[Sca-cooks] plantain, bananas, herbals

lilinah at earthlink.net lilinah at earthlink.net
Wed Sep 2 12:33:57 PDT 2009


Ranvaig wrote:
>  A savory dish with a banana type fruit sounds more like plantain.  Is
>  there evidence that sweet bananas are meant?  This is out of my area
>  of expertise, but are early bananas as sweet as current ones?

If you are referring to the dish Cariadoc mentioned of cooking a 
chicken so its juices drip onto a tray of bananas and ruqaq (very 
thin flatbread), i addressed this is a reply, mentioning other 
recipes for this dish, Judhaba.

A cooking tray is lined with flatbread and topped with something 
sweet, often something toothachingly sweet: fanid = taffy made of 
sugar, sometimes with nuts; crushed nuts and sugar; lauzinaj which i 
didn't describe but have discussed on this list - it is some sort of 
wrapper described in poetry of its day as gossamer as a grasshopper's 
wing filled with crushed nuts and sugar. Sometimes the sweets are 
topped with another layer of ruqaq, but not necessarily.

While the recipes may not discuss how the dish is eaten, the humorous 
stories of its day that i mentioned do describe how the roasted 
chicken is eaten at the same time with the dripping-enriched bread 
and taffy or other very sugary sweet. One recipe calls for bananas, 
the bananas are coated with batter and fried until crisp and golden. 
 From experience, i know this brings out the sweetness of the bananas.

So comparing other recipes for Judhaba and the cooking method for the 
banana version, i am quite convinced that sweet bananas were used.
-- 
Urtatim (that's err-tah-TEEM)
the persona formerly known as Anahita



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