[Sca-cooks] Side Dishes for al-Warraq

[lilinah at earthlink.net]

I had the opportunity to check all the dishes in al-Warraq i could find that used rice. The number preceding the name of the dish is the page number in Nasrallah's hard cover edition.

There is no plain rice recipe. There is nothing resembling a pilaf.

There are 30 recipes using rice, which is a tad less than 5% of the total number of recipes. (i skipped the recipe for fuqqa, a sort of near-beer, in which rice replaces barley)

In 20 recipes, the rice is ground, pounded, crushed, disintegrated into mush, cooked as a porridge (so it's soft and mushy), cooked as harisa (so it's soft and mushy or beaten until it is a puree), or used as flour.

In the remainder the rice is cooked with meat and an equal amount of lentils, and/or beans, and/or chickpeas or added to meat with the vegetables. In one it is added to the stuffing for a sort of medieval Arabic haggis (qippa). In another a handful of rice is optional in a dish of 2 fat chickens, chickpeas, and noodles. In yet another it is cooked in milk & broth as for judhab (probably soft and mushy, since many judhaba are made with crumbled torn bread soaked in water or other liquid). Two are broths for invalids in which it is noted to cook until thin enough to sip.

I would suggest that no rice be served at the feast unless it is in one of the aforementioned dishes. Clearly rice topped with another dish was not part of the dining of the elite in the 9th and 10th centuries. Don't give in to a modern stereotype.

Bread is the basic carbohydrate eaten with meals. Check out Middle Eastern and South Asian markets for flat bread that is NOT pita. If you have Trader Joe's, it sells naan flat bread (i recommend the plain).

Urtatim (that's oor-tah-TEEM)