Arab Cuisine

Mainly Iraqi kitchen recipes, translated, partly re-translated into English, in favor of a poor unknown soldier, I met April 04, guarding the CPA and missing all chances to enjoy Iraqi food in an Iraqi restaurant or with an Iraqi family.

more English texts

 
 

The Arab cuisine new Indian spices long before the Europeans. They did not only use them, but developed their own varieties (s. Baharat). The arab cuisine is rather heavy than refined, but tasty. It has to please the palate, the taste and the nose. Strange things as "nouvelle cuisine - to eat with the eyes - luckily passed Arab countries without leaving a trace. As introduction, here a simple dish, a poor people's dish, that has to be eaten by hand:

Lablabi: Soak 3 Cups of pealed horse-beans (or chick-peas) for 1/2 to one day in water. Cook it in a pressure pot with a little bouillon, until the beans or peas are soft. The consistence of the broth should be rather heavy, as in the picture. To this soup  you ad pieces of dry bread, fried onions with some garlic and the juice of one lemon. Knead all by hand, but not too soft, and ad a gush of good olive oil. As spices you may use chopped parsley, roasted onion-rings and ... This one, as most Arabic recipes are memories of a time, when cooks still measured oil by jars and not by drops.

Soup with lentils, peas or chickpeas

Ingredients:

  • 3 cups lentils
  • 1/2 cup rice, if wanted
  • 1/2 cup butterfat
  • 1 cup chopped onions
  • 1.5 teaspoons salt
  • water

This soup, especially the chickpeas, flavored with lots of lemon juice, are enjoyed especially in wintertime. Iraqis are sure it prevents from catching a cold.

Preparation:

Lentils, peas, but especially chickpeas have to be soaked 1 night long. 15 minutes in the steam-cooker will get them soft. The water should not cover them more than 2 cm. Depending on your taste those pulses may be left complete, crushed or even pressed through a sieve.

 Fry the ognions in hot fat until they are brown and ad them to the soup. Leave the whole simmering for 10 minutes, and, if apperciated, ad parsely and/or lemon juice. If you roast and ad a piece of meat, that's going to improve the taste. A further refinement would be roasted bread crumps and/or some chopped parsely.

An other delicious mix for soups are white beans and spinach or silver beet.

Tabuleh - Parsley Salade

Tabuleh  is one of the most appreciated arabic salads and supplements, especially on hot days.

Ingredients:

  • 1 cup fine burghul (shredded wheats, as Kuskus)
  • 2 cups of very finely chopped parsely. If you like it, you might mix in a quarter of fresh peppermint leaves.
  • 1 cup finely chopped ognions
  • 3/4 cup finely chopped tomatoes
  • 3/4 cup olive oil, of the tasty one
  • 1 cup lemon juice
  • salt & pepper

Preparation:

Soak the burghul for 1 hour in water, then poor- and squeeze out the water. Mix all ingredients well, serve on a big plater or salad leave, nicely garnished with some tomato slices.

Fetoush: Roasted-Bread-Crumbs-Salad with sour cream

This is in fact a Lebanese specialty, not Iraqi - but it tastes nevertheless delicious. (Similar discussions on priorities might arise as well on cubba, s. further down.)

Ingredients:

  • 1 cup of roasted bread cubes

  • 3 middle sized cucumbers, peeled and cut in slices

  • the hart of a lettuce

  • 1 big tomato ... or more if you like

  • 1 big onion or 8 shallots

  • 1/2 cup minced parsley

  • 2 garlic toes

  • 1/2 cup lemon juice

  • 1/2 cup olive oil (the good one)

  • 1 large hot pepper

  • Salt

Give the roasted bread (or large crumbs) in a large dish and sprinkle with lemon juice. Ad the chopped (not only sliced) cucumbers, salad, green pepper, tomatoes and mint. Salt the fine chopped onions and ad them. Mix well and ad the olive oil by and by. Test and ad salt if needed. My be refined with mashed and salted garlic plus lemon juice - and especially with a spoon of fresh cream.

Rice / Safran-Almond-Rice

Rice is the Α&Ώ of Iraqi kitchen. A meal, independent of how many courses are being served, is not a meal without rice. Rice means in Iraq Basmati, that is planted in the swamps south and west of Baghdad. So the discussions on patenting the name basmati were rather absurd, as basmati is cultivated in India, Iraq and other countries since centuries. What concerns the rice-cuisine, as well as the preparation of soups and meat, Iraq is much closer to Iran than the political quarrels might let one expect (s. especially Khouzi).

The preparation of rice shows, that the Arab kitchen is in fact the opposite of fast food. Already a simple, but halfway edible rice meal needs almost an hour for preparation. More difficult things as Tebsi (filled tomatoes, grape leaves and the like (s. further down), need up to 3 hours. An extreme case of slow food so, as most traditional meals. Does not a good tomato sauce or an Italian polenta (maize) need 3 hours as well?

Ingredients:

  • 400 g Basmati
  • 3 spoons of melted fat, best from the tail of an Arab sheep
  • 75g almonds
  • 3 spoons rosewater
  • 1/2 teaspoon saffron
  • 1 middle-sized onion
  • 250 g minced meat
  • 75 g raisins
  • salt, spices (Baharat)
  • 0.7 litter bouillon

Preparation:

Rinse rice thoroughly and leave, covered with cold water, for half an hour

In the meantime heat the fat in a heavy pan and fry onions, using a high temperature, but turning constantly, until golden brown. Ad the baharat. As curry, those spices need to be roasted to develop their full flavor. In the meantime soak the saffron in the rose water.

Ad minced meat and fry it until the liquid evaporated and the meat separates into crumbs. Ad the raisins,  2/3 of the rose-water with saffron and roast for an other 2 to 3 minutes. Taste for seasoning, ad bouillon.

Let the rice drop dry and ad to the boiling broth. Cook for at  least 30 minutes.

Variations: Mix rice and meat immediately or squeeze the meet in a folded kitchen towel between pot and lid for an other 15 Minutes. Take the pot away from the fire and leave it for an other 5 minutes. The rice is served o a big plate, garnished with almonds and sprinkled with the remaining rosewater-saffron.

THE traditional rice specialty of Iraq is Hakake, with broad beans and lam rips. Hakake is in fact only normal dry rice with a substantial amount of fat (or oil, or butter) - left cooking for quite some time ... using the right temperature (we don't want to produce charcoal). This procedure produces a thick crust of crispy rice. The best and most well-known restaurant for this specialty was Ibn Smeena, the son of the fat, Saadoun Street, southeast of Tahrir Square, second road to the right. Well, unluckily Ibn Smeena is not anymore what it used to be. Before you had to wait quite some time to get a place, what nowadays is no problem. But so, the hakake is not always crispy, sometimes not even hot anymore. Arrrrg ... bl... boykott, bl.. Bush ....  Instead of producing mouth-watering dishes, many restaurant owners nowadays get drowned by the fixed costs of empty restaurants.

Here I need to ad an other comment on the spices of Arabia. Baharat, as curry, does not mean a specific spice or a specific mixture, but rather thousands of local mixtures, produced fresh in almost all Arab villages and towns. The main ingredients are black, red and hot pepper (cayenne & chili), caraway seeds, coriander, cloves, cumin, nutmeg and cinnamon. The best place in Baghdad to get spices is Suq Shorja. Compared with the variation of spices found there, our choice, even in special shops, looks rather poor.

 Varieties of baharat s. : http://www.geocities.com/umhajar/baharat.html

Khouzi

A specialty of many Baghdadi restaurants and a reduced version of the traditional Arab feast, the filled lamb:

  • 6 split lamb legs (side-piece)

  • 1 noomi basra (dried limes, as poor replacement you may use fresh lemons, especially the peel).

  • 1 large, fine chopped onion

  • 1/4 coup oil

  • 1 teaspoon baharat

  • 1/2 teaspoon kurkuma (check at an Indian shop)

  • 2 coups of peeled and chopped tomatoes

  • salt, fresh pepper.

Wash the meat, put in in a large pot, cover with water, ad noomi or lemon peels and boil slowly. In the meantime fry the onions in some oil until transparent, ad baharat and kurkuma and fry for an other minute. Ad tomatoes, 2 teaspoons salt, and pepper - as much as you like. When the broth stopps forming lather, remove that one, ad tomatoes and cook, covered, for 1.5 to 2 hours until the meat is tender. Close to the end of the cooking time remove the lid somewhat, so that the broth is reduced to a thick sauce. Serve with rice, salad and flat bread.

