In Lebanon during the 1920s and 1930s, as elsewhere, a growing bourgeoisie necessitated an emerging science of housewifery and the forging of new modes of moral, national, and social conduct. The "mother of the nation," and her skill and ease in managing and administering the home constituted the successful, albeit confined, modern national subject. Food, its substance as well as its preparation and presentation, were central to the experiences and representations of national inclusion. Cuisine, and its links to new bourgeoisie prescriptions of womanhood, motherhood, and citizenship are powerfully articulated in girls' schools. In these penultimate sites of inculcation, the preparation, presentation, and nutritional value of food was a key site for the discipline of tadbir al-manzil, or home economics. What can the pedagogical focus on food in the emerging science of housewifery tell us about rapidly shifting demarcations of taste, distinction, and subjectivityt How did the introduction of "western" ingredients, such as pasta for example, influence and interact with the imperative to forge and define an "authentic" local cuisine It was in this period that dishes such as samaka harra [spicy fish] and dajaj musahhab [pulled chicken] became subjects of instruction in girls' schools. These meals, already common fare in many middle class households, were now squarely placed inside the institutional space of the school. A "professional," teacher replaced the long-standing role of mothers and grandmothers. At the same new spatial norms of the ideal household reshaped the kitchen as a site of domestic authority and confinement. Utilizing memoirs, cookbooks, recipes, oral history, and the press, this paper explores food as a lens to trace new formation of space, self, and society in the labyrinthine contours of a new citizenry.