From KCRW, I'm Evan Klineman and you're listening to good food.

I ask the women if they would like to do a cookbook, you know, I just asked, you know, some in in general and they all said to mom which is yes

absolutely and then they all said Karen what is a cookbook because they've never

seen one before they had this tacit knowledge,

a kind of corporeal way of learning how to cook

from their mothers and their grandmothers.

Everything was just in our heads.

And they've never even thought about it before. They didn't know what a

recipe was. How many recipes do you know? And when I ask that I don't mean

reciting tablespoons and half-cup measures.

I'm talking about knowing a recipe deep in your bones.

I pondered this question as I read Karen E Fisher's cookbook about Zatari, a 1,300 acre village

of 83,000 souls situated just south of the Syrian border in Northern Jordan. It's the largest Syrian refugee camp in the world.

This place, and far too many other places like it, are where people arrive with little more than their memories and it's the recipes

the ones they keep in their heads and know deep inside their bodies that keep those memories and their culture alive.

Kareny Fisher first arrived there in 2015 to work with the UN High Commissioner for refugees.

And in the new cookbook Zatani she and her team of refugee women tell the story of

the singular place through the lens of food.

Hi Karen.

Hi, hi Evan. The book just blew me away. Oh, thank you. And

thank you that really warms our hearts. I mean, for me, the cookbook part of it was

secondary, the stories of the people and how much they were willing to share was quite moving.

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