Category: Vegetarian

A great vegetable dish from 14th-century Egypt, made with chickpeas, walnuts, salted lemons, olive oil, tahini, coriander, caraway, rue, aṭrāf al-ṭīb (أَطْراف الطِّيب), mint, wine vinegar, and pistachios. If you think that you’ve seen this one before, you’re right since it is the ancestor to the modern favourite hummus!

Despite its name (arnab, ‘hare’), this is a vegetarian dish made with two aubergines, which are first boiled in water and salt. They are then cooked in the oven with garlic, olive oil and spices such as pepper, cumin, thyme, and saffron. You can also break some eggs into the dish before baking, which is how it was done in the recreation. [Andalusian, fol. 52v.]

This recipe is one of a number of cold snacks (known as بوارد, bawārid) found in what is thought to be the earliest cookery manual (10th century). These cold dishes were served prior to the main course and eaten with bread. This particular dish is highly nutritional as well as very simple to make. It requires gourd, chard, mallow and purslane added with sweet yoghurt, mixed with ground mustard and olive oil. Though not in the original recipe, it seemed a good idea to decorate with some freshly sliced cucumber! It is wonderful with some crusty bread and makes for a perfect picnic dish!

This was a speciality of the mediaeval Islamic west (al-Andalus, North Africa) and the cookbooks include quite a few recipes for mujabbanas, which were conspicuous by their absence from tables in the Near East. This 13th-century recipe requires flour, yeast and water to make a dough which is then shaped into balls and filled with cheese before deep frying in oil (though shallow frying also produces nice results). Don’t forget to drain them after removing them from the pan. They can also be turned into a sweet snack very easily through a generous dusting of sugar and cinnamon and with honey and rosewater for delicious dunking! There are a number of present-day descendants of the mujabbana, the most far-flung of which is probably the Brazilian pao de queijo.