The Original Grazing Food

M eze (pronounced mezzeh ) is a word you see on Greek, Yugoslav and Near Eastern menus of every stripe. Originally it was just Persian for “a taste,” but it’s become the name for a whole repertoire of small dishes, or a meal made up of them (the more the better).

Just about anything can be meze , so long as it’s not sweet and you can put it on a small plate. Salads, raw or pickled vegetables, or vegetable purees flavored with something sour--yogurt or tarator (lemon and sesame paste), for instance. . . . Or olives, cheese or yogurt alone . . . Or any sort of salted nuts from pistachios to toasted melon seeds . . . Or miniaturized dishes like sausages, meat purees, little bits of cooked meat or little fried pies filled with meat or cheese or vegetables. Even a piece of bread dipped in olive oil and spices is a meze .

Above all, stuffed vegetables, a particular passion of the Turks, are meze . Most languages in the eastern Mediterranean have just one word meaning a stuffed vegetable, but the Turks carefully distinguish between a dolma , made by putting the meat or rice stuffing inside a vegetable (a pepper, a tomato, an eggplant, a zucchini, even a carrot or an onion), and a sarma , which is made by wrapping the stuffing up in a leaf (grape leaves or cabbage leaves usually, but spinach, chard and even lettuce leaves are also used).

Iranians like raw herbs and onions, cooked vegetables dressed with yogurt, and very sour pickles, and for some reason a potato salad they learned from the Russians. The Greeks use a lot of fish products, such as cod roe, and a lot of olive oil. Yugoslav meze often has a Western European flavor, as when they stuff eggplants in the Turkish fashion, but with a cheese stuffing like eggplant parmigiana’s.

Lebanon and Syria make a cult of kebey , a mixture of lamb, onions and bulgur wheat pounded to a smooth paste, and even serve it raw. This is something of an acquired taste, not for anything loathsome in the flavor, but because of its subtlety. Raw lamb paste is a dish that’s served to show honor to a guest because it only works if the ingredients are of the highest quality.

Meze always comes out when a guest shows up, and when friends are having a glass of the anise-flavored brandy called arak . In quieter times, one of the great recreations of Lebanon was to visit the Roman ruins of Baalbeck in the Bekaa Valley, and then retire to a grassy park (with a little stream wandering through man-made channels) to have plate after plate of cheese, olives, toasted almonds, hummus , tabbouleh , stuffed grape leaves, little lamb-filled pies, some radishes and green onions, sour pink spears of pickled turnip and lots of the paper-thin bread Baalbeck was famous for.

These are not just hors d’oeuvres we’re talking about, but practically a way of life. Meze is the original grazing food.