Cookbooks · 2024
Lebanese Heritage — Cookbook Vol 2
Selma Khoury & AUC Press · Cookbook Photography & Styling
The second volume of chef Selma Khoury's Lebanese Heritage series, focusing on the mountain villages of the Chouf and the cooking practices of three matriarchal households still using a wood-fired tannour oven daily.
The publisher wanted a tighter, slower book than Volume One — 156 pages, fifty-two recipes, with a deliberate emphasis on technique photography. Long sequences showing how dough was kneaded, how meat was layered for kibbeh, how a kishk dough was sun-dried over forty days.
Logistics were the central challenge. The locations were remote, the kitchens were tiny, and the matriarchs were not interested in waiting for our lighting team.
We brought one camera, two prime lenses, and a single 4x4 collapsible silk. No flash, no LED panels, no apple boxes. We shot for fourteen days across three villages — sometimes at three in the morning when the tannour was first lit, sometimes at noon when the bread was being slapped against its walls.
Magy worked alongside the matriarchs as a second pair of hands rather than as a stylist directing. The food was never re-plated for the camera. If a kibbeh fell apart, we shot it falling apart.
The book is slower, quieter and more atmospheric than its predecessor. The publisher reported that the second volume outsold the first within four months of release.
Project closes
Selma Khoury & AUC Press
Cookbook Photography & Styling, 2024
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