Field Reports
Sherry Sabbagh took Dearborn's Arab kitchen onto Food Network's biggest contest
Graphic: Times of Palestine
Original Reporting
This summer, on the largest home-cooking stage American television has ever built, one of the hundred aprons carried Dearborn. Sherry Sabbagh — the Dearborn Heights mother whose easy weeknight recipes have drawn a devoted Instagram following as @sherryhour — competed on Food Network's inaugural "100 Cooks", the network's biggest competition ever, where a hundred home cooks from across the United States chased a grand prize worth up to $250,000.
Food Network's own introduction of its hundred put her gift plainly: she gives modern Middle Eastern cuisine a fresh twist, and specializes in comforting one-pot stews and Lebanese dishes. For the Arab table in America — the table Palestinians share — that sentence on a prime-time network page is its own kind of arrival.
A kitchen found in the quiet of 2020#
Her story starts where so many new cooks' stories start: the pandemic. SEEN, the metro Detroit magazine, profiled her as a Dearborn-raised, Dearborn Heights-based self-proclaimed foodie who began spending long hours in the kitchen in 2020, watching cooking videos and discovering a love that became a calling.
What she built from it is the most democratic kind of food fame.
No restaurant, no cookbook deal at the start — just a phone, a stove, and recipes a working household can actually make: honey mustard salmon, air-fryer carrot chips, a no-bake pumpkin icebox cake, and the steak-and-cheese sandwich on toasted brioche that SEEN liked enough to publish as a recipe of its own.
Cooking, dining and a side of style, as the magazine put it.
The capital of the Arab kitchen#
Dearborn and Dearborn Heights are the capital of Arab America, and their kitchens are where the Levantine table lives furthest from home. The stews Food Network singled out — yakhneh-style pots of vegetables and meat over rice — are the same pots that simmer in Beirut, Damascus, Amman, Nablus and Gaza; the Lebanese kitchen and the Palestinian kitchen are neighbors who borrow each other's spices without knocking.
That is why her run matters on this page. Every time an Arab home cook stands on an American prime-time stage and calls a one-pot stew comfort food, the whole region's table — including ours — is translated for a country that too often meets it only as politics.
One hundred aprons, seven weeks#
"100 Cooks" ran as a seven-week gauntlet hosted by Terry Crews, with the chefs Alex Guarnaschelli and Nick DiGiovanni judging, and ninety-nine eliminations standing between the hundred and the title of America's best home cook. Sabbagh competed as cook number 59, and FOX 2 Detroit introduced her to her hometown as the metro Detroit woman taking on one of the biggest cooking competitions anywhere.
The season's finale aired on 19 July, and the title went elsewhere — NBC Montana reported that Bryce Stubbs, a 24-year-old oil-field worker from Bozeman, took the $215,000 prize. But a hundred aprons were cut from the whole of American home cooking, and one of them was earned by a Dearborn Heights mother cooking her grandmother's category of food. That selection is the achievement; the scoreboard is a footnote.
The table she keeps#
What distinguishes her feed is what distinguishes the Arab kitchen itself: generosity made practical. Her recipes assume a real evening — children, a clock, a budget — and still put something warm and unhurried at the center of the table. It is restaurant-free food media, the home cook speaking directly to other home cooks, and it is the register in which Arab food has always actually lived.
The competition's lights have moved on, and her kitchen in Dearborn Heights is back to its regular audience — the family at the table and the followers at the screen. Both are lucky.
Somewhere between a one-pot stew and a brioche steak sandwich, Sherry Sabbagh is doing quietly what the Arab kitchen in America has always done: feeding the people in front of her, and making the culture legible one dinner at a time.
