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‘Too sticky. Too saucy. Too weird’: could I persuade my son to eat the food of my heritage?

Before she became a mother, Samantha Ellis secretly judged other parents who let their children subsist on white bread and pesto-pasta. And when her son was born she couldn’t wait to share the Iraqi Jewish food of her ancestors. Unfortunately, he had other ideas My family takes food very seriously. So seriously that when my mother’s family left Iraq in 1971, limited to 20kg of luggage each, they found room for not one but two rolling pins. The truth is that, having used the rolling pins, I think they were right. Born in England, I grew up on my father’s stories, too, of going to a Baghdad street stall to buy hot samoon, Iraqi bread shaped like a teardrop, with a puffy middle and a crunchy crust, with amba (mango pickle) oozing out of it. But he left Baghdad even earlier, in 1951, in a mass airlift along with most of Iraq’s Jews. I grew up in Britain, homesick for a place I’ve never been to, and will probably never see. There are now just three Jews left in Iraq.Scattered across the ...


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