"He [who eats] should not find fault with any dish. It was the custom of the Prophet, may God bless and preserve him, not to complain of any dish. If he liked it, he ate it, and if not, he left it."
From a medieval Muslim etiquette guide by Abū Hāmid Muhammad
Al-Ghazālī (1059-1111), excerpt from Bernard Lewis’s
A Middle East Mosaic: Fragments of Life, Letters and
History.
Ramadan ended officially at sundown on the 11th of October and the festival celebrating its end was the 12th of October. During Ramadan, observant Muslims are supposed to refrain from eating or drinking anything from sunrise to sunset. Needless to say, the end of the fast is a time of celebration. The feast is called the "Eid al-Fitr" or the "Festival of Breaking the Fast." The "What’s For Dinner?" folks have kindly allowed me to take this evening’s diary to talk about Arabic food, and I have a bit of food, a couple of recipes, and a few pictures.
The tradition during the month of Ramadan is to break the fast with a sweet, eaten right at sundown. I was in Istanbul in December of 1999, when Ramadan fell over our Christmas and New Year. When we were on the streetcar and the sun set, the call to prayer went out, and everyone could eat, people came along the aisle, passing out hard candies for those who needed to have something to wet their mouths, and put something in their stomachs. Traditionally in the Arab world, the fast is broken with dates. Beautiful trays of dates are for sale in the Middle East. You can find them in Middle Eastern groceries in North America as well. As you might be able to go to your local grocery and find them, I wanted to start you with an image that is perhaps a bit more exotic. This is a picture of a date palm from the Egyptian Delta. The dates are not ripe, but you can see a lot of them. Ownership of date palms is inherited, just as farmers’ fields would be.
Drink:
When I first went to Egypt, it was the summer of 1973. My chief taste memory from that time was an awful banana-flavoured soda. Now Egypt has western sodas and bottled water so you don’t have to worry about something so sweet and disgusting. Although Egypt has a long tradition of beer making, Egypt is now a Muslim country, and in several provinces of modern Egypt you cannot buy any alcoholic beverage. However, Stella Beer is now produced in Egypt, along with a couple of quite decent non-alcoholic brews. What people drink traditionally instead of beer is tea. Strong, hot, and very sweet. An alternative is the drink made from hibiscus blossoms called karkade. It is quite sour so it is traditionally served hot with a lot of sugar. The first time I ever had it, though, it was cold, and so much better than lemonade. It was like a very floral pomegranate juice. It can stain badly if you spill it on your clothes. It makes great sherbet as well as a drink.
Breakfast:
Traditional breakfast food is fuul (also spelled foul, and pronounced like "fool" as in jester) and tamiya (pronounced tuh-MEE-yuh). Beans, beans, beans.
Fuul is made with fuul beans (small fava beans). You can find it in cans in a Middle Eastern grocery, but you can make it too.
½ pound fuul beans (small fava beans)
Brown outer skin of 1 onion
4 eggs
Rinse, clean, and soak beans for at least 8 hours.
Put the beans in a saucepan and cover with about 2 inches of water. Add the whole eggs in their shells, nested into the beans, and the washed brown outer skin of an onion (gives colour). Cover and simmer for 1 ½ hours.
Remove the lid and simmer until the water is only ¾ of an inch above the beans.
Remove the onion skin and serve. You traditionally mash the egg into the beans when eating.
Fuul is rather bland. It is often served with oil drizzled over it (olive or some other type). Generally you squeeze small lemons (the size and colour of limes, but yes, they are lemons) over it and season it with salt.
Tamiya is the Egyptian version of felafel. In Egypt it is green because of the amount of parsley. When I have a party and serve Middle Eastern food I usually serve this, taking a good felafel mix (sometimes I take the easy way out!) but chopping up a couple of tablespoons of parsley very finely until the thing takes on a green colour that is roughly the colour of grass.
Lunch:
A good traditional lunch food is kushari, probably my favourite Egyptian food. It is not good for someone who is on a low-carb diet as it is a mix of lentils, rice, and macaroni. I don't have a picture (really need to get one when I go back). It really is the most remarkable carbohydrate-rich dish and goes to show that cheap doesn't have to be anything other than absolutely delicious.
Kushari
1 cup brown lentils
1 cup rice
1/8 kg macaroni (the recipe calls for small round macaroni)
2 large onions, chopped
2 Tbsp. oil
2 cups tomato sauce
Hot chili sauce (optional)
Cook lentils, rice, and pasta separately (I generally use angel hair pasta, break it up into inch-long lengths and fry it before stirring it into the mix with a bit of water; this gives it a nice golden colour). Mix the three ingredients together and put them in a cooking pot.
Fry onions in the oil until rich brown, then drain them on absorbent paper and put the cooking oil in with the carbohydrate mixture (yummy). Return the cooking pot with the pasta, etc., to the flame and toss while reheating for a few minutes. Serve topped with the onions and tomato sauce and hot sauce, if desired.
Tomato sauce
2 cups tomato juice
1-2 onions, chopped very finely
5-7 garlic cloves, crushed
1 tsp. vinegar
Cooking oil, salt, and pepper
Sauté onions until soft, then add garlic and fry to a pale brown. Add tomato juice and simmer for 15-20 minutes, until sauce is cooked and becomes dark. Add vinegar and seasoning if you want, and cook for 2-3 minutes longer.
Dinner:
If you have enough money, a family would eat meat. Sometimes it is roast or grilled (pigeons, quail, and chickens – chickens are first documented in the reign of Thutmose III (early 15th century BCE) when the records talk of a wonderful bird brought from the east that laid an egg a day). Sometimes it is ground (lamb or beef) and made into meatballs or wrapped around a skewer and grilled. The tougher meats (mutton, gamousa (water buffalo), and cattle) are boiled until they fall apart, and the boiled liquid served alongside the meat.
Here is a photograph of a meal (lunch) with the boiled meat, stewed beans, rice, tomatoes, and bread. Melon pieces served for dessert. The meal was served when we took a break on an archaeological excavation in the Delta. The food was brought out from the village on this metal tray and we ate sitting around a mat on the ground. The bread was some of the best I have ever eaten. It was made fresh every day. I was lucky enough to get a series of photos of the women in the village baking the bread. It was patted out flat and put into a mud oven that was up against the mudbrick wall of the house. At the same time they were using straw and grasses to cook the bread, they were baking sweet potatoes.
I realize I have been talking a long time. I will just leave you with the names of the two books I have taken the above recipes from. The first is from Suzy Behghiat’s Middle Eastern Cooking which also has a great vegan recipe for stuffed grape leaves with dried apricots, and the second is from the American University in Cairo’s Egyptian Cooking: A Practical Guide by Samia Abdennour. I have several Middle Eastern cookbooks, but those are the two I keep coming back to and the ones that have a great track record for me. Middle Eastern food is comfort food for me.
As for what is for dinner for me? I am going over to a friend's house for homemade pizza. What about you?