Category: Vegetarian

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Spotlight on: Melon

The exact place of origin of the common melon (Cucumis melo) is unidentified to date but it is widely accepted that it somewhere in the area between the Mediterranean and northern India. The variety eaten in Antiquity was the cucumber-shaped chate melon (Cucumis melo var. Chate), rather than the sweet fruit of today.

The watermelon (Citrullus lanatus) is an unrelated species that is native of (west) Africa, as is its sister species, the colocynth (Citrullus colocynthis) — most commonly known as ḥanẓal (حنظل) in Arabic –, which was never eaten, due to its bitterness. The oldest attested use of the watermelon in the Mediterranean may go back to Egypt in the second millennium BCE. Indeed, the Arabic word for it, biṭṭīkh (بطّيخ), is a descendant of the ancient Egyptian bddw-k’, which became pi-betuke (pi-betikhe) in Coptic, though it has been suggested that this actually denoted the aubergine, and was only later transferred to the watermelon. The depictions of the fruit have also been called into doubt and are said to show the colocynth, rather than the watermelon. The wild ancestor of the watermelon was very different from today’s varieties, particularly in that it was more bitter than sweet.

A more plausible hypothesis of the development of the watermelon is that it travelled eastward and after cultivation in India returned west, courtesy of the Arab merchants, who also introduced the fruit to Europe. Support for this hypothesis may be found in the fact that medieval Arabic scholars often distinguished between a number of watermelon varieties, all of which hail from the east: Falasṭīnī (Palestinian), Shāmī (Syrian), Hindī (Indian) and Sindī (from the Sind, i.e. north-west India).

In Arabic, dullāʿ (دلاع) and biṭṭīkh were not uncommonly used interchangeably for both the common melon and the watermelon; the former word is of Berber origin and explains why this is the still the most common word for watermelon in North African vernaculars. The term shammām (شمّام) is applied only to the sweet (cantaloupe) melon.

In the medieval Arabic culinary tradition, melons are used relatively rarely. There are some savoury recipes for snake melon (‘ajjūr, عجّور) used in savoury recipes in Syrian and Egyptian collections, whereas the latter also contain a chate melon confection. In the early Abbasid tradition, the watermelon appears in some judhāba and fālūdhaj recipes. Additionally, the rind was used in hand-washing powders, whereas the dried ground peel was said to make food cook quickly.

Medicinally, opinions on the benefits of watermelon varied somewhat. According to some, the watermelon was slow to be digested and generates thick blood. Others held that all kinds of melon are beneficial for coughs, kidneys, and ulcers in the lungs and bladder. Al-Qazwini recommended soaking watermelon seeds in honey and milk to ensure its fruit will be very sweet.

The watermelon enjoyed much favour in religion as well, as shown by the following hadith (saying of the Prophet): “Enjoy the watermelon and its fruit, for its juice is a mercy, and its sweetness is like the sweetness of faith. Whoever takes a morsel of watermelon, Allah writes for him seventy thousand good deeds and erases from him seventy thousand misdeeds.”

description of melons in al-Qazwini’s ‘Wonders of Creation’
Sweet melons in the Tacuinum Sanitatis (1490, Vienna), the Latin translation of Ibn Butlan’s Taqwim al-Sihha
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Mamluk starch pudding

This is a recreation of a recipe from The Sultan’s Feast for a wonderful sweet starch pudding, known as hayṭaliyya (هيطلية). Though the recipe is from an Egyptian collection, its name betrays Central Asian origins as it goes back to Hayṭal (هيطل), a name for the historical region of Transoxania, which was usually known as mā wara’ al-nahr (ما وراء النهر), literally ‘beyond the stream’, i.e. the area beyond the Oxus river. Additionally, the word — more particularly the plural hayāṭala — appears in the literature as a name for the Hephthalites or White Huns, tribes from the Mongolian steppe who had settled along the Oxus by the 4th century CE.

The first step is to make the starch (with crushed wheat and water), which is then cooked in milk, added with mastic and two other highly unusual ingredients — tree wormwood (shayba) and shampoo ginger (ʿirq kāfūr). Once the mixture has thickened sufficiently, it’s ready to serve with a generous drizzle of your best honey on top. The result is a very unusual pudding with a bit of a kick.

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Spotlight on: Garlic

Garlic (Allium sativum) is one of the oldest cooking ingredients and was already used in Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia; in fact, the Arabic word thūm (ثوم) goes back to the Akkadian šūmū (from the Sumerian sum). The plant was grown along the northern Mediterranean very early on and the Ancient Greeks were probably the first to preserve garlic by smoking it. According to Dioscorides, it clears bronchi and is a remedy for chronic coughs when eaten raw, baked, or boiled. While the Greeks appreciated the flavour garlic imparted to food, they were less impressed by the odour of garlic on the breath.

