy ingredients. What to look for in an eggplant (smooth, taut skin, firm flesh). The difference between veal and beef (veal is the young, tender one). How to buy better quality ground beef with less fat (buy a piece of beef and then ask the butcher to run it though the mincing machine).

One challenge for Sarhan is introducing her students to new, at least for them, ingredients.

“Egyptians,” as she told me, “are not necessarily adventurous.” Even a chili pepper might, for this lot, be considered risqué. One young woman kept wanting to know if she absolutely had to add half a chili pepper to the eggplant caviar (salata rahib). Sarhan tells them, “wait until the end, you will not even remember you added it.” Even so, we’re not sure that particular student left convinced.

Pomegranate molasses (dibs al-rumman) and orange blossom water (ma’ zahr al-bortuqal) were the evening’s other new elements.

The recipes were all relatively simple, and some involved shortcuts that would surely not pass muster in Damascus. Using frozen puff pastry to make sfiha, the small pizza-like savory tarts so popular in Syria and Lebanon, puts an otherwise difficult and time-consuming recipe within the grasp of the beginning cook. And these are dressy enough dishes to serve for a party. As El-Shayeb puts it, “now we can have parties.”

If from these modest aspirations a culinary renaissance is born in Egypt, it won’t simply be a matter of good taste, it’ll be a matter of good business. “You go to places they are making a lot of money and people are just there to be there. Not eating or drinking. Imagine if you’re serving good food and good coffee. You’ll be making loads more.”

Fred Glick

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