Middle Eastern

The dish takes its name from the Ottoman pasha who administered Mount Lebanon in the nineteenth century. Serve with rice or mashed potatoes. The meatballs are usually fried, then cooked in a tomato sauce, but baked this way they have a light, fresh flavor.

This is a specialty of Aleppo in Syria, where it is traditionally baked in a round tray and served on a round dish, with the rolls arranged in a coil.

This is common throughout the Middle East.

This is one of my favorites. You will need a large shallow pan that can go to the table. In Morocco the cooking is finished in a wide earthenware tagine which goes on top of the fire. Serve it with plenty of warm bread.

I love this Arab equivalent of shepherd’s pie.

This is an old family recipe which originates in Syria. It is easy to make now that dried pitted sour cherries are available. We used to have to pit them. Serve it with rice or, as was usual in the old days, on miniature pita breads split in half, soft side up.

This intriguing layered dish with a delicious mix of textures and flavors is a specialty of the city of Hama in Syria.

This is a Persian stew which is a sauce for plain rice. You will find many more Persian sauces with meat in the rice chapter. Use dried pitted sour cherries.

Tagine barkok, made with or without honey, is one of the most popular fruit tagines of North Africa. It is eaten with bread. Restaurants in Paris accompany it with couscous and bowls of boiled chickpeas and boiled raisins (see page 377).

Recipes for meat cooked in yogurt abound in medieval Arabic cookery manuals, where the dish was called madira. As early as the tenth century, the Arab writer Badia’z Zaman wrote a tale entitled “Al Madirya” about the dish. Such dishes are still popular in the Arab world. The name of this Lebanese version, which means “his mother’s milk,” implies that the meat of a young animal is cooked in its own mother’s milk. It can be made with chunks of meat or lamb shanks. Serve with plain rice (page 337) or rice with vermicelli (page 340).

The particular quality of this stew, which I hated as a child, lies in its texture. The knuckle or shin of veal (we called it bitello, from the Italian vitello) contains the large leg-bone and marrow. The connective tissue turns into gelatin while the meat becomes juicy and succulent. In Egypt, the potatoes were sliced and fried in oil before going into the stew, but I prefer to omit the frying.

Also called buraniya, this is one dish where I prefer to broil or grill the eggplants instead of frying them, before putting them in the stew. Serve with rice or bulgur or with bread.

This dish is uniquely Turkish, and was developed in the Ottoman palace kitchens. A current legend surrounding the name of the dish, which means “sultan’s delight,” places it in 1869, when the Sultan Abdul Aziz entertained Empress Eugénie, wife of Napoleon III, in his white rococo palace of Beylerbey, on the Asian side of the Bosporus. The Empress was ecstatic about the creamy eggplant sauce which served as the bed for a stew and asked for the recipe to be sent to her cooks. The Sultan’s cook explained that he could not give the recipe, because he “cooked with his eyes.” Serve it with rice.

This is a common and much-loved dish of Egypt. You also find it in other countries. Use small okra—they are much nicer than the tougher large ones—and serve with rice or bulgur. Traditionally, okra is put in to cook at the same time as the meat, so that it becomes extremely soft and falls apart, but these days it is not uncommon to add it at a later stage, so that it remains firm. That is the way I like it.

A quick and simple dish to be served with rice, bulgur, or potatoes, or with bread.

Meats grilled on skewers have become the best-known Middle Eastern foods as the standard fare of Lebanese, Turkish, and Iranian restaurants abroad. They are a symbol, in particular, of Turkish food. Turks say that this way of cooking meat was created during the conquering era of the Ottoman Empire, when Turkish soldiers, forced to camp out in tents for months on end, discovered the pleasures of eating meat grilled out of doors on wood fires. Twenty years ago, on a gastronomic visit to Turkey, I went with an interpreter on an arranged tour of kebab houses in Istanbul. At every stop I was invited to eat. It became a grand marathon—une grande bouffe. At the fifth establishment they opened the refrigerated room and showed me all the prize cuts, which were later presented to me straight from the fire on a gigantic plate. As well as the kebabs and ground-meat kofta kebab on skewers, there were small lamb chops, kidneys, slices of calf’s liver, beef steaks, sucuk (spicy beef sausages), and pieces of chicken. It was a gourmand’s dream, but for a woman already satiated from eating elsewhere and afraid of giving offense, it was a nightmare. In Greece and Turkey, alternating pieces of onion, tomato, and bell pepper are threaded onto the skewers in between the cubes of meat. This looks good, but it is not a good idea, as the meat and vegetables take different times to cook and the meat becomes wet and does not get properly seared. So, if you must have roasted vegetables, have them on another skewer, or straight on the grill. In some countries, lumps of fat are pressed between pieces of meat to keep them from drying out as the fat melts.

Hardly any dishes were invented by restaurant chefs in Turkey, but this one was, by a man called Iskander; that is why it is also known as Iskander kebab. It made its appearance in the 1920s, after the Ottoman Empire had crumbled and Turkey became a republic. The cooks who had worked in the palace kitchens and in the homes of the aristocracy (much of the aristocracy moved to Egypt) became unemployed and looked for ways to survive. Many of them opened restaurants—lokandesi and kebab houses. This dish has remained a mainstay of Turkish kebab houses, where it is sometimes served dramatically in a dome-shaped copper dish—the type that was used at the palace. On one level it reflects the preponderance of yogurt in the Turkish kitchen. I serve it in deep individual clay bowls which can be kept hot in the oven. It is a multi-layered extravaganza. There is toasted pita bread at the bottom. It is covered by a light sauce made with fresh tomatoes, topped by a layer of yogurt. This is sprinkled with olive oil which has been colored with paprika and with pine nuts. Skewers of grilled ground meat kofta or small burgers (as in this recipe) are laid on top. The tomato sauce and the meat must be very hot when you assemble the dish. The yogurt should be at room temperature.

A Turkish specialty. The meat becomes so tender you can pull pieces off with your fingers.

My aunt Latifa and uncle Mousa lived in a villa in a suburb of Cairo. It was large and housed their extended family. There was no oven. Much of the cooking was done over a mangal (portable outdoor grill) and a Primus oil heater, and trays were sent off daily to the baker to be cooked in the bread oven. This dish was sent to the baker.