I Like You Almost as Much as Musakhan takes one part of our Food, Land and Rituals illustration and turns it into a small conversation about food, land, and the rituals that connect people to place.
Musakhan is widely regarded as one of Palestine’s national dishes, built from taboon bread soaked in olive oil and layered with sumac-spiced onions, roast chicken, and toasted nuts. It is a dish made for sharing, often torn by hand from a communal platter, and closely associated with the olive harvest, when new-season oil becomes part of the meal itself.
The deep colour of the card takes its cue from sumac, one of the ingredients that gives musakhan its distinctive flavour and colour. Sharp, earthy, and deeply rooted in Palestinian cooking, it became a natural starting point for the palette of the piece.
Musakhan also sits within a wider food culture where rice plays an important role, from dishes such as maqluba and qidreh to everyday family meals. That creates another connection across the Together Project: rice runs through Palestinian kitchens, across Jammu and Kashmir, through Sudanese meals, and into the food cultures of Bangladesh and displaced Rohingya communities.
Bread creates another thread. The taboon bread at the heart of musakhan connects to the bread used to scoop ful in Sudan and the traditions of the neighbourhood baker in Kashmir, where bread is part of daily routine, community, and the household.
That is what the Together Project looks for. Not ways to make different cultures seem the same, but the small points of recognition between them: bread baked and shared, rice grown and cooked across different landscapes, tea poured for conversation, and food becoming a way to hold memory, identity, and home.
The original illustration was created by British-Bangladeshi artist Maryam Huq for our Together Project, bringing Sudan, Jammu and Kashmir, Azad Jammu and Kashmir, the Rohingya community, and Palestine together through food, land, agriculture, and everyday ritual.
For this card, SPINDLE reworked Maryam’s original Palestinian illustration into I Like You Almost as Much as Musakhan, because apparently there are limits to affection, and musakhan is one of them.
Designed by SPINDLE from original digital artwork by Maryam Huq @vividbymaryam.
