Side

The best eggplants to use for this are white-fleshed with no seeds.

Some people like to dip the zucchini slices in flour, which is supposed to seal them so that they absorb less oil, but it makes little difference. One popular way of serving them is accompanied with yogurt, or with a tomato sauce (page 464).

Fava beans are the most important vegetable of Egypt. Buy young, tender ones in their season. If they are very young, you can cook them in their pods, which you cut into pieces. Some supermarkets sell young fava beans already shelled in packets, which do not need to be skinned. Older beans have tough skins as well as tough pods. The skinned frozen ones you can buy in Middle Eastern stores are particularly good.

This makes a good side dish. The Arabs brought it all the way to Spain and Italy.

Spinach, like most vegetables in the Arab world, is also cooked with tomatoes. Almonds are a special touch.

A North African dish which can be served hot as a side dish or cold as a salad.

Chicory is one of the vegetables believed to have been eaten in ancient Egypt. It has a pleasant, slightly bitter taste when it is cooked. In this Lebanese mountain dish, wild chicory is used.

The combination of spinach with chickpeas is common throughout the Middle East, but the flavors here are Egyptian. You may use good-quality canned chickpeas. It is good served with yogurt.

This is good hot or cold, as a first course. The Moroccan play of flavors, which combines preserved lemon with honey, garlic, turmeric, and ginger, makes this a sensational dish. I make it with the frozen Egyptian artichoke bottoms that I find in Oriental stores.

The Copts of Egypt observe a long and arduous fast during Lent—El Soum el Kibir—when they abstain from every kind of animal food, such as meat, eggs, milk, butter, and cheese, and eat only bread and vegetables, chiefly fava beans. Artichoke hearts and fava beans in oil is a favorite Lenten dish, also popular with the Greeks of Egypt. These two vegetables are partnered in every Middle Eastern country, and indeed all around the Mediterranean, but this dish with almonds is uncommon and particularly appealing. You can find frozen artichoke hearts and bottoms from Egypt that are difficult to tell from fresh ones, and frozen skinned fava (or broad) beans in Middle Eastern stores. But if you want to use fresh ones, see the box on the opposite page for preparing artichoke hearts or bottoms. If your fava beans are young and tender, you do not need to skin them.

A ubiquitous sauce in Syria and Lebanon, served with fried and grilled fish as well as with cold fish.

Although shami means “Syrian,” this was a specialty of the Jews of Egypt. It has a strong taste of lemon and garlic. It should be made with a good, well-flavored chicken stock (see page 143). After the recipe was given to me thirty-five years ago, I never heard of it again until recently, when I was giving a lecture about Jewish food and a man complained bitterly that I had left it out of my Jewish book. So I feel obliged to leave it in here.

Brains are considered a great delicacy in the Middle East. In some parts, it is believed that they feed one’s own brain and render one more intelligent. In other places, it is thought that eating brains reduces one’s intelligence to that of the animal, and people who hold such beliefs cannot be persuaded to touch them. I used to have to eat them in hiding from my children, who screamed when they saw me.

I like to make this Lebanese salad with basmati rice, because the grains stay very separate.

This is an instant salad to make with canned chickpeas, but they must be good-quality.

This is one of a few Turkish pilafs which are cooked in olive oil and eaten cold.

The celeriac acquires a special delicate flavor and a pale-yellow tinge.