For itinerant chef and musical therapist Marie Cassis, home is where the feast is
Words Charlie Monaghan
Photography Marie Cassis
Production Hannah Phillips
How does a picture of a plate holding a fried egg and a piece of ordinary-looking bread come to attract over 13,000 likes on Instagram? In a trend-driven food culture of grotesquely overengineered butter boards, and when everything that could possibly be gold leafed has been (including, no doubt, butter boards), the ability of something as prosaic as pb and j on white bread to elicit comments such as “This looks like a painting!“ and ”This is an edible work of art” is, you might think, somewhat of a headscratcher. That is unless you follow @aromecassis, run by Egyptian-born, London-based musical therapist Marie Cassis.
That’s because under Marie’s eye, what you could broadly call home-cooked comfort food is celebrated with a sense of warmth, pleasure and authenticity that is rarely felt on social media. “I aim to keep it as honest as possible, and I try not to do crowd-pleasers,” says Marie, who paradoxically fails at the latter by achieving the former. “It’s not about me trying to make something look really elaborative and really complicated. It’s really about letting the ingredients speak for themselves and being led by them. And, when I focus on that, it’s not a magical process.”
If the magic isn’t in the cooking, there is certainly a charm in seeing the end result, which I get first-hand experience of when I visit Marie at home in London Bridge for what I thought would be a cup of tea and a chat for this story. Not so. It’s 11am and not long past my breakfast but on her table lies a spread of food I can’t wait to eat: barrel-aged feta dressed with zaatar and olive oil; blood oranges cut into segments and Greek ‘spoon sweets’ – small quince pieces and blanched almonds sitting in syrup – so-called because you eat them with a small spoon along with a coffee. There is a baguette and a pile of aish baladi, an Egyptian pitta-like flatbread with ancient origins. And then finikias, Greek cookies made of semolina and walnuts. These ones, Marie tells me, were snuck into her suitcase on a recent visit home to Cairo by her grandmother, who travels hundreds of miles to Alexandria to buy them from “a very old man”.
It’s a beautiful and generous spread but, as I discover talking to Marie, it’s also an autobiography in culinary form. Marie grew up in Cairo in a French- and Arabic-speaking multi-generational household in which her parents, her and her two brothers lived with the family’s extended maternal side, overseen by her Greek grandmother. Her father is of Egyptian heritage but his parents have Greek and Syro-Lebanese ancestry. The Egyptian bread, the Greek feta and sweets, the Levantine zaatar and the French baguette – “Ah ha,” I think as she explains this. “The way language and culture influence your way of being… I can’t find the word for it,” Marie says, but what’s before me, and a bite of Greek feta wrapped in a piece of aish baladi, does the job better than any words can.
This blending of culinary repertoires is something Marie says she learned from her grandmother. “She cooks Egyptian dishes, but always in her own way,” Marie says, citing Egyptian stews given a Hellenic makeover with lemony dressings. Her grandmother, like many before her and many since, expressed her love through food, spending hours, days even, preparing meals. A young Marie would sit and watch, rolling up vine leaves while the rest of the family got on with their assigned tasks – “no one was allowed not to be busy”.
If her grandmother takes credit for her culinary education in the home, it was her parents opened up her world outside it. “My father is a very generous, talkative, outgoing man,” says Marie, recalling family holidays in various regions in France, including Brittany, where the family would indulge their love of seafood. “We were very explorative in terms of food and culture. It was a very mixed upbringing, and a happy childhood filled with family, love and eating,” she says.
Eight years ago, Marie’s sense of home shifted profoundly. For one, she moved to London to study music. Then, with the last of their three children gone, Marie’s parents said farewell to the house she grew up in to move to a farm outside Cairo they had been slowly working on for some years. “It was a very emotional experience for me at first,” says Marie, who dealt with it by focusing on what she had gained instead. “I refused to feel homesick in my first few years in London and I embraced the excitement that comes with independence and change.” Her grandmother’s influence also made itself known. Rather than just recreate the dishes she grew up with, she instead sought to fuse her cooking with the ingredients and produce she found in London. “I love the food we cook at home but I didn’t need to cook it the exact same way. And I think that opened up a new world of possibilities.”
