Quotes from Diana Abu-Jaber

She is stirring a pot of leben yogurt, which is heated slowly, carefully, tenderly, and hopefully, layered with butter and onions and heady and rich as a high summer night. She cannot stop stirring because it is a fragile, temperamental sauce, given to breaking and curdling if given its way. So she must wait and stand and stir and stir and stir and look and look.

She is frying onions and working on two dishes at once, chopping eggplant and stirring the leben- a delicate mellow yogurt sauce that needs constant stirring or it will break-

She looks over, still smiling, to Sirine behind the counter, and says, Roasted lamb, rice and pine nuts, tabbouleh salad, apricot juice. Then she blows a kiss. Hanif glances at Sirine. She looks down, quick, a bunch of parsley pinched in her fingertips, rocks the big cleaver through a profusion of green leaves, onions, cracked wheat. Suddenly she remembers the leben and hurries to the big potful of yogurt sauce, which is just on the verge of curdling.

She pulls her uncle's topaz prayer beads out of her pockets and settles herself by thinking of braised squab: a sauce for wild game with motes of cinnamon and smoke.

She lifts the lid from the pan of smoked green wheat kernels and dips in a spoon. Here. Taste. He holds the spoon in his mouth for a moment. She knows what he is tasting, how the broth is flavored with pepper and garlic and lustrous, deep smokiness. And try this, she says. Vibrant vegetable greens, garlic, and lemon. And this. Herbal, meaty, vaguely fruity.

Flour and yolk and cream are all coarse- of the earth. But sugar and air and vanilla are elements of the firmament. Avis used to tell her kids: Sweets should be an evanescence, cakes and pies represent minutes, cookies and milles-feuilles are seconds, meringues are moments.

He's a Muslim , you know. Um-Nadia's voice is half-warning and half-laughter. Dark as an Egyptian. Ma! Mirielle shouts. Get a grip. Um-Nadia's grinning like it's one of her old jokes. And here is our beautiful Sirine, whiter than this. She takes a bite out of a whole peeled onion as if it were an apple.

Damaged children are all of the same tribe: I can look at any adult and recognize one instantly— we're everywhere. Lost childhood lingers like tribal scars— in an off-kilter smile or a look in the eye— there's always some sign.

Li Pin Chu tells them that if he could eat one dish every day for the rest of his life it would be sliced pork and egg in palm sugar. Han says he would enjoy some chicken stewed in onion yogurt sauce. Sirine thinks she might like some reheated spaghetti and meatballs- a breakfast that her mother used to make from the previous night's dinner.

She removes the pint of apricots, plump and exquisite as roses, and offers him one. He takes a bite and puts his hand over hers as she takes a bite, the velvety peel and fruit sugar filling her whole mouth. The air between them is complicated, infused with the scents from the bags: toasted sesame, sweet orange blossom water, and fragrant rosewater.

She takes a bite of the custardy penne cotta and it melts into a dozen separate flavors. She can smell oranges and lemons, cherry and wood, and even the soft silk and wool of Persian carpets, the smell that she thought came from Iraq.

And as long as she could cook, she would be loved.

Sirine finishes deskewering six plates of lamb shish kabobs and three plates of chicken, drizzling oil over ground beef and hummus, over smoky puréed eggplant, over a bowl of olives, and splashing four tabbouleh salads with lemon.