“It’s kind of like its own world,” cookbook author Lottie Bildirici says of the close knit Syrian Jewish corner of Brooklyn where she grew up. Make your way down Ocean Parkway in Midwood or through nearby Gravesend and you’ll hear English tinged with Arabic slang. And when “you walk into a grocery store, everyone knows your name, everyone knows your whole family,” she adds. 

They also know what you’re cooking. From one house to the next, the menus are remarkably similar across this community. “If you go to someone for Friday night dinner, it’ll be a version of a yebra, which is a stuffed grape leaf, everyone makes chicken and potatoes…. peas and meatballs and another thing is hamod,” Lottie says, referring to a lemony soup with meatballs served over rice. 

Mujadara is a staple here on Thursday evenings. The comforting dish of lentils, rice, and fried onions is centuries old. The earliest written recipe for it is found in “Kitab al-Tabikh,” an Arab cookbook written in Iraq in 1226 based on a collection of recipes from the ninth century. In Jewish communities in the Middle East, cooks prepared the simple-to-make mujadara on Thursdays so they could focus on preparation for Shabbat, culinary scholar Gil Marks writes in “The Encyclopedia of Jewish Food.” Historically, it was also popular on laundry or washing days, Sundays for the Jewish community and Saturdays for the Muslim one. 

In Lottie’s family, it’s served on Thursdays alongside a rich casserole of eggs, cheese, and spinach called jibon (or jiben), and a bowl of yogurt with diced cucumbers and mint. Her mother Claudia has even packed mujadara for family vacations and heated it up in places like Aruba. 

She inherited the custom of making it from her mother, a very traditional Syrian cook, whose parents emigrated from Aleppo in northern Syria. In the generations since, family members have tweaked it though. Claudia often makes hers with brown rice, while Lottie, who is a nutrition coach for high performance athletes, included a mujadara recipe with cauliflower rice in her book “Running on Veggies: Plant-Powered Recipes for Fueling and Feeling Your Best.” 

Even with the updates, Lottie says, “It still holds its tradition and you can still get that sentimental feeling from eating it.”