Cooking In the Red Zone

The biggest challenge of cooking in Iraq was finding ingredients. Several of the larger grocery stores in Baghdad stocked American and imported goods. Fortunately, I had scouted the stores before it became too dangerous to go shopping so I had an idea of what was available.

"Bassam, do you guys have basil?" I asked one of our Iraqi translators while compiling a shopping list. However, Bassam's English vocabulary did not include basil. I tried to describe the plant's appearance and taste, but we were getting nowhere. I moved on to scallions and again struck out. Ultimately, I found a picture of a basil plant on the Internet and showed it to Bassam. "Oh," he said, "that is reehan ." From then on, whenever I needed something from the store I printed a picture and attached it to the shopping list.

We made everything from scratch in Baghdad: mayonnaise, salsa, salad dressing, cream of mushroom soup. I learned to break down dishes made back home and piece them back together without prepackaged foods and ingredients. In a soy-free world, I made vegetarian burgers from scratch. My macaroni and cheese tasted like my grandmother's -- nothing processed was in it.

My war zone meals were a way to bring everybody together -- Iraqi guards, translators and Western correspondents. We started each meal with a poem, our love of words uniting us in the midst of suicide bombings, mortar attacks and kidnapping threats.

Rajiv Chandrasekaran, the Baghdad bureau chief in 2003 and 2004, often asked me to cook when he grew tired of Iraqi food. "Why don't we make something else?" he would ask and then disappear in his room to work. I didn't mind. Although I was the only woman in the bureau for most of my time there, I like to cook, and it was something I could contribute beyond reporting.

I hesitated only after a kitchen mishap. When I turned on the stove to light the internal burner with a match, a ball of flame shot out of the oven, singeing my hair and eyebrows. The sound of the explosion brought two of our Iraqi staff, Dhia and Baldy, running into the kitchen. Dhia sniffed. "You smell baked," he announced. I wasn't hurt, but I had no hair left on my right arm. Rajiv had heard the commotion, too, and walked into the kitchen.

"What happened to the brownies?" he asked. I glared at him. "You're okay, too, right?" he responded, sheepishly. Baldy, whose real name was Mohammed, answered for me. "Mohammed Baldy. Jackie Baldy." I refused to light the stove myself again, but the next night I was back in the kitchen, baking banana bread with real bananas.

On Christmas Day in 2004, I spent the day in the kitchen after pulling "story duty" the night before. That was always the deal. When I cooked, I didn't write. We ended up with quite a feast: turkey, mashed potatoes and gravy, corn pudding, green bean casserole, broccoli and cheese. The only thing missing was a fruitcake. Part of the turkey was undercooked, so we had to cut around the pinkish meat. The mashed potatoes turned out slightly runny, more the consistency of pudding.

But we had our Christmas miracle. Muhnthir, our one-time chef, showed up with a Christmas yule log cake he had made for the occasion. We were a family, and we did what families do when estranged relatives show up for Christmas dinner. We welcomed him, and the green frosted log, with open arms.

Then we dug in.

Staff writer Jackie Spinner was a correspondent in Baghdad from May 2004 to November 2005. The full names of Iraqi staff are withheld for security reasons. This article is adapted from her book, "Tell Them I Didn't Cry: A Young Journalist's Story of Joy, Loss and Survival in Iraq" (Scribner, 2006).