[Sca-cooks] Interesting little food-related experience: badenjum
Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius
adamantius1 at verizon.net
Sun Aug 26 21:29:18 PDT 2007
Hullo, the list!
I thought I'd share this little experience of mine, although I guess
it's sort of a culinary shaggy-dog story with no real point or
conclusion other than, well, what happened.
My sister has lived in Israel for about 30 years and converted to
Judaism around the time she moved there, married a pretty
conservative Orthodox rabbi, and has been living that life since
then, has a bunch of kids, now mostly grown, is happy, and this is
all good.
Well, she and her youngest daughter have been visiting, staying at my
mother's place, and we're finding it just a little difficult to find
things like restaurants they're completely comfortable eating in,
because for maximum comfort level, there is not only concern over
whether things and establishments are kept Kosher, but also Glatt
Kosher, and also Glatt Kosher as certified by a fairly narrow
spectrum, or maybe I'd better say specific, "family" of rabbinical
councils or organizations. This is in no way a condemnation of
anybody else's idea of what is Kosher; it's just that she and her
daughter could order absolutely anything off the menu without having
to think too much about it, because someone they trust has already
done the research and the worrying.
Okay. A bit of a challenge, but not an unwelcome one. Well, we found
a place that was not only Kosher as approved by the specific group of
rabbis in question, but also was not your typical Glatt Kosher
restaurant; this place was a meat (fleischig? as opposed to dairy)
restaurant that did Persian food. It was very nice, a little pricey,
presumably what with all the various inspections and the inability to
buy their raw ingredients from just anyone with the lowest price, but
a good host takes things like this in stride, I believe. It was cool,
though, the things that appeared on the table before we had ordered
anything, various pickles, chopped salad-ey condiment-ey items, all
vaguely similar to a lot of Middle Eastern food of my previous
experience, but not quite. And the sumac on the table in a third
shaker next to the salt and pepper was fun...
So there I am, ordering food, and in among all the kebab-like items
that everyone else wanted, were a couple of stew-like items, and I
figured I'd do one of those, contrary fellow that I am. I ordered
something called badenjum, in part because I thought it might be some
modern descendant of one of the eggplant dishes mentioned in al-
Baghdadi, maybe something like badinjan muhassa or some such. Yes,
it's true, folks. In spite of all I've said on this list in the past
approximately ten years, I ordered eggplant voluntarily.
It was good, basically appearing to be fried whole baby eggplants
braised with browned lamb chunks and tomatoes, in a tomato-ey sauce.
As I say, the eggplants were small, had very few seeds, and between
being fried and finished in a tangy sauce, had little or no trace of
either the bitterness or mucilage so common in badly-prepared
eggplant dishes.
Upon returning home, I did a little checking to refresh my memory on
badinjan muhassa, and I found that although what I ate was mostly
unrelated (badinjan and badenjum both being simply terms meaning
"eggplant", apparently), badinjan muhassa is still eaten today in a
fairly recognizable form. The period dish, as far as I can tell from
looking at one or two recipes -- there may be others that are
different -- seems to be a dish of boiled eggplant, peeled and
chopped, mixed with pounded nuts and a tangy sauce made with vinegar
and pomegranite juice, plus various other seasonings, depending on
the recipe. This has sometimes been put up in jars as a pickle,
apparently. There seems to be a modern version that involves little
fried blobs or patties of pounded walnuts, which you stir into the
chopped, boiled eggplant, and apparently the vinegar-steeped
pomegranite pulp/juice has become straight vinegar in the modern
version. Not sure if it's ever sealed in jars and kept for any period
of time. I'd suspect not, given the fried component, but one never
knows.
So, as I said, there's no really big point to this, except to
demonstrate that sometimes the desire for both learning and a good
meal can take us around some pretty interesting corners.
Adamantius
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