It is one of the vegetables mentioned in the Qur’an, alongside cucumber, lentils and onions. It came in two varieties: wild (برّي, barrī) and cultivated (بستاني, bustānī), and became a staple in Arab cooking; according to the author of The Sultan’s Feast, ‘garlic draws forth the aromas of oils in broths, seeds and vegetables, and enhances their flavour.’ Garlic was often cooked with vinegar and oil and garlic to make a sauce. It was also used frequently in fish dishes. There’s even an Egyptian recipe for sour yoghurt and garlic, which results in something most people today would recognize as tzatziki. Garlic was a particular favourite in medieval Andalusian cookery, and often cooked in vinegar.

Medicinally, it was recommended as a diuretic, to remedy flatulence and various dermatological conditions, while chewing its leaves cures eye inflammation. According to the 12th-century physician Ibn Butlan, garlic is partiuclarly good for older people and in winter time. Howver, he warned that it should not be overcooked because then it loses its effectiveness, especially when it is prepared with vinegar and eaten with milk or fish.

garlic in a 13th-century copy of the Latin translation of Ibn Butlan’s Taqwim al-Sihha
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Spotlight on: Cucumber

The cucumber (Cucumis sativus) is a member of the Cucurbitaceae family, which also includes gourds and melons, and its cultivation history goes back at least 4,000 years. It probably originated on the Indian sub-Continent, but was already known to the ancient Mesoptamians and Greeks.

The route taken by the cucumber from its Indian homeland to the Mediterranean is revealed in the common Arabic words for it — khiyār (خيار) and qiththā (قثاء). The former is a Persian loanword, whereas the latter goes back to the Assyrian qiššū (which may, in fact, be related to the older Sumerian úkuš). The word qiththā ((or quththā’) appears in the Qur’ān (2:61) and also referred to the snake-cucumber, aka snake melon (Cucumis melo var. flexuosus), which was sometimes known as faqqūs in the literature. Both terms are also thought to denote the chate melon (Cucumis melo var. chate). Unripe snake lemons, called ‘ajjur (related to ʿajr, ‘green, unripe’) appear in a number of Syrian and Egyptian cookery books, as an ingredient in stews, or topped or stuffed with meat and vegetables. Cucumbers are also called for in cold dishes (بوارد, bawārid), pickled, or used as a garnish. Sometimes, the juice extracted from cucumber pulp is also mentioned. In any event, cucumbers were more used in the Near East and were a rarity in Andalusian and North African cuisines.

In the medical tradition, the cucumber’s cold and moist properties caused it to be prescribed for a hot liver, as a diuretic and antipyretic, but it was said to cause stomach aches. It was also used to sweeten the breath. The best qiththā’ were said to be from Nisabur.

illustration of cucumbers in Tacuinum Sanitatis.
some 13th-century Syrian pickled cucumber recipes
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Andalusian Pomelo Vinegar

After making Syrian pickled pomelo, the time came to make a vinegar with this rarely used fruit in the medieval Arab culinary tradition. The recipe was taken from The Exile’s Cookbook, which is the only treatise to refer to a zanbū‘ (زنبوع), which in the East was known as kubbād (kabbād). Pomelo vinegar is called for in a number of recipes, including beef and lamb stews, and in a sauce for grilled meat and fried dried tuna.

The recreation was patterned on the recipe for lime vinegar and is quite simple. The juice of the pomelos is extracted and decanted to glass jars and then salt is added. They should be left out in the sun and strained a couple of times more, after which the vinegar is ready for use. The author recommends sealing the jars with olive oil for storage.

If, like me, you’ve never had pomelo vinegar, it has a wonderfully tangy flavour. In fact, I discovered it works very well as a dip — possibly mixed with olive oil — for bread.

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Andalusian fried cheese buns

One of the most emblematic dishes from al-Andalus are the fried cheese buns, known as mujabbana (مجبّنة), for which a number of recipes can be found in the two Andalusian cookery books. This particular re-creation is based on one from The Exile’s Cookbook. And to make it even more special, it was made with cheese from the same source. A future post will be devoted to the latter, for those who want to try their hand at whipping up some medieval cheese.

This particular variety of mujabbana calls for a semolina dough and fresh cheese which has been washed with water and kneaded into a marrow-like consistency before being left to dry. After adding aniseed, mint juice and fresh coriander juice everything is kneaded together. Once the cheese mix is ready, it’s time to put a pan with olive oil on the heat and start shaping the mujabbanas. It’s a simple — but slightly delicate — process which involves taking a piece of dough and wrapping it over the cheese mixture before deep-frying each piece, making sure that it is golden on all sides. They are served with fresh butter or melted honey, and sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon.

