Tabbouleh 4eva

Tabbouleh is not a grain salad; it’s our emotionally un-scribable dish

There was never a question about whether tabbouleh would be in the cookbook. There was a question about whether I could write it without getting emotional. Eventually, I managed it.

Here is the thing that most people in this country have been told about tabbouleh, and which I will now take gently away from you: it is not a bulgur salad with some herbs in it. It is a herb salad with some bulgur in it. That's not a preference or a regional variation or my family being difficult. It's just what the dish is. If you can see the bulgur before you see the green, something has gone wrong and it happened long before you got to the table.

I know this because I spent a lot of my life chopping parsley. And really what a load of chopping I’ve dedicated my life to. Perhaps in my final moments this will be what flashes before my eyes, knives, boards and various delicious produce staring up at me invitingly.

I couldn't tell you what we ate on any particular day growing up as there was always so much variation — but the shape of a day, the making of a meal was always the same. Being given a job because everyone was given a job. There was more often than I can even recall, tabbouleh. Me, the chopper, wrestling bunches of flat-leaf parsley on my board, more than seemed reasonable, more than could possibly be necessary, and the instruction to keep going. My knife work was always a little, let's say, “interesting”. It was allowed to be just so for exactly as long as it took someone to notice, and then a hand would come over mine and reposition my fingers, and there'd be a comment about how I was bruising it rather than cutting it, and then they'd go back to their own board and I'd carry on being bad at chopping but perhaps in slightly better form.

Our tabbouleh recipe, from Sohaila: the cookbook

Nobody sat me down to teach me. That's not how it works. You were just near the food, for hours, and eventually the food went in.

The smell of parsley on your hands is one of those things that doesn't wash off properly, and I'm glad. It's green and slightly bitter and completely specific, and it hits now and again in the Sohaila kitchen on an afternoon, where I'm transported back to being the interesting chopper that I was.

Why this recipe, and not something more impressive? Every cookbook has a dish that the author is quietly using to explain their entire deal. This is ours, this is Sohailas.

Tabbouleh is a dish that cannot be rushed and cannot be faked, and it requires many hands or a lot of patience, and it rewards neither speed nor cleverness. There's no technique to hide behind. It's parsley, mint, tomato, a small amount of fine bulgur, lemon, oil, salt. Six ingredients and one of them is salt. Everything depends on the quality of what you bought and the care you took with the knife, which is another way of saying everything depends on how much you were paying attention.

That's the whole philosophy of the restaurant, honestly. We've built a menu with some genuinely ambitious things on it — Chris's mind blowing cuttlefish salad, Ellie's Mardi Gras poussin - recipes that took time and deep energy. But if you want to know whether a kitchen loves you, order the simplest thing on the menu. Tabbouleh will tell you everything.

I've been trying to work out why this dish specifically means safety to me, when it's not warm, it's not rich, it's not the food you'd design for comfort if you were starting from scratch.

I think it's because it was always there. Tabbouleh isn't the centrepiece. It doesn't get carried in. It's on the table before you sit down and it's still on the table when everyone's slumped and talking too loudly, being picked at, going slightly softer as the lemon works on it. It's not the event. It's the room the event happens in.

And it's the dish that means people are coming over. Nobody makes tabbouleh for one. The quantities don't work — you cannot buy a small enough amount of parsley, the maths simply refuses. So it's always a signal: there will be more of us than usual, and it will go on longer than planned, and somebody will be sent to chop.

The recipe as we make it at Sohaila, is the recipe my beloved aunt sent over to me.

We use a fine bulgur and we barely soak it — just the tomato juice and the lemon, ten minutes, no more. It should be a texture in the salad, not a base for it. We're heavy-handed with the mint in a way that some people will find unorthodox. And we salt at the very last second before it goes out, because tabbouleh salted early is tabbouleh in a puddle, and I've watched that happen enough times in many kitchens to want to write it in capitals.

We’ve written it in weights, because that's what a cookbook has to do. But I want to be clear that this is a betrayal. Nobody I learned it from has ever weighed a single component of this dish in their life, and the correct measurement for parsley is "keep going, more, that's still not enough."

Make it for a lot of people. Give someone a knife.