The Muslim holiday Eid al-Fitr marks the end of Ramadan, the holy month of fasting, andāimportantly for Yvonne Maffei, the proprietor of the enormously popular blog My Halal Kitchenāthe beginning of several days of feasting. āEverybodyās got their thing that they do on their Eid,ā Maffei told me recently, shortly after the holiday began. On her blog she suggested a cheese platter, advising her followers on how to find halal-appropriate cheeses and suggesting a garnish of edible flowers. Maffei herself, following the Prophet Muhammad, likes to break the fast with dates. But after that, āfor me itās always going to be some kind of Italian," she said. "This year I did a simple Sicilian sauce with meat in it, because thatās what I remember my grandmother making in the summertimeāthe smell of fresh tomatoes cooking.ā
Thereās a bolognese sauce in Maffei's new cookbook, also called My Halal Kitchen, as well as āpenne without the vodka,ā boeuf bourguignon without the red wine, shrimp pad thai, and lamb carnitas. The book is a compendium of modern global classics, rendered halal through Maffeiās creative substitutions and described with the same cheery enthusiasm telegraphed in conversation by their author. This energy, as well as those Muslim-friendly recipes, has gained Maffei an enormous fan base on the internet, including more than 1.2 million followers on Facebook.
āIf thereās 2 billion Muslims in the world,ā Maffei reasons, āthen a million really isnāt that much.ā Still, where Facebook is concerned, sheās more than halfway to Martha Stewart. Maffei previously self-published a cookbook, Summer Ramadan Cooking, and conceived the new one after being heartened at its reception. She reached out to Dianne Jacob, the author of the food-writing guide Will Write for Food, who helped Maffei develop a book proposal and find an agent. Agate Publishing, based in Evanston, Illinois, ultimately took on My Halal Kitchen.
Maffei was born in Ohio to a Sicilian father and a Puerto Rican mother. They lived in a town called Amherst, west of Cleveland near Lorain, where a steel mill and a Ford assembly plant drew diverse populations of immigrantsāand the foods they brought with them. Maffei's was a food-oriented childhood. There were international street festivals. Her Sicilian grandfather fished in Lake Erie; her father toured farm stands to find the best fruit and shopped at Italian bakeries in Cleveland. The whole family gathered Sundays for a big Sicilian meal.
Maffei started cooking in her early teens. When she was 18 she wrote a letter to Saveur magazine: āHow do I work for you guys?ā (The magazine, in reply, suggested she needed a little experience.) Maffei went to college at Ohio University, in the southeast part of the state, where she continued her formal education in international studies, and her informal culinary education through relationships she developed with international students from places like Malaysia, Qatar, and South Africa. She stayed on at OU for grad school, where her foreign-born classmates had kids, familiesāand regular meals for which Maffei often joined them. She bonded with them over food.
"I met Palestinians, people from Yemen, people from UAE, from Saudi Arabia,ā she says. āI can honestly say, I was a little bit afraid because of what I had learned from the media: āI donāt really know anything, I only know that your culture is a complete mystery to me, and thatās a little scary.ā But they cooked so much food, and weād sit down and talk and realizeāmy goodness, we have so much in common.ā
So much, in fact, that by the end of grad school, Maffeiāwho hadnāt previously been particularly religiousāconverted to Islam. āAfter five or six years, I thought, this is a really nice, peaceful, loving community to be a part of,ā she said. She moved to Chicago after graduating.
In Chicago, Maffei learned about the halal cooking of the Muslim communities she found there, largely of Middle Eastern and South Asian descent. āBut after a while I just thought, I miss my foods: I miss lasagna, I miss chicken cutlets," she says. "Rice and beans and chicken on the Puerto Rican side." And so she started making those things, and sharing them with friends at her workplace, an Islamic college-prep school. That her colleagues had never had the sorts of food she was feeding them helped inspire Maffeiās blog, which she launched in 2008.
Her mission is twofold. One is to expand the options available to Muslim cooks (and eaters). āSome people have never had an avocado!ā Maffei realized. āIām like, are you kidding me? Thatās totally halal. Itās used in Mexican food, but we donāt go to Mexican restaurants because they cook with pork.ā She started devising substitutesāusing chicken fat, for instance, in place of lard in tamales. She could make meatballs with a combination of beef and veal, rather than beef and pork.
The other goal is to dispel misconceptions about halal, which is a fairly straightforward dietary systemāno pork, no alcohol, animals should be slaughtered ritually. With its emphasis on clean, healthy eating and care for animals, Maffei thinks of halal as being very au courant; sheād like to introduce it to outsiders, and reemphasize some of these points for people already in the faith. āIām trying to remind my own community of whatās deeply embedded in our faith and bring it back out again,ā she said. āAnd if people of other faiths knew all this goodness thatās in our faith, then maybe they would see us as more human than all of these caricatures weāre seeing in the media.ā
Through her blog and her new book, Maffei offers both a savvy Muslimās shopping guideāavoid flavoring extracts, which contain alcohol; watch out for breads that contain a dough conditioner that might be made from hog hair; try unsweetened grape juice where a recipe calls for red wineāand a tour of her culinary passions, inherited from her parents and informed by her travel around the world. She went abroad in college, to Mexico and Spain, where she jotted down recipes from whomever she'd meet. Her sense of food as a way to connect people of disparate backgrounds has only deepened since she became Muslim.
"I used to think food wasn't political," Maffei says. "But what I'm realizing is that it's probably one of the most political statements you can make. What I can do is do my best to say, despite what you may think or what your questions are, I would like to show you something beautiful, something clean, something delicious. It's not to force my way of cooking or eating on anyone, it's just to show that Muslims are people too and we love good food."