The author also gives an alternative, which, so we are told, is how the Andalusians prefer it; the mujabbanas are served in a bowl sprinkled with cinnamon, aniseed and sugar, whereas in the middle there should be a dish with honey into which to dip the buns. A third variant is to mix egg whites into the dough as ‘this will further enhance the taste and delight.’ I can’t think of anyone who would argue with that once they’ve tried it!

The modern Spanish almojábana denotes a popular Colombian cheese bread and, in Spain, a type of cheesecake, or even a fritter made without cheese.

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Medieval Egyptian crunchy roast chickpeas

What is probably the oldest reference to this snack can be found in a recipe for toasted wheat called qāwūt (قاووت) — a word related to an Arabic root meaning ‘to nourish, feed’, with qūt (قوت) and quwāt (قوات) denoting ‘food’ — in treatises from Mamluk Egypt, including The Sultan’s Feast. The recipe mentions taking the wheat to the chickpea roaster to perform the required task, thus revealing that it was already a popular streetfood even then, as it still is today in many countries.

The recipe mentions the name these crunchy roast chickpeas still have, i.e. qadāma (قضامة), which actually denotes anything that is nibbled, from a verb, qadima (قضم), ‘to nibble or bite on something dry’. Interestingly enough, one of the other meanings of the verb is ‘to have black and broken teeth’ — presumably, due to over-nibbling on snacks!

The chickpeas are soaked, boiled and then roasted over a gentle fire. For this recipe, I just added salt, but today a number of other spices are also used. In Turkey, it is known as leblebi, but, confusingly, in some Arab countries (especially Tunisia) lablabi (لبلابي) denotes a chickpea soup, a popular streetfood.

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Medieval Syrian pickled pomelo

This recipe from 13th-century Aleppo was apparently created by the maidservants of the Ayyubid sultan of Egypt and Damascus (and nephew of the great Salah al-Din), al-Malik al-Kamil (d. 1238), and it is they who taught the author to make it. The recipe is one of very few in the medieval Arab culinary tradition to require pomelo (كبّاد, kubbād). Both the peel (which will be fried) and segments are used, together with wine vinegar, sweetened with honey or sugar. Other ingredients include toasted hazelnuts, the aṭrāf al-ṭīb spice blend, and mint. The mixture should be left for a couple of days to ferment away before it is good to eat. A wonderful accompaniment to many a cold and hot dish!

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Spotlight on: Pears

Pears (Pirus communis)– like their cousin the apple – originated in the Caucasus and northeastern Anatolia. The fruit was already cultivated in Ancient Greece in the first millennium BCE, but it only spread throughout the Mediterranean in the Roman period. The Greek botanist Theophrastus (d. 287 BCE) discussed various techniques for growing them, whereas the naturalist Pliny the Elder (d. 79 CE) referred to forty-one varieties being available in Rome. Dioscorides recommended pears as an antidiarrheal medicine, but said that they are harmful when eaten on an empty stomach. More mysteriously, he claimed the ash of pear tree wood was an effective remedy for those choking from mushrooms, while cooking pears with mushrooms removed the latter’s harmful properties. Pears were much more popular than apples at the time but because pears can spoil very easily, they were often preserved after drying them, or in grape syrup, and the Romans even made a pear vinegar.

In the Arabic-speaking world, pears (كمّثرى, kummathra) were grown in a number of areas, especially the Levant, but also in Egypt. Sources also refer to Chinese, Sijistani and Khorasani pears as being particularly good varieties. Pears appear only once in the medieval Arabic culinary literature, as an optional ingredient in a 13th-century Andalusian fruit pudding.

Muslim physicians agreed with Dioscorides’ assessment of pears, but also recommended them to strengthen the stomach and suppress thirst. The fruit was used in a digestive conserve, made with sweet unripe pears submerged in honey and then slightly cooked.

In the Syrian dialect, pears are known as ‘ijjāṣ‘ (إجّاص), the usual word for plum in other varieties.

pears in al-Ghafiqi’s herbal
pears in an Arabic translation of Dioscorides’ Materia Medica (University of Bologna)
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Violet conserve (بنفسج مربّى, banafsaj murabbā)

A recipe from an 11th-century pharmacological encyclopedia compiled by the Baghdadi scholar Ibn Jazla. It is very easy to make and involves drying petals from good-quality fragrant violet flowers in the sun and then adding sugar syrup.

Medicinally, the conserve was said to be good for the chest and useful against coughs and roughness in the throat.

Violet conserve recipe in a copy of Ibn Jazla’s text in the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland