LOS ANGELES — I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the life and career of Anissa Helou, the cookbook author (among many titles) who is one of my favorite people on the planet. She turned 70 on Feb. 1.
For anyone needing inspiration to persist through professional highs and lows, consider the stumbling block Anissa faced a decade ago around her 60th birthday. She was finishing her most personal work to date, a book called “Levant: Recipes and Memories From the Middle East.”
Born to a Lebanese mother and Syrian father and raised in Beirut, she turned her focus to food in her 40s after a career as an art consultant. “Levant” was a full-circle project for her: Her first book, “Lebanese Cuisine,” published in 1994, had translated her mother’s cook-by-feel-rather-than-measurement repertoire into precise, illuminating recipes. With its chapters on stuffed vegetables, variations on raw and cooked kibbeh and delicate savory pastries, and with snippets of Lebanon’s history and culture on nearly every page, it was the most authoritative catalog of the country’s cuisine ever produced in English. If you ask me which book I’d most like to cook through from cover to cover, it’s this one.
