Dairy

You need to use large dried apricots for this famous Turkish sweet. The cream used in Turkey is the thick kaymak made from water buffaloes’ milk (see box below). The best alternatives are clotted cream and mascarpone.

This is a meat stew with pasta. I am assured that it only tastes right if small Italian pasta called “orzo,” which look like tiny bird’s tongues or largish grains of rice, are used. In Egypt, families used to make the pasta themselves with flour and water, rolling tiny bits of dough into little ovals between their fingers. A friend recalls spending hours doing this with her brother every Sunday as a small child.

This Armenian specialty makes a hearty main dish. It has a pure and fresh quality and is an entirely different experience from eating an Italian or Asian pasta dish.

Manti, a specialty of Kayseri, are said to have been brought to Turkey from China by the Tartars. I first saw them being prepared in a hotel in Izmir twenty years ago. I was accompanied by Nevin Halici, a cooking teacher, culinary historian, and ethnographer, who was then researching the regional foods of Turkey. She was going from village to village, knocking on people’s doors and attending the traditional lunches where women cook together. The second time I saw the little dumplings being made was in a hotel in San Francisco, where at the invitation of the Institute of Food and Wine she was cooking a Turkish meal for almost a hundred people. She shaped the dumplings into tiny, open-topped, moneybag-like bundles, baked them for 20 minutes, poured chicken broth over them, and put them back in the oven again until they softened in the broth. The following recipe is for the easier version, like ravioli, which many Turkish restaurants make today. It is really delicious and quite different from any Italian dish. They call it klasik manti, and often cook it in chicken broth (see variation), which is particularly delicious.

A large amount of fried onions makes this refreshing Syrian pasta particularly tasty.

People used to make 1-inch-long vermicelli by rolling tiny pieces of dough between their fingers. Make it by breaking dry vermicelli in your hand.

This Syrian recipe which combines bulgur with eggplants and the salty, chewy halumi cheese makes a lovely vegetarian main dish.

Sour little red berries called barberries (zereshk in Persian) and yogurt give this chicken-and-rice dish an exciting flavor and texture. The woman who wrote out this recipe for me more than thirty years ago added a comment that it was the most famous and traditional of Iranian dishes.

A number of popular Lebanese dishes which go under the name of fatta (see page 222) involve yogurt and a bed of soaked toasted or fried bread. This one is served for breakfast accompanied by scallions and green peppers cut into strips.

This Syrian and Lebanese dish, for which the city of Damascus is famous, is complex and requires time, but it is not difficult and it has dramatic appeal, with different layers of texture and flavor. There are those who prefer deep-frying the stuffed eggplants and the bread, and those who stew the eggplants in tomato sauce and toast the bread instead of frying. I have tried both ways and found them both delicious. A little sour-pomegranate concentrate gives a brown color and sweet-and-sour flavor to the tomato sauce.

This is a family dish we all loved. My mother accompanied it with yogurt. The fried onions and large amount of sharp cheese lift the usually somewhat insipid taste of zucchini.

Bell peppers change in color as they ripen from olive, pale, and bright green to vivid yellow and red. The red ones are the ripest and sweetest. In Turkey they are roasted or deep-fried whole and served hot as a first course accompanied with yogurt or with a tomato sauce. There is no need to peel them. A long, pointed, piquant (but not hot) variety is also prepared in the same way.

Fava beans are the most important vegetable of Egypt. Buy young, tender ones in their season. If they are very young, you can cook them in their pods, which you cut into pieces. Some supermarkets sell young fava beans already shelled in packets, which do not need to be skinned. Older beans have tough skins as well as tough pods. The skinned frozen ones you can buy in Middle Eastern stores are particularly good.

A delicious Turkish dish—the rich meat is offset by the cool yogurt.

Because of its whiteness, this is a festive dish served on the New Year to augur a year full of happiness. It is served hot with rice in winter, and cold in summer.

This famously Greek dish is to be found throughout the Arab world without the creamy topping. Broiling or grilling instead of frying the eggplants makes for a lighter and lovelier moussaka. This one is made upof a layer of eggplants, a layer of meat and tomatoes, and a layer of cheesy white (béchamel-type) sauce. Serve with salad and yogurt.

This intriguing layered dish with a delicious mix of textures and flavors is a specialty of the city of Hama in Syria.

Recipes for meat cooked in yogurt abound in medieval Arabic cookery manuals, where the dish was called madira. As early as the tenth century, the Arab writer Badia’z Zaman wrote a tale entitled “Al Madirya” about the dish. Such dishes are still popular in the Arab world. The name of this Lebanese version, which means “his mother’s milk,” implies that the meat of a young animal is cooked in its own mother’s milk. It can be made with chunks of meat or lamb shanks. Serve with plain rice (page 337) or rice with vermicelli (page 340).

Hardly any dishes were invented by restaurant chefs in Turkey, but this one was, by a man called Iskander; that is why it is also known as Iskander kebab. It made its appearance in the 1920s, after the Ottoman Empire had crumbled and Turkey became a republic. The cooks who had worked in the palace kitchens and in the homes of the aristocracy (much of the aristocracy moved to Egypt) became unemployed and looked for ways to survive. Many of them opened restaurants—lokandesi and kebab houses. This dish has remained a mainstay of Turkish kebab houses, where it is sometimes served dramatically in a dome-shaped copper dish—the type that was used at the palace. On one level it reflects the preponderance of yogurt in the Turkish kitchen. I serve it in deep individual clay bowls which can be kept hot in the oven. It is a multi-layered extravaganza. There is toasted pita bread at the bottom. It is covered by a light sauce made with fresh tomatoes, topped by a layer of yogurt. This is sprinkled with olive oil which has been colored with paprika and with pine nuts. Skewers of grilled ground meat kofta or small burgers (as in this recipe) are laid on top. The tomato sauce and the meat must be very hot when you assemble the dish. The yogurt should be at room temperature.

This multi-layered dish is complex and time-consuming, and I don’t expect many people to attempt it. But it is very important in the Arab world, especially in Syria and Lebanon. And it is one of those recipes which bring me a flood of memories. I had received a letter from a woman I did not know in Beirut saying that she would like to meet me and that she had recipes for me. It was the late Josephine Salam. On our first meeting—at Claridge’s tearoom, where a band played Noël Coward tunes—she brought me a bottle of orange-blossom water and a copper pan. She volunteered to come to my house and show me how to make fattet jaj. I got the ingredients, and we made so much that we had to call in the neighbors to eat. I saw her for many years after that, and we had many meals together. It was the time of the civil war in Lebanon, and I received through her an ongoing account of everyday life in the ravaged city. Her daughter Rana has become a conceptual artist. For her thesis at the Royal College of Art in London, she asked me to give a lecture on the history of Middle Eastern food. She filled the college with hangings announcing the event, with my portrait painted on by a cinema-poster painter in Egypt. She laid out foods and spices as in a souk, put on a tape of Egyptian street sounds and music, and offered Arab delicacies.