#near and middle eastern studies
This week, I’m going to be making a simple party dish - recorded by a Syrian writer in the 13th century! Though the dish is described very literally as “gourd dish”, it is, in fact, a delightfully savoury and crunchy snack that can be served at parties alongside a simple yet nutty dipping sauce! Thanks again to Charles Perry for the translation of the original Arabic!
In any case, let’s now take a look at The World That Was! Follow along with my YouTube video, above! If you like my recipes, consider checking out my Patreon!
Ingredients (serves 4)
1 - 2 courgettes / zucchinis (or 1 bottle gourd / calabash)
½ cup walnuts (finely ground)
½ cup tahini paste
bunch of finely chopped mint
1 tbsp ground coriander
1 tbsp ground cumin
lemon juice (to taste)
honey (to taste)
olive oil / sesame oil (for frying)
Method
1 - Prepare Ingredients
To begin making this dish, we need to grind up about a half a cup of walnuts into a fine powder, along with about a tablespoon of cumin seeds, and a tablespoon of coriander seeds. Then, finely mince some fresh mint. All of these ingredients are native to the region in question, i.e. the Near East, and were used throughout history to today!
2 - Prepare Sauce
To make the sauce, simply pour about a cup and a half of tahini paste into a bowl, along with your crushed walnuts, ground cumin, and ground coriander to taste! Squeeze the juice from half a lemon, and add it to the sauce, before tossing in your chopped mint, and get to mixing! Taste this when you’re done to see how bitter it is. If it’s too dry and sour, add a bit of honey to loosen things up a little and sweeten it! Make sure you do this to taste, mind you.
3 - Prepare Gourd
When your sauce is done, we need to deal with the gourd! A common issue in antiquity is the ambiguity over the translation of “gourd” as many gourds we see today come from the New World (i.e. the Americas). However the bottle gourds (or calabash) and courgette (or zucchini) were commonly cultivated in the Mediterranean in the medieval period - with evidence for the courgette dating back to the Hellenistic Period! So for this, I’m using a courgette, as it’s easier to deal with. Slice this into thin segments, about as thin as your little finger.
4 - Fry Gourd
When you’ve cut the segments, coat them in flour, before placing them into a pan filled with sesame oil over high heat. They should foam a little, depending on the water content of your courgette. Let these fry for a minute or two, or until they’re golden brown on one side, before flipping them over and letting them brown on the other side for the same amount of time.
When they’re done, place them on some paper towels or a rack to drain off excess oil for a minute. Plate them up with some of your dipping sauce and dig in!
The finished dish is very light and crisp - and pairs wonderfully with the nuttiness of the sauce! The thinner segments act more like modern-day crisps (or chips, depending on where you’re from), and are a fantastic dish to have at any medieval parties you’re heading off to!
This week, I’ll be taking a look at another medieval Syrian dish - this time, a simple pistachio sauce chicken bake! It’s a sweet and savoury take on a staple of near eastern cuisine at the time - fitting for most people in the medieval period to be able to make!
As with a few other recipes like this, many thanks to Charles Perry’s translations from the original Arabic textbooks!
In any case, let’s now take a look at The World That Was! Follow along with my YouTube video, above! If you like what I make, please consider supporting me over on Patreon!
Ingredients
250g chicken (any cut of meat)
300g pistachios
salt
pepper
ground cumin
ground coriander
honey
Method
1 - Season Chicken and Bake
To begin with, we need to prepare our chicken. Do this by cutting your cuts of meat with a knife, before seasoning your cuts with equal amounts of salt, pepper, ground cumin, and ground coriander. The original recipe doesn’t make note of any spices, but we can infer from elsewhere in the cookbook that cumin and coriander formed the core of medieval Syrian cuisine. So, season this liberally! When this is done, place your chicken onto a lightly greased pan, and then into the centre of an oven preheated to 180C for about 20 minutes. While this is cooking, go prepare your pistachios!
2 - Grind Pistachios, Make Sauce
Next, shell 300g worth of pistachios. This will result in a significantly lighter amount of shelled nuts, but this is suitable for about two or three portions of meat.
In any case, when they’re shelled, go crush them into a fine powder in a mortar and pestle. Try and go for a very fine sandy texture.
When these have been ground up, toss them into a pot, along with a tablespoon or two of honey, as well as a small splash of water if everything looks too dry. Put all of this over a medium heat, and let it cook away until the honey softens and bubbles. Keep it stirring, so the honey doesn’t burn onto the bottom of the pot. This should only take about 15 minutes to cook - if the sauce starts looking a little brown, quickly take it off the heat so it doesn’t burn. It’s safer to do this slow and low, rather than fast and high.
