[Sca-cooks] Middle Eastern haggis

lilinah at earthlink.net lilinah at earthlink.net
Tue Nov 5 12:29:07 PST 2013


For the late 16th c. gipa, here's a re-post of a message i sent to this list Sunday 6 February 2011

There is a 16th c. recipe for a Persian dish called gipa (hard g, as in good), which is strikingly like haggis. Here is the current version of my translation from Fragner's German translation:

Bert G. Fragner
"Zur Erforschung der kulinarischen Kultur Irans"
(Toward an Exploration of Iranian Culinary Arts)
in Die Welt des Islams 23-24 (1984), pp. 320-360.

>From Maddatal-hayat, resala dar 'elm-e tabbaki
("The substance of life, a treatise on the art of cooking")
written in 1003 AH (September 16, 1594 to Sept. 1595 CE)
by Master Ostad Nurollah, Chief Court Cook of Shah 'Abbas I (r. 1587-1629)

gipa-polaw (n.40)
in Fragner, pp. 350-351

Know that, cooked according to rule and regulation, gipa is a tasty dish, when it is prepared properly. Thus it is done: Clean rumen stomachs, abdominal networks and mesentery[i.] / chitterlings (shirdan va charba-ye ruda va shekanba) of sheep several times and afterwards rub with Iraqi soap (?, sabun-e 'eraqi) using a napkin and then rinse again. Then chop a lot of meat, and it is important that it has no bones. Fat-tail from sheep is used in large quantities, such that cracklings are processed and removed. [In the hot fat] put onions in the weight of two mann according to Tabriz measurement, also fifty mesqal[ii.] of spices, spikenard (sonbola[iii.]) and davala [probably a kind tree lichen] in necessary quantity, and finally a half-mann of rice. Some people add saffron as well. The quantity of meat should be two mann and tail fat equal to one mann -- these are the ingredients for a whole meal. All this is mixed [over the fire]. The lower the liquid, the better it is, because so much onion is used for this dish. If one uses too much liquid, the food loses its consistency and is overcooked. Now the sheep's rumen and the other [innards] are filled, as should be, so they do not burst. Once they are filled, they are sewn shut, placed in a kettle and cooked, until they are soft. Then wipe them off and wash them in cold water. If one lines the bottom of the kettle with sheep ribs, [the gipa] is particularly good. The latter is a creation of my very own self! Then layer the rumen stomach and the other [guts] nicely [in a vessel] over one another, drip fat and clear meat soup (shorba) thereover and let the whole marinade. The fire must be set up so [low] that the dish simmers very slowly until morning and, when it is done, is not burned, but soft and lightly browned. In the morning, place a thin flat bread on it and the gipa done.

40) [Bert Fragner's note] gipa is obviously a very traditional category of dishes in which rice is combined with offal. In cookbooks from the 20th century gipa-dishes are no longer mentioned with one exception. Only Forough Hekmat (The Art of Persian Cooking, Tehran, 1961, p. 82 f.) describes two gipa recipes. With regard to Boshaq-e at'ema[iv.], he says explicitly that we are dealing with very old-fashioned food, that traditionally was eaten in the early morning (similarly to kalla-pacha, soup made from sheep's heads and feet). As already mentioned, Ba'urchi-Baghdadi[v.] (1521) still gives a total of nine gipa recipes (Karnama, p. 166-172).

*** my notes ***

[1.] Mesentery (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesentery) i'm not sure what American butchers call it, if they call it anything... anyone know?

[ii.] mesqal = mithqal

[iii.] sonbola = sumbul, which often = jatamansi = spikenard

[iv.] Boshaq-e at'ema (died 1426 or 1436) was a poet, author, and lexicographer who wrote works in the language of food, but whose subtext was social and political criticism. Boshaq is a contraction of Abu Ishaq, meaning Father of Isaac; standard naming form in the area, to call a married adult after the name of their first born son (a woman could be Umm Ishaq, Mother of Isaac). ''-e at'ema'' means ''of food''.

[v.] Mohammad 'Ali Ba'urchi-Baghdadi is the author of the oldest known Persian recipe collection, Kar-nameh (or Karnama) dar bab-e tabbakhi va san'at-e an ("Manual on cooking and its craft"), written for a Safavid prince and dated 1521. The Mongolian word "ba'urchi" means "cook" and he came from a Turkish-speaking family. His father was a trained chef in the service of the Aq-Qoyunlu Prince Budaq Mirza and taught his son his skill. Some scholars have speculated that Nurollah was a descendant of Ba'urchi Baghdadi, as several of Nurollah's ancestors had been involved in the earlier Safavid court kitchen.

(side note: Alot is the name of a town in India, not a word in English. If one means a large quantity, it is two words: a lot)
-- 
Urtatim [that's err-tah-TEEM]
the persona formerly known as Anahita



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