3/18/2024 0 Comments Iraqi okra stew![]() ![]() Most people liked their Bamya very sweet. The preferred mint was Butnaj, penny-royal, a strong and spicy variety. The dumplings would then be added to a stew of Bamya and, often, pieces of meat on the bone, typically lamb ribs, made sweet and sour with vinegar, tomato paste and sugar, but sometimes with dried limes ( loumi Basra) and date syrup ( sylan or dibis), with the addition of garlic (rare in Jewish cooking and confined to a few dishes including this one) and mint. The art of the operation is to make the dumpling shell light and thin. The paste was then shaped into small dumplings stuffed with seasoned ground meat, onion and parsley. Friday morning was marked by the loud noise of pounding in brass mortars with heavy pestles. ![]() The Kebba was rice- Kebba: rice soaked, drained, then pounded in a mortar into a paste. The stew was called ‘hamidh’, sour, but in reality it was sweet and sour. Lunch was served soon after, with the aromatic stew over the rice. ![]() We kids, walking back from school, were assailed by these delicious aromas, intensifying our hunger.Īt home, I would walk straight to the kitchen, to watch the last steps in the cooking of the rice, finished, typically, with chopped onions fried in sesame oil being poured over the boiled rice, then left to steam. This was the customary Friday lunch of Kebba-Bamya. Walking around these streets on Friday midday and later afternoon you would be struck by the cooking aromas of Bamya (it does have a distinctive smell), garlic, and mint. In the earlier decades these were the old quarters, around markets and synagogues, but by the 1940s the Jewish middle classes relocated to the then modern suburbs of Bab al-Sharqi, Sadounand Battaween (now downtown commercial areas). Amongst his extensive publications is A Taste of Thyme: Culinary Cultures of the Middle East and his latest, published in 2018 is Food, Politics, and Society: Social Theory and the Modern Food System.īaghdad in the first half of the 20 th century, till the 1940s: while there were no exclusively Jewish quarters, certain areas had a high concentration of Jewish households. Sami also holds the position of Professorial Research Associate of the Food Studies Centre, SOAS and is a regular contributor to the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery. His main research Middle East Politics, Religion and Law mingle with his interest in food culture and politics which he takes a tad beyond academia with his cooking flair and skill. Sami has inspired generations of sholars and students through his teaching at Birkbeck College, University of London, as well as through his visiting positions in Cairo, Istanbul, Beirut, Aix-en-Provence, Berkeley CA, Paris and New York. I am thrilled to end 2019 with a food memory by Professor Sami Zubaida who remembers Baghdad in the 1940s, coming back from school, and being ‘assailed’ by the delicious and distinctive aromas of bamya (okra) cooked with mint and garlic. ![]()
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