3 - Assemble Dish
When the chicken and the sauce is done, pour a generous amount of the sauce onto a plate, before arranging your chicken on top. Garnish with a few whole pistachios, and a few sprigs of parsley, and dig in!
The finished dish is a succulent and sweet meal, with a wonderful floral sensation from the spices. The original recipe claims the chicken should be cooked in the sauce itself. This could be done, but you’d probably need more sauce than I’ve made here - it would result in a cut of meat that was tenderly stewed, with the seasoning leeching out into the pistachio and honey sauce. I opted for preparing these separately, as it was more sanitary to do on the day. It’s just as likely that it was prepared like this in the medieval period as well, but was not recorded in the original text.
Today, I’ll be taking a look at another recipe from 13th century Syria - and the anonymously written Scents and Flavours Arabic cookbook - the creamy chicken Jurjaniyyah!
The name Jurjaniyyah is derived from an Iranian region - Gorgan - which suggests that this was an imported culinary style, rather than a local recipe! Either way, it’s a fairly simple and tasty dish!
In any case, lets now take a look at The World That Was! Follow along with my YouTube video, above!
Ingredients (Serves 4)
500g yoghurt
½ tablespoon flour dissolved in 1 tablespoon water
½ tablespoon honey
2 tablespoons mustard seeds
ground cumin
250g chicken thighs (or cut of your choice)
Method
1 - Bake the Chicken
To begin with, we need to cook our chicken. To do this, season a few thighs of chicken with salt, pepper, and freshly-ground cumin. I’m cooking the meat separately to the sauce, which is unusual for meat-based recipes in this time period - but this is seemingly how the dish was intended to be prepared!
In any case, bake or roast your chicken at 200C for about 30 minutes, or until it’s cooked through!
When it’s cooked, take it out of the oven and let it rest while you make your sauce.
2 - Make the Sauce
Next, we need to make our sauce. Start by placing 500g of Greek yoghurt into a saucepan. Into this, toss a slurry of 1 tbsp flour and 1tbsp water - this will help prevent the sauce curdling as it cooks. Place this over a high heat, and stir it. Contemporary Arabic cookbooks emphasise that you should stir this in a single direction, to reduce the risk of curdling. So stir it until you start to see bubbles forming at the edge.
At this point, turn the heat down to medium, and let it foam up and froth away for about 10 minutes.
3 - Assemble Dish
After 10 minutes, pour in a tablespoon of honey, and a couple of tablespoons of mustard seeds. The original recipe describes the dish as being very pungent, so you can adjust this by increasing or decreasing the amount of seeds you add here!
Place your chicken on a plate, and ladle on some of your sauce. Serve up warm and dig in!
The finished dish is super fragrant, and each mouthful of the sauce has a sharp bite of heat thanks to the mustard seeds. In a sense, it’s almost like horseradish! But overall, it’s more fragrant than it is hot - and acts very creamy!
Mustard seeds have been cultivated throughout the Near East for millennia, and had a variety of uses besides the culinary field. However the popularity of this seed as an ingredient seems to have increased following the occupation of the region by the Roman Empire - as well as subsequent empires and caliphates.
How and why a Persian recipe was recorded in a Syrian cookbook that charts local, regional tastes could suggest that this dish was popular enough at the time of writing in the region that it felt right at home alongside other dishes (such as my chicken with blackberry sauce)
Today, I’ll be going back to the Hellenistic Period, to the Hasmonean dynasty of Judea. The recipe in question is a simple honeyed-hens, recorded by Seleucid accounts of a feast held by one of the ruling elite. Though the original recipe refers to it plainly as chicken with honey, I’m going to be recreating it today based on our knowledge of contemporary dining habits!
In any case, let’s now take a look at the World That Was! Follow along with my YouTube video above!
Ingredients
4 chicken thighs
salt (to taste)
pepper (to taste)
ground cumin
ground coriander
2 tbsp wholegrain mustard
2 tbsp olive oil
2 tbsp honey
2-4 cloves garlic
Method
1 - Prepare the Chicken
To begin with we need to season our chicken. Do this by sprinkling some salt, some freshly ground black pepper, some ground coriander, and some ground cumin on top of your chicken, before rubbing it in with your hands. In antiquity, chicken would have been eaten, along with wildfowl like duck, and even doves or pigeon. Any of these birds would work well here, but chicken would be the easiest meat to deal with today.
