Freya Stark at the table

In the Arab regions Freya Stark traveled through, meals are not divided into starter-main-dessert. A large cloth or rug—the sufra—is spread on the ground, and everyone sits around it. Everything is placed at once: flatbread in the center, dates, rice and meat in a large shared dish from which one eats with the right hand, and fragrant coffee that opens and closes the welcome. Hospitality is paramount: refusing to share would be an offense. The traveler's own cooking is reduced to the bare essentials—dates, dry bread, grains—supplemented by local resources.

A small green pod with a lemony, camphor-like fragrance, cardamom is the aromatic soul of Arabia. Ground into coffee, it becomes ceremonial qahwa; slipped into rice and stews, it marks all the cuisine of the peninsula. For Freya Stark, its scent was inseparable from the tents and coffeehouses of Baghdad and Aden where she was welcomed.