Mint

You need a fair amount of the fresh mint and cilantro here so the meat really tastes both lemony and herbal. The ginger adds to the fresh, cleansing feeling. Serve with flatbreads or rice. For a snack, this ground meat, or keema, may be rolled up in flatbreads along with finely sliced shallots, chopped tomatoes, and, if you like, chopped fresh hot green chilies. Today, in the Western world, this would be called a “wrap.” As children we wrapped this keema in a chapati (a whole-wheat flatbread) and my mother called it a batta.

Apart from serving these kebabs, freshly grilled and hot, at mealtimes, when they are always popular, I find that if I refrigerate the cooked kebabs overnight and then put them into a hamper for a picnic, they are equally loved outdoors and hold well. In fact, if properly wrapped and refrigerated, they will hold for a good 5–6 days, making them perfect for an impromptu cold meal. For a hot meal, serve with a rice dish and Indian vegetables. For a picnic, serve with salads and crusty French bread.

Chappali kebabs, popular throughout much of Pakistan but originating near its borders with Afghanistan, are beef patties shallow-fried in the fat rendered from the tail of a fat-tailed sheep. If you can imagine a juicy, spicy hamburger cooked in roast beef drippings, you get a general idea: delicious but iffy on the health front. So over the years, I have come up with my own version, a turkey kebab. I serve these kebabs with Thin Raw Onion Rings and the local Peshawari Red Pepper Chutney. You may even put this kebab in a hamburger bun, along with the onion rings and either a good squirt of lemon juice or some tomato ketchup.

An 8–24-hour marination period is required here. This chicken tastes just as good cold as it does hot, making it perfect for everyday meals, formal dinners, and picnics. (Once cooked, if properly wrapped and refrigerated, the chicken will hold for 5–6 days.)

Before cooking, the meat-spice mixture requires a rest in the refrigerator to bring all the flavors together and to give the kebabs their requisite melt-in-the-mouth tenderness. If you cannot get a baking pan of just this size, something a bit smaller or a bit larger will do. (You could also use a 6-inch-square cake tin and cut the kebabs into rectangles—in which case, bake for only 30 minutes.) Serve these pâté-like kebabs with drinks, offering flatbread pieces or crackers to eat them with, or serve them as part of a meal with vegetables or salads. They need an accompanying chutney, such as the Peshawari Red Pepper Chutney, page 243, or the Bengali-Style Tomato Chutney, page 244.

Here you simply marinate eggplant slices in a spicy dressing and then grill them. When serving (hot or cold), spoon a dollop of yogurt seasoned with fresh mint on the top. It is cool and refreshing.

There is a dish of rice cooked in yogurt which has been stabilized so that it doesn’t curdle (see page 113), but it is simpler and just as good to pour yogurt over plain rice. Everyone likes this, and Arab doctors prescribe it for people with stomach troubles.

A great variety of vegetable fillings exist. Vegetables with a meat filling are meant to be eaten hot, those with a meatless filling are usually cooked in oil and eaten cold. In Turkey these are called yalangi dolma or “false dolma,” because of the lack of meat. The following are the fillings most widely used. Quantities are enough to stuff about 2 pounds of vegetables, but this varies according to the size of the vegetables and the amount of pulp scooped out.

A delicious version, to be served hot with plain rice or with roz bil shaghria (rice with vermicelli, page 340).

This is a specialty of Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt. Sweet ataïf (pancakes) are extremely popular stuffed with nuts and soaked with syrup). These savory ones are less common.

A refreshing sweet-and-sour Persian syrup to be diluted in ice-cold water.

In Morocco tea—a refreshing infusion of both green tea and mint—is the symbol of hospitality, prepared with art, served with ceremony, and drunk at all times of the day. Introduced in the nineteenth century by the English, tea became an indispensable drink. It is traditionally served in richly engraved English-style silver teapots (the grandest are from Manchester) on silver trays with tiny legs. It is poured from a great height into small, ornamented colored glasses. Spearmint is the type of mint used, and the infusion is sweetened in the teapot. In Morocco they like it very sweet, with many lumps of sugar, but you can suit your taste.

This deliciously refreshing drink, called doug by Persians, ayran in Turkey, and laban by others, is consumed extensively all over the Middle East and particularly in Lebanon, Turkey, and Iran. It is prepared in the home, served in cafés, and sold by street vendors. It is good served chilled or with ice cubes.

This Armenian specialty makes a hearty main dish. It has a pure and fresh quality and is an entirely different experience from eating an Italian or Asian pasta dish.

You can serve these hot or cold.

A refreshing summer soup from Iran.

In this lovely Turkish soup, the egg yolk and the flour prevent the yogurt from curdling. The rice is best cooked separately and added in before serving, as it gets bloated and mushy if left in the soup too long.

The filling is a traditional one for the famous Greek pie. A milder-tasting alternative was adopted in Britain by my contemporaries from Egypt. Both make a lovely teatime savory as well as a snack meal accompanied by salad.