Leave your chicken aside while you go make the sauce.
2 - Prepare the Sauce
Next, we need to make a sauce to go with this. In antiquity, mustard seeds and vinegar would have been the base of several sauces or condiments. You can easily do this here, but a better solution would be to use pre-made wholegrain mustard, like I’m doing.
In any case, toss about a tablespoon or two of mustard into a bowl, along with a good glug of olive oil. On top of this, add an equal amount of honey, along with a few crushed cloves of garlic. Mix all this together into a fairly thick sauce. If you want, you can thicken this over a medium heat for a few minutes until it’s just about bubbling. I didn’t do this, but it turned out well!
3 - Assemble the Dish
Toss your seasoned chicken into a lightly oiled baking dish. Pour over your sauce, and try and spread it around evenly. If you want to, you could place the chicken into a Ziploc bag with the sauce and leave it to marinate overnight in the fridge.
Either way, place your prepared chicken into an oven preheated to 200° C / 400° F, and let it all bake away for 40 minutes, flipping them over halfway through so they cook evenly.
Take the chicken out when they’re browned and cooked through, serve up warm on a bed of edible greens like rocket, and dig in!
The finished dish is super succulent and flavourful. The spices were very floral and nutty, improved by the time spent baking. The mustard and honey mix caramelised at the bottom of the baking dish, which was a delicious bit of sweet heat when serving up!
The meat itself was very tender, with the skin on top crisping up significantly during the cooking process. In antiquity, it’s unknown if birds were divided up into legs, wings, thighs etc, before or after cooking. Though it’s likely that they may have been prepared both as a whole roasted chicken that was then divided up at the table, as well as pre-cut into more easy to manage pieces like I did here. It’s really a matter of personal preference today anyway.
This week, I’m recreating some Akkadian bread, as seen in some cuneiform inscriptions, as well as visual representations in carved panels in Akkadian palaces.
The original bread has a striking similarity to modern Iraqi samoon - from it’s shape to it’s description in Akkadian!
In any case, let’s now take a look at the world that was! Follow along with my YouTube video, above!
Ingredients
1 cup wholemeal flour
2 cups plain flour
salt
water
active dry yeast (or 1/3 cup sourdough starter)
milk
sesame seeds
Method
1 - Preparing the Dough and letting it Rest
To begin with, we need to make a starter. The easiest way to do this today is to use some dry active yeast, opening a sachet, and placing it in a bowl with a bit of warm water. But if you have some sourdough starter, you can use 1/3rd of a cup of that instead! But keep in mind that the sourdough starter will affect how hydrated your dough is later on.
Pour in 1 cup of wholemeal flour, along with two cups of plain white flour into the yeasty mix, and mix everything together until the dough starts to pull away from the sides of the bowl cleanly. If it’s too dry and crumbly, add some water - little by little - until it comes together into a smooth ball.
When it’s ready, place a damp cloth or a bit of clingfilm over the top of your bowl, and let the whole thing prove in a warm area for a few hours - or until it’s doubled in size.
2 - Forming your Bread
When your dough has expanded hugely, tip this out onto a lightly floured worksurface, and get to kneading. Fold and twist this around for about 10 minutes, just to help develop a better texture of the loaf down the line. When you’re finished kneading it, roll the whole thing into a long snake of dough. Cut this in half, and these halves in half again, so you wind up with four roughly evenly-sized balls of dough.
Carvings of Akkadian banquets show off lemon-shaped loaves of bread, and modern samoon are formed in a similar way. So roll a ball of dough in your hand, leaving two nubs at either end of it. Flatten the centre of the loaf down, by stretching and pulling at the dough until it smooths down.
3 - Baking
When they’re formed, place them onto some baking paper, and cover them with a damp towel for about 20 minutes. After this, brush them with a bit of milk, before sprinkling some sesame seeds over the top of them if you want. Bake these in an oven preheated to 230C / 450F for 15-20 minutes, or until they turn golden brown.
Serve up warm, and dig in!
The bread is delicious and fluffy, with a nice crisp crust. The sesame seeds - if added to the top - become toasted and flavourful when baked.
The original name for this bread would have been “ninda ensu” - which literally translates to “the bread of the king/ruler”. “ninda”being a catch-all word for a variety of breads and cakes in the Akkadian language, so while it’s likely that “ninda ensu” referred to a savoury bread, it’s also likely that this may have been sweetened too!
Today, I’ll be making an Egyptian dish that dates to the pre-Dynastic period (the bronze age) - a simple herb and egg omelette that’s still eaten today: “eggah” (in modern Egyptian Arabic). The first records of this dish come from early Arab writers, discussing a much older dish!
