Quick

Okra is one of the most popular vegetables in the Middle East. Cooked this way, it may be served cold as a salad, or hot with rice, or as a side dish with meat or chicken.

Use olive oil and add lemon juice if you want to eat this cold.

Takleya is the name of the fried garlic-and-coriander mix which gives a distinctive Egyptian flavor to a number of dishes. It goes in at the end. In Upper Egypt they chop up and mash the okra when it is cooked. Serve hot as a side dish with meat or chicken.

Onions and leeks have been known in Egypt since ancient times. Romans regarded Egyptian leeks as the best. According to legend, the Emperor Nero was fond of them. This is an Egyptian way of preparing them. Serve cold as a salad or an appetizer, or hot as an accompaniment to meat or chicken.

A Persian dish.

The best eggplants to use for this are white-fleshed with no seeds.

Some people like to dip the zucchini slices in flour, which is supposed to seal them so that they absorb less oil, but it makes little difference. One popular way of serving them is accompanied with yogurt, or with a tomato sauce (page 464).

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.

This makes a good side dish. The Arabs brought it all the way to Spain and Italy.

Spinach, like most vegetables in the Arab world, is also cooked with tomatoes. Almonds are a special touch.

A North African dish which can be served hot as a side dish or cold as a salad.

Chicory is one of the vegetables believed to have been eaten in ancient Egypt. It has a pleasant, slightly bitter taste when it is cooked. In this Lebanese mountain dish, wild chicory is used.

The combination of spinach with chickpeas is common throughout the Middle East, but the flavors here are Egyptian. You may use good-quality canned chickpeas. It is good served with yogurt.

The Copts of Egypt observe a long and arduous fast during Lent—El Soum el Kibir—when they abstain from every kind of animal food, such as meat, eggs, milk, butter, and cheese, and eat only bread and vegetables, chiefly fava beans. Artichoke hearts and fava beans in oil is a favorite Lenten dish, also popular with the Greeks of Egypt. These two vegetables are partnered in every Middle Eastern country, and indeed all around the Mediterranean, but this dish with almonds is uncommon and particularly appealing. You can find frozen artichoke hearts and bottoms from Egypt that are difficult to tell from fresh ones, and frozen skinned fava (or broad) beans in Middle Eastern stores. But if you want to use fresh ones, see the box on the opposite page for preparing artichoke hearts or bottoms. If your fava beans are young and tender, you do not need to skin them.

Serve with mashed potatoes.

Serve with salad.

This Lebanese specialty is served as an appetizer, but it is also good as a main course accompanied by mashed potatoes. Calf’s liver has a better flavor and texture, so use it if you can.

A popular way of serving kibbeh nayyeh, which makes it more of a grand dish, is with this ground-meat sauce. Veal is popularly used.

From the Greek word for “doll,” these Greek meatballs make lovely finger food, as good cold as they are hot.