Dubai: This Ramadan club tells stories linked to recipes from different countries
A March night in Jumeirah, where a villa is bubbling with chatter, the aroma of baked sea bass and stories spun around fables on a balmy Ramadan evening. Many of the 400 guests are strangers to each other, as they broke bread seated across one another on tastefully dressed iftar tables. The guests at the Ramadan Sagra Supper Club listen to spirited tales told by the storytellers, woven around recipes reminiscent of the day menu of Middle Eastern and Italian dishes as the evening unfolds.
Exchanging stories is the one true thing that unites bonding communities. Cultural heritage lies at the heart of our supper club Paola Balbi, co-founder of the Sagra Storytelling Supper Club, Dubai and an awarded storyteller, says, "What better time for a Ramadan gathering around stories verbunden the one and the other way?"
Founded in 2023, this special supper club formed when Balbi, an Italian and her Indian friend Debanjana Chaudhuri, decided to fuse an Italian Sagra with a storytelling approach. Summer food fairs called sagras take place in the summer in open-door rural Italian villages. Every Sagra is dedicated to 1 specific ingredient or a recipe and is always prepared on the spot by the older folk in the village. The founders of the supper club are trying to bring back the age-old practice of opening your doors to strangers.
This Ramadan sagra, which had united guests from 18 nationalities, showcased the best of UAE's multiculturalism. As they sink their teeth into crescent-shaped Palestinian Eid Eras (olive oil soaked breads), served with an Italian Zimino soup, from chickpeas, spinach, fresh herbs and calamari, Balbi entertains them with an old Palestinian tale of a woman who used to bake bread and leave some on the window sill for others to pick at.
Our stories are multi-layered and usually have messages. Sometimes, they are no more than real life incidents and anecdotes. They would interpret the message from the stories,’ says Balbi.
While guests are piling their pots with huge mounds of the tabouleh on the table before them, another storyteller Lorenzo Caviglia launches into an old Italian fable centered on parsley. Caviglia, an Italian storyteller, wears a mortar and pestle as she tells an ancient tale of a young mother forced to relinquish her daughter to witches after her husband is caught stealing parsley from the witches' garden. All eyes are glued to their seats for this riveting retelling.
Lebanese expat Zeina Bachir, who lives in Dubai, is going to her first Sagra Supper Club after hearing about it just days ago through a friend. Add a little more emotion and some hand gestures while I read stories to my daughter every day. Sana, a Syrian, recalls attending the second Sagra storytelling event and how the stories "always make her reconsider her life."
“Informational: No matter your background, you will resonate with the folk tales and the lessons they hold and your own heritage. They're always a reminder for me of being a child and sitting with my grandmother listening to stories,' she says. The Sagra supper club provides a great opportunity to explore new cultures for Indian expat Sonya Jose. Eager eye to what the world has to offer in food and stories. Not to mention the opportunity to meet new people too."
All the Sagras have some theme, which usually corresponds to the season and seasonal ingredients available at that time. Our previous Sagras included seafood, Pesto Pumpkin to welcome Autumn, Carnevale around the Italian street carnival season, Pistachio Truffle — think heart-shaped for Valentine’s Day. Chaudhuri, co-founder of the club, says, "This is our fourth Ramadan Sagra and this year we have a Palestinian-Italian menu.
With the Palestinian bread and Zimino soup, the Parmigiana Napoletana (fried eggplants with tomato sauce, mozzarella and parmesan cheese), Pesto Lasagne and Gazawi baked fish and Pastiera (Napolitan tart over the Ramadan Iftar.
The Ramadan Sagra was a joint undertaking, the Palestinian bread had been baked by Dalia Arja, owner of Karmiyeh bakery located in Dubai, and the Gazawi baked fish recipe sourced from older Gazan women and re-created, using spices, via Sumac Cooking. The food is also never prepared by a professional chef, similar to the Italian sagras, but by Balbi and her collaborators.
As the name suggests, the Eid Eras are baked during the Eid era with fresh olives after the harvest. The act of baking the bread is nostalgic for Arja, a Palestinian. Well, I spent my childhood in Jordan and never been to Palestine. It is the bread she soaks in sesame, fennel and anise seeds and then bakes: 'Food is my only link to my family, my heritage,' she says.
We serve the dessert, with herbal tea and coffee as the last course of the meal in the garden’s majlis. Balbi, who has a collection of Kharareef stories from the UAE, says: “We wanted to bring back the majlis story-telling that was popular during Ramadan in the desert in earlier times.
A lover of storytelling, she has spent a number of years researching and gathering oral history of local stories from the UAE. The full time teller of tales, a figure now somewhat passé in the UAE (at least since the seventies) Many elders I spoke to nostalgically recall a woman, named Mariam, who used to go to their houses in Bur Dubai, and tell stories while people sat in a courtyard, and later in a souk around midday break and also at night during the Ramadan period between iftar and suhoor.
Balbi adds that in most of the Kharareef stories, magical animal powers rescue the characters. "In Emirati fables the magical fish would take the place of the fairy Godmother of the Emirati Cinderella,” In other stories, you know, it would be a talking rooster comes to the people's aid or a Saluki dog.
The stories become ice-breakers between guests (now deep in conversation) at the Ramadan supper club majlis. Balbi notes that adults will hang out with folks from their own community, which is why we require storytelling to disrupt psychotherapy. “And over here at this majlis, you can see how harmonious it is to have different races celebrating and embracing cultural diversity and understanding.
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