 

Bamia - Okra

Ingredients:

  • 1/2 kg sliced lamb- or beef

  • 1/2 kg okra

  • plant- or olive oil

  • 1 middle sized onion, cut in slices

  • 1 garlic head, peeled, large toes cut

  • 1.5 teaspoon salt

  • 1/4 teaspoon black pepper

  • 1 teaspoon grinded coriander

  • 1/4 teaspoon cinnamon

  • 2 spoons tomato paste

  • coriander leaves (parsley or lovage leaves)

  • 1 to 2 lemons

Preparation:

Cover meat and onions well with water and simmer until tender (remove lather). Wash okra, cut the end with the stalk. Fry layer for layer in a flat frying pan. Discard oil except of two spoon full. Fry onion slices, turning them once or twice, adding spices. Ad okra, cooked meat, tomato paste and 4 cups of meat-bouillon. Simmer slightly for 20 to 30 minutes and turn once or twice. The okra will split open ... should it refuse to do so, help with slightly squeezing it with a fork. Season with spices, minced coriander leaves and lemon juice.

Cubba (Kubba, Kibbe, Kibbaye)

Ingredients for stuffing:

  • 3/4 kg minced beef meat

  • 1/4 cup pine kernels

  • 1 grated onion

  • 1 teaspoon salt

  • black pepper, cinnamon, red pepper: s. Baharat. Parsley

Roast meat and pine kernels, ad onion and spices, stew until meat is tender and onions transparent.

Dough - and 6 ways of making cubba:

Cubba is a kind of dumplings filled with meat. There are many ways to prepare it. While the filling varieties depend mainly on different spices and the kind of meat, finely or coarsely grinded, the wrapping may be made of different materials and in different forms.

  1. very crispy: 3/4 of dry rice (not risotto rice! - but) cooked as risotto, until soft. Let it cool down and knead until it gets sticky. (An added egg might help, but many Arab women despise this). Form balls with this dough. From the balls form a shell, a hollow half-ball with your thumb. Fill it, close it carefully and form a kind of double pointed egg. Its important that your fingers are not greasy or oily, otherwise the dough will not stick and the shell not close anymore. Those dumplings (variety 1 to 3) have to be fried in hot, deep oil.

  2. crispy-crusty: 3/4 kg of bulghur (rough-grinded hart-wheat), even some cooked potatoes might be added.

  3. soft-crusty: 3/4 kg rice with potatoes, or only potatoes .... while the latter one would be called potato charp:

  • 1 kg potatoes

  • 1 big egg

  • 1/4 coup wheat flour

  • salt, pepper

Stuffing:

  • 1 middle-sized onion, chopped in smal pieaces

  • 1 spoon oil

  • 1 garlic toe, fine cut

  • 250g minced lamb or beef meat

  • 1 teaspoon baharat

  • salt

  • 1/2 cup peeled and chopped tomatoes

  • 1/4 cup chopped parsley

Cook poatoes in peeling until tender, peel and smash. When cooled down ad egg ans spices. Fry onions in oil, ad garlic and minced meat, turn over strong heat until it gets bronish and disaggregates into crumbs. Mix in salt, parsley and tomatoes. Stew for an other quarter of an hour.

Flatten one spoon of the potatoe paste on your hand. Put one spoon full of the filling in the middle, fold and close the potatoe dogh over it. (The hands should be wet, otherwise the potato dogh sticks). Roll balls in flour and flatten them slighly. Fry in a flat pan with some 5mm oil on both sides (about 30 min.)

  1. Cubba for vegetarians: Instead of the stuffing with minced meat you may fill the dumplings with e.g. a tomato-parsly mix: Peel two tomatoes, cut in quarters, remove cernels and juice, chopp finely. Mix with a stued big onion and half a cup parsley. The rest of the procedure is the same for al varieties.

  2. Cubba for soup is normally made out of burghul, as rice desagregates much more easily. A typical cuppa-soup contains besides cubba mainly leaves and stalks of Swiss Chard or some similar spinach-like vegetables.

