Tabouleh is one of the more recent foods to have been caught in the culinary-rights war between Israel and Lebanon, a war adjudicated by the Guinness Book of Records wherein proponents in each country attempt to make the largest, record-breaking dish to stake their claim on ownership. It’s also happened with the chickpea dip, hummus, and the ellipsoid balls of cracked wheat and meat, kebbe. Lebanon has currently taken the lead; Israel is yet to respond with an ever-larger platter of greenery.

Amongst the dead seriousness of geopolitics, there is something loosely whimsical about nations challenging each other to make giant food to assert their possession the entire history of a foodstuff, as if the sheer weight of a dish can suck in the gravity of a food’s past. It is like claiming that the Big Banana is not just the spiritual home of Australia’s bananas but the actual origin of all the world’s bananas due to its ludicrous immensity. When you look at any of the traditional foods cooked throughout the Middle East – from borek to zaatar – it is difficult to find any particular national origins. National and regional variations maybe, but no clear origin that can be pinned down to particular states. .

Modern politics is the only possible reason to make a salad that weighs three and a half tons. You don’t make friends with salad.

As I mentioned in at least three previous posts, I’ve been meaning to cook more vegetables from the SBS food back catalogue instead of just plumbing its depths for charred meat dishes. The Lebanese Food Safari recipe for tabouleh is spot on. Until I’d cooked this recipe, I viewed tabouleh as superfluous filler that soaked up extra yoghurt sauce inside a greasy kebab. The kebab bulk filler is generally made with as much cracked wheat as possible with flecks of greenery and the occasional tomato somewhere submerged amongst the grainpile. This version is the polar opposite.

Tabouleh is a salad that I get from the garden to show off my unfading sense of smugness about what I can grow. Yes, my tomatoes are on their last legs and the parsley went to seed about two months ago, but I’m one ingredient away from zero food miles, hippies.  If I planted out my front lawn with wheat, I’d probably yield enough for a single salad.

As for the recipe, soaking the cracked wheat (burghal) in the lemon juice is nothing short of revelatory as are the proportions in the dish – more tomatoes and greens than previous taboulehs.