Middle East - Anthony Ham [76]
Although it’s usually perfectly acceptable for diners to construct an entire meal from the mezze list and forgo the mains on offer, there are subtle differences from country to country in just how far you can take this mezze obsession. Mezze is the headline act when it comes to Levantine cuisine, but it’s the understudy to kebabs in Turkey and the trusted warm-up to the region’s other cuisines, guaranteed to get the audience enthusiastic for what’s next on the culinary bill.
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A New Book of Middle Eastern Food, by Claudia Roden, brought the cuisines of the region to the attention of Western cooks when it was released in 1968. It’s still an essential reference, as fascinating for its cultural insights as for its great recipes.
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Among the seemingly endless candidates for inclusion in a list of the Middle East’s most popular mezze specialties, we’ve narrowed it down to the following dishes (spellings on menus differ from country to country).
baba ghanooj – literally ‘father’s favourite’, it’s a purée of grilled aubergines (eggplants) with tahina and olive oil
basturma – a cold, sliced meat cured with fenugreek
borek – pastry stuffed with salty white cheese or spicy minced meat with pine nuts; also known as sambousek
fatayer – triangular deep-fried pastries stuffed with spinach, meat or cheese
hummus bi tahina – cooked chickpeas ground into a paste and mixed with tahini, lemon, olive oil and garlic; sometimes served with meat on top
kibbeh – minced lamb, burghul wheat and pine nuts made into a lemon-shaped patty and deep-fried
labneh – thick yogurt flavoured with garlic and sometimes with mint
loobieh – French bean salad with tomatoes, onions and garlic
mouhamarra – walnut and pomegranate syrup dip
muttabal – purée of aubergine mixed with tahini, yogurt and olive oil; similar to but creamier than baba ghanooj
shanklish – tangy, eye-wateringly strong goat’s cheese served with onions, oil and tomatoes
tahina – paste made of sesame seeds and served as a dip
wara ainab – stuffed vine leaves, served both hot and cold; in Egypt also called mahshi
Breads
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Literary foodies will enjoy The Language of Baklava, by Diana Abu Jabr, which combines an autobiographical novel with a home-style Jordanian recipe book, offering authentic recipes for mouhamarra, kunafa and shish kebab, among others.
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As the Syrian writer Rafik Schami has said, ‘only a Middle Easterner could have written the Lord’s Prayer’ with its invocation to ‘give us this day our daily bread’. Bread (khobz or a’aish, which means ‘life’) is considered a gift from God and the essential accompaniment to any Middle Eastern meal. It is a regional obsession and for all the variety of the Middle Eastern table, bread is the guaranteed constant, considered such a necessity that few Middle Eastern restaurants dare to charge a cent for it. Governments also know this lesson well: with the price of bread subsidised in many countries, it’s a brave government indeed that dares to increase the price of bread. If you’re wandering through the streets of an Arab city in the morning and you see a large queue forming at an otherwise innocuous hole in the wall, you’ve almost certainly stumbled upon the local bakery. Fresh bread is the only way that Middle Easterners will have it.
The staple Middle Eastern bread follows a 2000-year-old recipe. Unleavened and cooked over an open flame, it’s used in lieu of cutlery to scoop dips and ripped into pieces to wrap around morsels of meat. Dinner is always served with baskets of bread to mop up mezze, while kebabs are often served with a tasty bread canopy coated in tomato, parsley and spices.
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Damascus: Tastes of a City, by Rafik Schami,