  3. Cubba in the oven: For large families and restaurants there is a mor rational way of producing cubba. Put one layer of dough (mostly burghul) on a greased baking-tin, the stuffing over it, and cover the whole with a second layer of dough. The upper layer should be slightly thicker than the lower. This cubba is coated with oil and baked in the oven for some 20 minutes.

Cubba is mostly served with salad and laban (sour milk), often laben with cucumbers (like zaziki).

Stuffed Grape Leaves, Tomataoes, Eggplants, Onions, Swiss Chart.

Those receipts might be well known, as they are quite typical all around the mediterranean and on the Balkan.

Stuffing

Chopped onions, parsely, peppermint, lemon, chili, fennel, rice, olive oil - for vegetarians, + minced meat for the others.

Preparation:

The grape leaves have to be left in water for some time and blanched. Then a spoonfull of the rice-spices-meat mixture will be added and the leave rolled like a zigar, from the side of the stem.

Tomatoes, onions and eggplants will have to be scooped out first. The lid cut for this purpose will be put back after the stuffing. 

The filled vegetables goes into a big and heavy pan with lots of olive oil and 1.25 l of hot water. To prevent it from swimming you might have to place a dish on top of it. It has to simmer on low heat for at least 45 minutes.

Kleetsche

Date-cookies are a specialty for the end of the month of fasting (Ramadan):

  •  3 cups of wheat flour

  • 1/2 cup fine shugar

  • 250g butter

  • 3 spoons rose water

  • 1/4 cup water

Sttuffing:

  • 250 g dates without stones. (The large and delicious ones, as those from California, not the dry, small Santaclause dates. Those are sheep-fodder.)

  • 2 spoons of butter

Pass flour and sugar through a sieve. Cut butter in pieces and work it into the dough with your fingers. Mix rose water with water and drop on the flour. Mix into a strong dough and let it rest for half an hour. (I did not forget leaven or backing powder, its really not used here).

Chopp dates, give them into a pan with butter and heat them up under constant stirring, until the dates get soft. A little spoon of pulverised cardamon should be added as well.

Roll one spoon full to a small ball, squeese it in your hand, ad 1 coffespoon of date-stuffing in the middle and close the ball again. There are special forms, as for christmas cookies, if you like the decor. If you don't have a form, first they taste as well without, second, do as many Arab housewoman do and create some decor with a fork. 

The fast and rational way ist to roll out the dough, roll in the stuffing and cut the roll into slices of 1.5cm.

Fruits:

Thanks to the different climatic zones of Irak, the country offfers a lot of fruits. The hot and damp South (up to 50°C in summer + an extreme humidity, due to the swamps and the near sea) produces a rich variety of dates (some 120 kinds), the hot and dry center (until 58° C) some of the world's sweetest water- and sweet melons and the North, in winter snow-covered and frosty, produces most of the fruits we know and enjoy, as apples, pears, peaches, plums, walnuts, haselnuts, pine cernels, almonds, figs, pistachios, chestnuts. In addition, some plants, that in our countries only produce fodder for the birds, develop here really eddible and tasty fruits, as especially witethorn and medlar, whose fruit in the area of origin, in Central Asia, may reach sizes of over 1 cm.

Typical oriental fruits as pomegrenade, carob, whitebeam and Sidr (Ziziphus spina-christi), whose fruits are able to drive any houseowner crazy, as the children can never resist to throw balls, stones, wood pieces and even showes at it to get hold of the refreshing apple-like fruits.

THE fruit of Iraq is the date (tamr). Iraq hosts some 120 varieties of dates. Some of them serving as fodder for animals, as sheep, or even the bear in the zoo of Baghdad. Unluckily processing has a very low standard. Even the best ones of the most famous confectionary of Baghdad, Abu Afif, make of visit of the toilet unavoidable some 3 hours after you eat them.

Some dates are fermented, what produces araq (aniseed brandy), or, some pistachio resin added, mustaki (poor Bin Laden, as the Iraqis have been said to be stubborn fundamentalists ....)

http://enhg.4t.com/articles/date.htm

Beer und Wine:

If the bear-keeper serves a poor beer that does not equal the price of the grain, she shall be held guilty and drowned in the river.