Things changed again, though, with the onset of the Covid pandemic. Marie was doing her master’s and working – as she still does today – as a musical therapist in hospitals, improving patients’ well being through improvisational music sessions. Somewhat isolated and with a sense of long-resisted homesickness creeping in, Marie would come home after a hospital shift, find herself drawn to the kitchen and, to her surprise, the food of home. “I didn’t go home for so long, so I think food became a way of connecting with it.” Phone calls to her mum and grandmother became a chance to ask about certain recipes or techniques, which she would try out in her London flat.
As a way to document what she was cooking, Marie started putting photos on Instagram. What began as crude snaps of culinary lockdown projects has developed into a rich visual world that captures the expansive range of things Marie likes to eat, mostly at home: rye bread with butter and anchovies; stuffed cabbages with sour cream and sumac; syrupy slow-cooked quince with crème fraîche. Sometimes – see a baba au rhum crowned with piped cream or fat pink shrimps resting on crystal coupes filled with Marie Rose sauce – things get wonderfully camp. Often, seasonal produce is simply but lovingly presented – fruit with cheese and nuts; peas cooked in their pods; a single oyster.
In more recent years, as international travel resumed, Marie’s visits home to the family’s farm in Egypt have given her followers an insight into the cultural and culinary context she comes from. Now, dishes cooked in London for herself are seen alongside bountiful long tables piled high with Greek-influenced Egyptian dishes ready for feasting. There’s a continuity that runs through everything, though, perhaps most obviously in presentation, which Marie credits to her mother. “In Egyptian households, you often find a vitrine dedicated to fine tableware that feels like forbidden fruit. My mum paved the way for letting go of this tradition in our family. She found pleasure in using her favourite plates for a casual family dinner and now I absolutely love using beautiful plates on all occasions.”
For this story, we tasked Marie with capturing the two types of journeys she embarks on with her food. One, the physical journey of going home to Egypt and sharing a meal with her family, which, as per Cassis tradition, is a big fish feast, sourced together at the market, then grilled and eaten outdoors. For the second, back in London, Marie embarked on a vicarious journey back to that memory with a trip to Billingsgate for red mullet, served with an abundance of dips, salads and fresh bread. “We didn’t have the whole family, but my brother currently lives in London and joined me in making this meal,” Marie says. “I wanted to make food that would remind me of the freshness, brightness and simplicity of a seafood lunch in Egypt, so we fried the fish and served it with a family recipe of crispy lemon potatoes, which immediately took us back.” Home, it turns out, can be a movable feast indeed.
This Levantine dip is present in seafood spreads around the region. It adds an intensely deep, sweet and colourful element to the table.
Ingredients
2 red bell peppers
30g toasted breadcrumbs
80g toasted walnuts, coarsely chopped
2tbsp pomegranate molasses
2tbsp olive oil, more to garnish
1tbsp Aleppo pepper (can be substituted with mild chilli flakes)
1tsp sumac
Salt, to taste
Parsley, to garnish
Method
Start by placing the red bell peppers in a cast-iron skillet or on a rimmed baking sheet lined with parchment paper. Roast them in a preheated oven at 220 degrees C for 25-30 minutes, turning them halfway. They are ready when they become tender and the skin has blackened in places.
Transfer the peppers into a bowl and cover with cling film. Let them rest for 15 minutes. This will make them easier to handle as you peel them. Once peeled and seeded, with stem discarded, transfer the peppers into a food processor (or mortar, if you are up for a challenge).
Gradually pulse in the breadcrumbs, toasted walnuts, pomegranate molasses, olive oil, Aleppo pepper, sumac and salt. Stop pulsing when the mixture is relatively smooth. Taste your dip and adjust if necessary. You may want to add more pomegranate molasses or even a squeeze of lime juice.
Transfer on to small plates and garnish with parsley and a drizzle of olive oil.
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