In any case, let’s now take a look at The World That Was! Follow along with my YouTube video, above!
Ingredients
6 eggs
1 onion
fresh parsley or cilantro
ground cumin
ground coriander
salt
pepper
olive oil
Method
1 - Chop and cook onion
To begin with, chop a single onion in half, and peel off it’s outer skin. Then slice and dice the onion into small pieces, making sure they’re all the same size.
Then, pour some olive oil into a pot, and place it over a medium-high heat. When the oil is shimmering, toss your onion into it and let it sauté away while you mince your parsley. Or coriander, if it doesn’t taste like soap to you.
When your onion is soft and translucent and fragrant, toss in your parsley. Let everything sauté away over medium-high heat until the parsley wilts slightly. Leave it aside to cool a bit while you deal with your eggs.
2 - Mix Ingredients
Crack six eggs into a bowl while your onions are cooling. In antiquity, Egyptians would have had access to wildfowl and dove eggs - but chicken eggs work just as well. Next, toss in a tablespoon or two of ground cumin and ground coriander. On top of this, add a tablespoon of flour to help thicken things up. When the onion and parsley mix is cool, toss them into your egg mixture, and whisk them to combine.
3 - Prepare Baking Dish and Bake
Pour some olive oil into a baking tin, and spread it around. Next, pour in your egg mixture. It should settle evenly. Place this tin into the centre of an oven preheated to about 180C/356F and let it cook for about 25-30 minutes, depending on your oven.
It should be done when the top has puffed up and turned a lovely golden brown.
Take the dish out of the oven and let it cool for a few minutes. The top of this will collapse and deflate, but don’t worry, this is what’s meant to happen! Cut it into slices, and serve up warm!
The finished dish is very light and fluffy, with a slight sweetness thanks to the onions. Modern eggah has tomatoes and peppers included in the recipe - but neither of these were available to the region until the Columbian Exchange of the 15th century onwards.
However, early Arabic records about the dining habits of pre-Islamic Egyptian populations references a dish of baked eggs and herbs - which effectively suggests a pre-existing dish like this that was eventually adapted into the eggah we know today!
This week, I’m recreating some Akkadian Kukku - or “butter-cakes” - which would have been offered to deities, much like the qullupu I made a while ago, which were used in the worship of Inanna! However this dish seems to have been eaten by Akkadian rulers, rather than offered to deities.
In any case, let’s now take a look at The World That Was! Follow along with my YouTube video, above!
Ingredients
1 cup flour
½ cup hazelnuts
½ cup walnuts
1/3 cup honey
½ cup butter
½ cup raisins (or sultanas)
1 egg
dates (for decoration)
Method
1 - Grind the Nuts
To begin with, we need to crush our hazelnuts and walnuts in a mortar and pestle until they take on a sandy consistency. I left a few chunks in my batch - as you can see here - but I cannot recommend you do this, as it makes it rather difficult to take out of your baking tin later on! So, do as I say, not as I do in this case.
In any case, hazelnuts and walnuts would have been cultivated in this region in the Bronze Age, and were used frequently in the civilisations cuisines too!
Place this into a bowl for later, while you cream your butter and honey
2 - Cream the Butter, Mix the Ingredients
Place ¼ of a cup of butter into a large mixing bowl, and pour 1/3 of a cup of honey on top of this. Using a wooden spoon, mash this together until it takes on a smooth, creamy texture.
At this point, pour in your crushed walnuts and hazelnuts, a half a cup of raisins, and a single egg. Also toss in a cup’s worth of flour. Mix all of this together until it forms a wet dough. If it’s looking a little dry as you’re mixing it, you can add a little milk to the mix to bring it together - but no more than a quarter of a cup! You’ll wind up with something that’s more like a batter than a dough.
3 - Prepare Tin and Bake
When your dough is done, butter up a baking tin, and scoop in your dough. Smooth down the top a little, before sticking some dates on top of this. There’s no real pattern to replicate, so scatter them as organised or chaotically as you want!
Place your dough into the centre of an oven preheated to 130C / 275F for half an hour, or until the kukku takes on a lovely golden complexion.
Leave the pan to cool before you take your bake out of the tin - this will help it retain its integrity.
The finished dish is really soft and light, and has a lot of similarities to the Palace Cake from Ur I recreated a few months ago. These cakes are delicious if you drizzle honey over the tops of them before you eat them, so the dough gets imbued with sweet honey goodness.