Hamurabi, 1768-1686 b. C.

The loss of the traditional beer breweries of Iraq is not only a shame, but a real loss of culture. The first beer has been consumed in Iraq before over 5000 years and lots of varieties have been developed. http://www.bier-lexikon.lauftext.de/babylonier.htm Many Iraqis have been beer loving people. 1981 one had to queue up already in the morning at around 10, because at lunchtime the whole production of the day had gone. I remember an employee of Yemen's General Directorate of Forestry that had the opportunity to visit Baghdad, and came back shocked, not merely about the fact that the Iraqis drink beer, but about the sheer quantities of boxes standing at the corners of the restaurants, waiting for refilling. Today, no Shariar, no Sharazade, not even the simple Lulu'a - but a rich choice of Heineken & Co. imports.

The Iraqi wines might be more useful for tanning than for drinking, as they shrink your intestines (the wine of the middle ages must have tasted somewhat like that). Here it's especially Yemen with its over 40 kinds of grapes, that spoils the chances for some delicious wines - because of an overdone literal-mindedness.

Rice:

An interesting product is Iraqi rice, that most probably would not be expected in such a dry area. It is in fact grown in the swamps of the south and west of Baghdad, and it definitely needs about four times as much water as cotton, whose production dried up already Lake Aral in Central Asia. Iraqi rice is, since a long time, called basmati, the best local varieties amba (or anba). So it was quite irritating to hear that some international manufacturers of genetically manipulated rice wanted to patent the name basmati.  Those local kinds of rice are the best for the production of hakake, as they form a crispy crust already with much less oil or butter than other kinds of rice. Moreover its taste and consistency, the bite, is first class.

http://employees.csbsju.edu/SSAUPE/biol106/lectures/cereals.htm

An example of arab cuisine from the middle ages shows, how refined cuisine can be, even if it does not come from France. [from: Peter Heine: Kulinarische Studien. Untersuchungen zur Kochkunst im arabisch-islamischen Mittelalter. Mit Rezepten. Otto Harrassowitz. Wiesbaden. 1988.]:

The aim of this receipt is, to cook, fry and steam a fish in the same time, so to spoil the palate with 3 different qualities of bite. The fish normally used are silver-scaled fish as bunni, gittan and shabut - from left to right always more resembling carp, and fatter. Those can get a size of 1m and longer, if they get the chance. The cleaned fish is filled with lemon leaves, apple peelings and different spices. The upper part with the head put in a pot with water. Pot and fish being put in the tanur together. That way the head will be cooked, the middle part, wrapped in oil-soaked linen, will be fried and the tail, wrapped in raw linen, cotton or other fibers will be baked. An effort reminding of the shows of modern kitchen athletes. The simple version of fish roasted over wood (mesgouf), is best enjoyed under the palm trees bordering the Tigris, mainly at Abu Nuwas and Mesbah. If Bush would have done that before the war, he might have searched the biggest danger to world-peace somewhere else.

The tanoor is the typical oven of each house, especially in Yemen and traditional restaurants (If you happen to visit Yemen, don't miss a stop at Marawia, where you get the best hanid (lambs meat baked in the tanur). THE restaurant in Baghdad for fish baked in the tanoor would be the Al Mahar. A tanur is a large clay pot, amphora like, about  1m high, with a diameter in the middle of 40 to 80 cm, tapering off towards the top. In this "oven" a wood-fire is lit in the morning, so that at about 11 there is only glowing charcoal left on the bottom. Its an energy saving device, as wood is scarce in most NME, and kerosene, electricity and gas got only available in the last decennials of the past century, and by far not everywhere, especially not in the countryside. The dough for flat-bread is slapped at the wall for baking, in the charcoal meat is roasted, and, when the cooking is done, a dish placed on the top of the tanur, will extract the last heat from the fumes and produce hot water for tee - and for washing. As you can see, energy saving has not been invented by engineers, development experts and not even by Europeans (Americans? They still think that's a communist plot). 

More recipes in English:

21 May 2004, Martin Herzog Rheinfelden, Switzerland  hewww.brainworker.ch
 

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