Labneh is a tangy, silky Levantine cheese spread that can be served as a dip with pita bread or smeared on a toasted bagel. The cheese can also be rolled into balls, encrusted in herbs, and preserved in golden olive oil.
In winter there was rain that fell for days without end and pulled from the almond trees green fruit so tender that you wanted to cup them with your hands and protect them like the fuzzy heads of newborns.
This seasonal memory is one of the corners where my husband’s and my childhood intersect, he on a kibbutz in Israel and me on an island in Greece.
My mother would mix lemon juice and salt into our leftover yoghurt, wrap it in white linen and hang it from a hook until it had drip, drip, dripped out all of it’s whey and become an impossibly tangy, thick spread. As we had no refrigeration this alchemy was both practical and delicious.
In Israel a sloe eyed yemenite friend showed me how to salt sheep’s milk yogurt, roll it into small, herb encrusted balls and preserve them in jars of golden green olive oil. This she taught me was called Labneh. We cooked as we danced to the radio in her tiny kitchen, twirling and laughing.
Both Hanaan and I grew up with the tang of fresh white cheese spread on our bread.
One I spring as I was running through the newly greened hills of Jerusalem I heard the bleating of goats in the still air. Following the sound, I left the dusty, sun beaten path and entered the cool of the forest. There beneath the pines, a beduin tent had sprung up between the pink cyclamen blooms.
A young woman called to me. I stopped my running and salty with sweat approached her. She stood in robes that flowed like dark water, beckoning me to follow her into her tent. She and her mother plied me with green mallow soup, flat, fire-scorched bread and thick creamy goat cheese. They fed me with their own hands like a baby bird, laughing at my clumsy attempts at eating one handed with no utensils but a piece of torn bread.
An Arab shepherd is searching for his goat on Mount Zion
And on the opposite hill I am searching for my little boy.
An Arab shepherd and a Jewish father
Both in their temporary failure.
Our two voices met above
The Sultan’s Pool in the valley between us.
Neither of us wants the boy or the goat
To get caught in the wheels
Of the “Had Gadya” machine.
Afterward we found them among the bushes,
And our voices came back inside us
Laughing and crying.
Searching for a goat or for a child has always been
The beginning of a new religion in these mountains.
-Yehuda Amichai
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