Pairing Brined Cheese & Watermelon
"salad" by ex.libris is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Almost 20 years ago, Nigella Lawson published a recipe for Watermelon, Feta and Black Olive Salad that took the internet by storm. It’s been wildly popular ever since then with numerous other versions popping up. These days you’ll find endless salad recipes that combine feta and watermelon including Greek Watermelon Feta Salad, Persian Watermelon Salad, Lebanese Cheese and Watermelon Salad, Turkish Watermelon & Feta Salad and more. Megan McKenna of the National Watermelon Promotion Board says according to their menu research. feta is the top savory ingredient paired with watermelon. While at first, the combination might seem surprising, the pairing of juicy sweet melon with salty crumbly Greek feta works and somehow feels like a classic. But is it? Greek food writer Thei Zervaki says the ingredients are not traditionally combined in a salad, although she reports having seen it on the menu at a few modern restaurants in Greece. The salad may be contemporary but the ingredients and combination are ancient.
"Watermelons" by S n o R k e l is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0
According to Mark Strauss in The 5,000-Year Secret History of the Watermelon, an article published in the National Geographic, the watermelon was cultivated in Africa before moving north into Mediterranean countries and, later, to other parts of Europe. Also in the article horticulturalist Harry Paris theorizes that watermelons were first cultivated as a source of water. Watermelon has traditionally been grown throughout the Levant and in 2018 Turkey and Iran were the biggest producers, after China, according to the World Atlas. Watermelon has also been an important crop in Palestine. Reem Kassis, author of The Palestinian Table shares, “In an ancient 10th century Arabic cookbook Kitab al Tabikh, Annals of the Caliph’s Kitchen, numerous varieties of watermelon are mentioned with different colors, flavors, and textures, most of them not being the sweet one we recognize today. The few recipes mentioned within involve cooking the watermelon.”
"File:Akawi Cheese.jpg" by Yona Damari is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0
White brined cheeses also go back thousands of years and are commonly consumed in the Levant. In Palestine Kassis says “Historically we have only one kind of white cheese called jibneh baladieh which means local organic white cheese or jibneh bayda which means white cheese. It is usually made in Spring after the sheep have given birth, then preserved in a saltwater brine until the following year’s season. There were probably a lot of farmers in Nablus who made this cheese, so it was referred to as nabulsi relative to where it came from. Akkawi on the other hand, is not a name Palestinians gave to cheese from Akka (Acre). It is believed that it is cheese that reached Lebanon via the port in Akka and was thus referred to in Lebanon as akkawi cheese and from there the name stuck. But both are salty brined cheeses, and the differences between them are like the differences between any two brands of mozzarella.” And that ubiquitous salad? According to Kassis, “Contrary to what has been popularized by Middle Eastern food writers, nobody eats watermelon salad in the Middle East. We don’t chop or mix, we don’t dress or season. We eat watermelon and cheese. Period. Sometimes we’ll put the cheese in a piece of bread and eat the watermelon on the side, but that’s the extent of it.”
"Watermelon Salad with Feta" by Tampa Bay Chef is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Kassis believes that given people’s natural affinity to sweet and salt, “It’s no surprise watermelon and cheese became one of the most popular combinations (but figs and labaneh are also a common one). If you want to get more scientific, your body sweats a lot in the heat of the summer and watermelon’s high water content is a good way to replenish it while salty cheese replenishes lost minerals like sodium. If you believe that your body craves the nutrients it is missing, it’s no wonder that in the summer people crave this combination.” A refreshing and delicious pairing, it’s also no wonder that today many chefs and food writers from the Levant and beyond are riffing on it to create salads.