A taste for war - food on the frontline

As a war reporter I had no home and no kitchen for a good decade, just a bag containing four pairs of khaki trousers, three grey sweaters and some books, as I bounced around the Caucasus and the Middle East. I had the good luck – inured peripatetic as I was – not to suffer any culinary nostalgia. I did not miss Marmite or a Sunday roast. Wherever I was, I was happy to be. Whatever was available to eat, as a curious foodie, I ate it. Even hand-churned pistachio ice cream made from raw milk in the Kabul market. Even a fried shrimp sandwich bought from a shack in a Cairo slum one baking, unrefrigerated July afternoon. Even liver and fatty sheep-tail kebabs on the road to Fallujah. Are you really going to eat that?' my translators would ask. Yup,' I would answer, Want some?'

I was freelancing for magazines and newspapers in between writing books – one on Georgia, one about an Iraqi general in the time of Saddam. Catch as catch can, expect the unexpected, pack plenty of water and Snickers bars. Roads in wartime are either ominously empty or packed with refugees crammed eight to a car, their lives (three bedrolls and a brown vinyl suitcase) strapped to the roof. Food along the way could be sparse, but hunger is always the best sauce: up in the high mountains on the Georgian-Chechen border, talking to refugees fleeing the Russian bombs, we could scrounge only a small pot of boiled potatoes from the village nearby. When Kirkuk fell and we were chasing-dodging columns of black smoke and bandits on the road to Tikrit, the shops were shut and we bought MREs (Meals Ready-to-Eat; American army field rations) from a black-market supply sold along the side of the roads that preceded any actual American troops. Every MRE comes with a little bottle of Tabasco: it turns out even cardboard-mealy jambalaya can be made palatable with Tabasco. When we drove into Baghdad a week after it fell, I remember the first thing I noticed – among the rubble, the dust, the traffic jams, intermittent gunfire and trails of Shia walking to Najaf for the mourning month of Ashura now that Saddam was gone and it was no longer prohibited – were street vendors selling piles of fragile freshly fried crisps. I hopped out of the car and bought a large bagful to encourage a small effort of commerce amid all the mess. The crisps tasted of the engine oil they had probably been cooked in.

Often there were small miracles; unexpected feasts. Holed up in the old port of Tyre in Southern Lebanon during the Hezbollah-Israel war of 2006, we ate vast platters of tender, crispy-fried calamari as lantern flares floated over the night-time bombardment of the surrounding hills. The local fishermen couldn't go out far because of the Israeli naval blockade so they took to dynamiting the shallows (often while we were swimming, which made for fast sprints back to the beach) and scooping up stunned baby squid. I remember with fondness the canteen at the Italian Red Cross HQ in Baghdad, hidden from the Muslim patients on another floor of the hospital, and stuffed with porky legs of prosciutto di Parma, and huge wheels of Parmigiano and bottles of Chianti.

I always ate best in people's homes. I remember eating the most delicious fried chicken in a parched poor hamlet in the Diyala province in Iraq; they fed us probably the only meat they had seen for a week. And a whole baked lamb on a mound of oily rice spiced with raisins and almonds at a sheikh's compound in Samarra, prepared by his third wife who had an engineering degree from Tikrit University and spoke fluent English and German. And a perfect salad of finely chopped radish, dill and potato set next to a mass of ugly, black, slimy, boiled ox at a feast in a Khevsur village in the high Caucasus. Everywhere I went there were new and interesting things to try: wild asparagus on the Zanzegur plateau in Armenia; walnut jam in Tbilisi; freshly poached caviar on the shores of the Caspian; illegal bathtub Shiraz in Tehran; Kurdish truffles, camel kebabs and fried hummingbirds in Damascus.

Apart from the time I took a chunk of jamon Iberico to Tehran and my luggage got impounded, I never took stuff from London. It was more fun to find things locally. My favourite places were the markets. In Baghdad I found live ducks and geese; they'd kill them and pluck them for you in the market, but you had to hang them for a few days otherwise the meat was stiff and as unchewable as balsa wood. I learned the value of a war-torn terroir too poor for pesticides: Armenian apricots are the sweetest; Georgian strawberries so ripe and juicy that I had to carry them back from the market with extreme care or they would mash into jam; and you can crush wild Lebanese tomatoes between your bare hands to make the best pasta sauce in the world.

I would cook improvised and impromptu meals while local friends would peer over my shoulder, grimacing at my sacrilegious fusion cuisine: Georgians were scandalised when I put mint on peaches (in Georgia it is only ever used on cottage cheese); no self-respecting Arab would ever eat rare beef; my Russian boyfriend (who had spent his military service patrolling the Soviet border and peeling kilos of potatoes for chips every day) refused to eat baked potatoes because the skins were dirty'. But I always had rave reviews for my hybrid harissa (diluted with a little yoghurt, lemon juice and extra garlic – excellent on grilled lamb chops), everyone seems to love a cheeseburger and it turns out it is possible to make a decent Hollandaise on a burner in a cement kitchen in Afghanistan.

Ultimately, of course, what you learn on the road, shacked up with strangers and refugees, is that bread must be shared, that one is blessed to be able to offer hospitality, and honoured to receive it. I remember one stinking-hot dusty afternoon in Baghdad in 2004 when I went to see the aftermath of a small mortar attack on a quiet residential street. A couple of Humvees were parked on the corner and the American soldiers, red and sweaty under their helmets, were making a pretence of investigation. I watched a young girl come out from one of the houses carrying a tray of glasses of water which she offered to the soldiers. Not one had the courtesy to accept. I watched this little failure of hospitality, a failure of communication, and knew that the Americans were never going to win Iraqi hearts and minds.