Lahm bi’ajeen, meat pies that come in many forms, aren’t a fancy food. They’re a convenience.
In Lebanon, the most cherished variety of lahm bi’ajeen is sfeeha baalbakiyyeh (sfeeha from Baalbeck), pockets of meat inside dough pinched into squares. Sfeeha baalbakiyyeh tend to report for duty as a roadside snack on road trips east of Beirut. It is the obvious choice on visits to its birthplace of Baalbeck, one of the most energetically charged places in our country of fallen empires.
The summer before the 2019 protests in Lebanon and the catastrophic financial collapse, I took my friends and their foreign partners to a butcher just up the street from Baalbeck’s historic Palmyra Hotel. My friend, Bethany, who is a chef, had taken me to the same butcher a month before, and I decided to share the secret spot with a chosen few. Both times, I saw the meat grinded, portioned, folded, and pinched, and within 10 minutes, we were eating a piping hot kilo of sfeeha on a weathered bench outside Baalbeck’s Roman temple complex.
There are different versions of sfeeha, varying in dough or minced meat, depending on the region and baker; however, they all follow the same basic formula: a ground beef mix with a bread base. The Jnoub variety, which are like mini meat pizzas in that they’re open-faced, palm-sized circles of dough, is my personal favorite. More than 20 years ago, it was the chosen sustenance for the droves of visitors who came to offer condolences during my jeddo’s funeral in our village in South Lebanon. Lemon wedges and salt plates were passed around with the platters of pies as a reprieve from the solemn recitations on loud speakers. For days, the reheated rounds became our breakfast, lunch, and dinner because no one had the energy to cook.
I thought I’d never eat another sfeeha after that week, but it remains my preferred version of lahm bi’ajeen. On subsequent drives to our village in the south, after I’d shed the association of the food with the grief it soothed, we used to pick up palm-sized, open discs of meat spread from the Al Wafaa butcher and restaurant in Zefta, a town in South Lebanon. Eating them in the car before they got soggy in the paper bag was key, but pairing them with ayran (a savory yogurt beverage) or Pepsi was optimal.
Almost a year into the COVID pandemic, my dad and I headed south from Beirut to escape the monotony of city life under lockdown. As we made our way down, we stopped at Malhamet Jabal Amel, a butcher on the Saida coastal road, and bought fresh pies for our car lunch. They were generous with their meat filling and the issue with delicious sfeeha is you rarely stop to photograph them as you are eager to eat them while they are hot. But, I did want to remember the name of the butcher and I loved the graphics they used on their packaging, so I quickly took a photo of the paper bag.
On every single trip my dad and I took from Beirut to the South, I learned about a piece of southern history. Through this butcher, I learned that “Jabal Amel” is another moniker for the South. When we stopped at Al Shareq for desserts once, I learned about the seven Shiite villages of Palestine. Another time, we were forced to detour through a seaside passage in Jiyyeh that took us to Saadiyat, and I learned that the former Lebanese president, Camille Chamoun, used to have an old mansion there. Through that, I also learned more about the 1976 Damour Massacre, an unsettling reminder of the country’s Civil War history. On another drive with my dad, I insisted that we stop at the Temple of Eshmun, northeast of Saida, after passing its highway sign for years. It was my dad’s first time to the deserted Phoenician place of worship.
In 2021, six months into a two-year stint in California, I was feeling homesick and alone. I decided to take a 45 minute journey and head to a museum, but what pushed me out the door was the Armenian bakery near the museum, famous for Lahmajune (Armenian for lahm bi’ajeen). While their version didn’t taste like home, they were good enough and provided the comfort I needed. It was the highlight of my excursion—and not just because the museum galleries turned out to be closed that day.
During the latest war with Israel, as my family and I lost motivation to prepare meals, sfeeha graced our table repeatedly—sourced from Lakkis, Safwan, Abou Abdo, and other small bakeries near our temporary home above Beirut. On the days my dad brought home paper trays of sfeeha, I would lose count of how many I’d eat as we talked about the latest airstrikes and killings across the country.
We ate sfeeha as we heard that the entire city of Baalbeck was told to evacuate. We ate sfeeha as we saw more people become displaced. We ate sfeeha and watched Baalbeck’s columns, which had withstood earthquakes centuries ago, facing genocidal jets. We ate sfeeha and watched.
Lahm bi’ajeen was once again the food of bereavement that comforted me, the flavor that hugged my insides. The only thing that topped it was my dad’s homemade version of the dish, herbed meat spread on pita and then toasted on a little grill, with a side of hummus and fries.
When I’m at home and not scarfing them down in a passenger seat or out of a box, I try to create the perfect bite. A sprinkle of lemon, a dash of salt. When more fixings are available, a drizzle of pomegranate molasses, a smear of red shatta, and a dollop of laban if there’s no ayran to wash it down. Poetry aside, this is also an attempt at reducing the number of pies I can easily inhale on my own. Being a communal food shared with a family of big appetites creates anxiety: will I get enough? I’m still bad at stashing leftovers in the fridge I only share with my cat for fear that they won’t be there when I open it again. If I mindfully prepare each pie, I won’t let scarcity dictate my emotional satiety.
This tactic hasn’t worked so far. I think I just love the tangy warmth too much.
In this last war, our village was destroyed by the Israeli army. My grandparents’ home, all of my relatives’ homes, and all of our fruit trees were reduced to piles of stone and dirt. The Israelis have refused to exit our border towns and “allow” us to return. For over a year, my dad and his brothers used Al Wafaa as their place of southern pilgrimage because it was the closest they could get to going home.
After seeing squashed buildings in Beirut with my own eyes, I knew that viewing the violence solely on our devices made it exist in a separate reality. In February, after an extended deadline for Israeli withdrawal, I went back to our village with my dad and uncle. The assault only sinks in when you see it in real life, when you can see the breadth of it.
As of writing this, the village is now accessible to residents but it is not safe. Unexploded ordinances aside, there is also the continued presence of Israeli forces surveilling and dictating where residents are allowed to go and what they are allowed to do on their own land. Drones circle overhead, especially along the border wall where the Israelis have claimed a sliver of territory as their de facto buffer zone. My jeddo’s grave, his mosque, my uncles’ building, and some of our groves fall within this inaccessible zone. I worry that while the Israelis may not physically occupy the borderlands, neither will we. I worry it will remain the barren wasteland they have turned it into, but I wonder if that’s what the land needs for it to heal itself.
The rest of my family need to take that drive beyond Al Wafaa to see what’s left, and to believe that what’s gone is truly gone. Sometimes, I fear that what’s left will get absorbed by the colonial entity before they get the chance to see it.
Lahm bi’ajeen has been the fast food that bandages my wounds and calms my hunger for safety and comfort for years—whether on a trip to Baalbek, on drives from Beirut to the South, as an expat living abroad, or during times of war. I’ve come to appreciate these pies as a dependable staple that has lodged itself into my core memories of places I can’t reach anymore, places that are cornerstones of my family’s unintentional traditions and our collective heritage.
Please pass the salt.
Farrah Berrou
Farrah Berrou is a wine & culture writer based in Beirut, Lebanon. Her work explores themes of collective processing, identity as it relates to the everyday minutiae, and the impermanence of memory. Currently, she creates video essays and writes a weekly Lebanese culture newsletter,Aanab News.
- Farrah Berrou
