Middle Eastern

This is an old family favorite which I recommend if you don’t mind taking time and trouble. You may substitute for the apricot sauce a sauce made with sour cherries. Serve with extra stuffing.

The grandest Arab meal is a whole stuffed baby lamb. A succulent leg accompanied by the traditional stuffing called hashwa is a representative of that ideal. The meat is cooked gently, for a long time, to such melting tenderness that you can pull morsels off with your fingers.

In the Middle East, turkeys range freely and are small and tough, more like game birds, so they are usually stewed, which makes the flesh tender and moist. In America, roasting is best for the birds.

Fesenjan is a famous Persian sauce for rice with stewed duck. I love the sauce, which has a special sweet-and-sour flavor from pomegranate molasses (rob-e nar), but I don’t like stewed duck, so I roast the duck instead.

Armenian dishes are humble and rustic. This one is a party dish which combines everyday ingredients in a complex way. The serving is something of a ritual.

I have also made this Persian stuffing for Christmas turkey, using twice the amount.

This was a regular at my aunt Régine’s dinner parties. It is similar to dishes featured in medieval manuals. The French would call it a galantine.

Chicken with rice-and-ground-meat stuffing or hashwa is a classic festive dish of the Arab world. The old way was to boil the stuffed chicken first, then briefly roast it to give it a golden color. These days it is more common to cook the stuffing separately and to roast the chicken. For a large party you can make double the quantity, shape the stuffing in a mound in a large round oven dish, cover it with the cut-up pieces of chicken, then heat it through, covered with foil, before serving.

This multi-layered dish is complex and time-consuming, and I don’t expect many people to attempt it. But it is very important in the Arab world, especially in Syria and Lebanon. And it is one of those recipes which bring me a flood of memories. I had received a letter from a woman I did not know in Beirut saying that she would like to meet me and that she had recipes for me. It was the late Josephine Salam. On our first meeting—at Claridge’s tearoom, where a band played Noël Coward tunes—she brought me a bottle of orange-blossom water and a copper pan. She volunteered to come to my house and show me how to make fattet jaj. I got the ingredients, and we made so much that we had to call in the neighbors to eat. I saw her for many years after that, and we had many meals together. It was the time of the civil war in Lebanon, and I received through her an ongoing account of everyday life in the ravaged city. Her daughter Rana has become a conceptual artist. For her thesis at the Royal College of Art in London, she asked me to give a lecture on the history of Middle Eastern food. She filled the college with hangings announcing the event, with my portrait painted on by a cinema-poster painter in Egypt. She laid out foods and spices as in a souk, put on a tape of Egyptian street sounds and music, and offered Arab delicacies.

The last time I ate this famous Moroccan dish was in a restaurant in Paris where there was an evening of Arab poetry and tales accompanied by musicians. It was not the best example of the dish, but I always find it enjoyable. I love the special flavor of preserved lemons. At every vegetable market in North Africa, and now also in the south of France, you can see stalls laden with huge piles of soft lemons oozing with juice beside several varieties of olives. The two are often used together. The pulp of the preserved lemon is discarded, and the skin alone is used. The word mqualli alludes to the way the chicken is cooked, with oil and only a little water.

In Morocco they say that this dish, like many others, was brought back from Andalusia by the Moors after the Reconquista.

This Syrian dish is made with a type of pasta called lissan al assfour (bird’s tongues) which looks like large grains of rice. It cooks in the sauce from the chicken and acquires a rich, spicy flavor and light-brown color. You will find it in Middle Eastern stores as well as in the pasta section of supermarkets, where it is called “orzo.” An apricot sauce, salsat mishmisheya, sometimes accompanies the dish .

A Turkish dish in which yogurt, an important feature in Turkish cooking, is flavored with cardamom and ginger.

A magnificent dish, and a stunning example of the way Moroccans mix savory and sweet. Chicken pieces are first stewed with lemon juice and saffron, then baked with a topping of almonds and honey.

This Moroccan tagine is one of my favorites. The chicken cooks in the juice of the tomatoes, which reduces to a sumptuous, thick, honeyed, almost caramelized sauce. And it looks beautiful too.

An Egyptian delicacy.

Djaj is the Arabic word for chicken; ferakh is an Egyptian term. Every day, the trams and buses coming into the towns from the villages are crowded with peasants carrying crates of live, cackling poultry. The chickens are killed and plucked at the market or poultry shops. This is a simple and homely but delicious Egyptian way of cooking the birds.

The chicken acquires a delicate, tangy flavor and pale-yellow tinge. It was a regular dish in my parents’ home. Serve it hot with potatoes or with rice; as part of a cold buffet meal; or for a cold family meal in summer, accompanied by salads.

Grilled chicken on skewers is part of the Arab kebab-house and restaurant trade. The flavoring here is Lebanese. Look at the variations for alternatives, and be careful not to overcook, as chicken pieces dry out quickly. Leg meat remains juicier than breast meat.

In this delicately flavored and scrumptious Moroccan qdra, the long-cooked almonds should become very soft. As so often in Moroccan cooking, one onion is cooked first with the meat or chicken, and when these are nearly done, the remaining onions are added. The first onion is used to add flavor to the meat, and it practically melts and disappears into the sauce. The onions added later keep their shape and add body to the sauce.