FOOD & WINE Article:
(March 1999 - P.97)
SAVORING PEACE

...Without the war, for instance, Mymouné might never have happened. Two sisters, Youmna Goraieb and Leila Maalouf, established Mymouné to support the women of Ain el Kabou, a village high on the slopes of Mount Sannine, in central Lebanon. With so many of the village men suddenly unemployed, Youmna and Leila set up Mymouné to put the women to work - making their traditional preserves, their rose-petal and fruit jams, their alembic-distilled rose and orange-blossom waters, pickled vegetables, sun-dried figs, apricots and dates, their thick syrups of pomegranate, mulberry and bitter orange juice and all the other staples of the mouné, the Lebanese pantry, which was always the pride of village households.

Today the sisters oversee a nucleus of 15 women that expands in summer, when the season is at its fullest. Their handsomly packaged products travel not just to Beirut but to every country in the world where Lebanese natives long for a taste of home. "We wanted to get back to the authentic traditions, the real thing," Youmna explaned to me as we watched two women making a thick soup from kishk (wheat mixed with yogurt, then dried in the sun before being ground into flour) and qawarma (a sort of lamb confit put up in terra-cotta vases) with plenty of sliced pink-skinned salamouni onions - the best, they told me. "Without our encouragement," Youmna added, "I'm certain these recipes would have disappeared."