Middle East - Anthony Ham [79]
Although not native to the Middle East, rice is the unsung hero of Middle Eastern cuisine. It’s a region-wide staple that’s ever-present in home cooking but far less common on restaurant menus. Usually cooked with lamb or chicken, a subtle blend of spices and sometimes saffron, its arrival as the centrepiece of an already groaning table is often a high point of the meal. Indeed, there’s no more dramatic moment in a home-cooked meal than when a proud host, with considerable flourish for effect, removes the pyramidal lid to reveal an enormous mound of steaming rice. Now the real business of eating can begin, he or she seems to be saying, now none of my guests shall leave hungry. It’s also the point at which you wish you hadn’t eaten so much mezze.
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Cooking courses are few and far between in the Middle East, but Petra Kitchen (Click here; www.petrakitchen.com) in Wadi Musa, near Petra in Jordan, is worth the wait, with local Bedouin teachers and plenty to learn and sample.
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If your average Middle Easterner loves rice, it’s the Bedouins who revere it. When eating with Bedouins, you’ll even wonder whether they’d be perfectly happy if they ate nothing else for the rest of their days. Easy to store, transport and cook, rice was perfectly suited to the once-nomadic lifestyle of many Bedouin. Although they now lead more sedentary lives, rice has been transformed from convenience food to one that no self-respecting Bedouin can live without. For this hardy desert people, mensaf (lamb served on a bed of rice and pine nuts and accompanied by a tangy yogurt sauce) is what it’s all about. In its true Bedouin form, mensaf comes complete with a gaping sheep’s head and is best enjoyed from a communal bowl around the campfire beneath a million stars as desert winds make the flames of the fire dance. Such is mensaf’s popularity, however, that you’ll find it on menus, including some far from the desert, in the Palestinian Territories, Jordan and Syria (especially around Palmyra).
Another regional rice specialty that won’t disappoint is makhlooba (literally ‘upside-down’) rice, which Damascenes adore. It’s cooked in stock and spices with chickpeas, onions and off-the-bone lamb shanks, then pressed in a deep bowl and turned upside down to reveal a delicious work of art. The vegetarian version incorporates eggplants with almonds and pine nuts.
Seafood
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In Syria, sole is known as samak moossa, or Moses fish. Because of its thinness, it is said to have been cut in half when Moses divided the Red Sea.
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When on the Mediterranean and Black Sea coasts (particularly in İstanbul, Alexandria, Tripoli and, to a lesser degree, Lattakia), you’ll undoubtedly join the locals in falling hook, line and sinker for the marvellous array of fresh seafood on offer. Local favourites are calamari, red mullet, sea bass and sole. Oddly enough, it’s difficult to find good seafood in other parts of the region and the further inland you go, the more you’ll pay for your prawns (up to three times the price of other main dishes in Damascus).
Vegetables
Unlike their Western counterparts, locals do not prepare vegetables that are out of season; here tomatoes are eaten when they’re almost bursting out of their skins with sweet juices, corn is picked when it’s golden and plentiful, and cucumbers are munched when they’re crispy and sweet.
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The Turkish dish imam bayıldı (‘the imam fainted’) is aubergine stuffed with onion and garlic, slow-cooked in olive oil and served cold. Legend has it that an imam fainted with pleasure on first tasting it.
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There are a number of vegetables that are particular to Middle Eastern cuisine, including molokhiyya (aka moolookhiye or melokhia), a slimy but surprisingly sexy green leafy vegetable known in the West as mallow. In Egypt it’s made into an earthy garlic-flavoured soup that has a glutinous texture and inspires an almost religious devotion among the locals. In Syria and Lebanon molokhiyya is used to make strongly spiced lamb and chicken stews.
The region also has