The Hirshon Medieval Mishmishiya Lamb and Apricot Tagine – مشمشمية

To My glorious Citizens of the Islamic faith! Now that Ramadan has officially begun in the Middle East – I ask Allah to purify your heart from sins and fill it with piety, faith, and tranquility – a most happy Ramadan to you and your family (and !مُبارك عليكم الشهر)! To honor this most auspicious occasion, and to assist you in your iftar (breaking the fast meal) over the coming 30 days, I am sharing a thousand year old recipe from the Arabic Golden Age: mishmishiya, lamb and apricot stew!

As noted in a scholarly treatise I have excerpted from manuscriptcookbookssurvey.org:

The cooking of the medieval Islamic world still survives today, to varying degrees, in most cultures that medieval Islam touched, and the contemporary cooking of these cultures informs my interpretation of medieval European recipes.

The Golden Age of medieval Islam was forged during the ninth and tenth centuries in Baghdad, seat of the third Islamic caliphate. Baghdad’s many achievements in philosophy, science, medicine, painting, poetry, and music are largely attributable to its openness to diverse sources of knowledge, symbolized by the famed House of Wisdom, a network of academies that translated all of the world’s known learned manuscripts—Indian, Persian, Syrian, Egyptian, and Greek—into Arabic.

The ancient, sophisticated culture of Persia, conveyed both through translated Persian texts and by the many Persians living in Baghdad, exerted particular influence on Golden Age Baghdadi culture, including Baghdad’s lush, fragrant, complex cuisine. High cuisine could flourish in Golden Age Baghdad because Baghdadi culture embraced pleasure.

An early fourteenth-century Baghdadi cookbook, translated by Charles Perry as A Baghdad Cookery Book (Prospect Books, 2005), begins thus: “The pleasures of this world are six: food, drink, clothing, sex, scent, and sound. The most eminent and perfect of these is food, for food is the foundation of the body and the material of life.”

Baghdad was sacked by the Mongols soon after these lines were written and all of its manuscripts thrown into the Tigris, so that the river was said to have run black with ink. But by this time, the culture of Baghdad, including its glorious cuisine, had been transmitted across the Islamic-ruled world, which stretched from India, across the entire Middle East and North Africa, and into Iberia. The Christian West tasted dialects of this cuisine when it came into contact with two Islamic cultures located within Europe itself, those of Spain and Sicily.

This amazing article from Al-Jazeera goes into much greater detail:

Recipes moved through the cities of medieval Islam like the stories in One Thousand and One Nights, carried by travelers and tested, collected, copied, and adjusted for local ingredients.

Many of these recipes are the ancestors of popular contemporary dishes, such as baklava and hummus. Others have largely disappeared from use. But medieval Arabic cookbooks have seen something of a revival – a growing number of them edited and translated into English, as part of a journey that brings old foods to new palates. Earlier this year, a paperback edition of a 13th-century Syrian cookbook, Scents and Flavors, appeared with a foreword by Cairo-born cookbook author and scholar Claudia Roden. 

All human cultures have recipes, but recipe-writing seems to have developed in Western Asia. Recipes were written in the Akkadian language starting around 1700 BCE. We have three clay tablets, according to Nasrallah, with recipes “ranging from simple stews to the complex bird pies”.

In the Sassanid Persian courts, gentlemen kept personal recipe collections, according to Perry, who is a food historian. None of these collections has made their way down to us, but the habit of recipe-writing had moved into Baghdad court culture by the 10th century.

Caliphs commissioned the invention of new dishes, as well as poems and songs about food. Codifying recipes would have begun in huge court kitchens, chef and food scholar Rodin writes in her foreword to, Scents and Flavors. Scribes would have been instructed to write down at least a few details about each “so that it could be easily passed on and the instructions read out to illiterate cooks.”

But other Baghdadis were eager to feast as the caliphs did, and cookery soon moved beyond palace walls. There was “a sudden explosion of cookbooks in Arabic” from the 10th to 13th centuries, Perry writes. At that time, so far as we know, Arabic speakers were “the only people in the world who were writing cookbooks”, he adds.

Many of these cookbooks must have disappeared. Ibn Sayyar al-Warraq’s 10th-century, Kitab al-Tabikh (Book of Dishes), is the earliest known title. It was translated to English in 2007 by Nawal Nasrallah. Al-Warraq was not a celebrity chef, but rather a scribe who compiled the collection for an unnamed patron, one who apparently wanted to know how the kings and caliphs ate.

By the 13th century, Arabic cookbooks had been adapted for the aspiring classes. They were built for practical use and, as Perry writes, “more or less cheaply copied”. Cookbooks, he imagines, “formed a regular part of a commercial scribe’s business”. We can imagine that, in using these recent translations, we are eating like the medieval middle classes. They, too, might have been stymied when trying to find ambergris or Damascus citron, and might have substituted plain local rose petals for the Nusaybini roses demanded by a recipe.

In 13th-century Syria, Rodin writes, we know of five major cookery volumes in circulation: copied by hard-working scribes, and perhaps loaned to neighbours or friends. Each had 600 to 700 recipes and was like a version of the, Joy of Cooking, or, How to Cook Everything: a snapshot of food culture at that moment in time.

Scents and Flavors, Perry and Rodin believe, was the most popular. The recipes shift between second-person instructions and third-person descriptions, which suggests, Perry believes, “recipes were typically read out to the cook and the book was then replaced in the household library”.

Better, probably, for avoiding page splatter.

The 14th-century Egyptian cookbook, Treasure Trove of Benefits and Variety at the Table, still shows the influence of 10th-century Baghdad, but also has many local modifications. This gem, translated by Nasrallah and published in 2018, includes not only translations of recipes, but photos and adaptations.

The book was not meant to teach the basics of cooking; those skills, scholars believe, were orally transmitted. But it does offer general advice. For instance, the anonymous author of Treasure Trove tells us that a “cook should be an agreeable person”, and one, moreover, who keeps their fingernails trimmed. The author goes on to make suggestions not only about the types of cooking pots that work best (soapstone), but also what sort of firewood should be selected, and how a chef should clean their utensils and select their spices.

There is a great deal of advice about improving the smell and taste of not-so-fresh meat; hopefully, this is something our contemporary dinner parties can avoid. The Treasure Trove suggests keeping a separate knife only for cutting onions, and rubbing it with sweet olive oil before use. If you have added too much salt – and this is something Treasure Trove sternly warns against – quickly toss in a small piece of papyrus in order to absorb the excess. If your meat is too tough, you can add sodium bicarbonate or crushed dried melon peel to the pot.

But dinner parties are not made by food alone. Hosts and attendees are expected to smell sweet, with fresh breath and clean hands.

If you want to eat like medieval Arab royalty, then you first need to smell like medieval Arab royalty.

You must not make the mistake of arriving at your dinner party smelling of plain-ash washing powder, or worse yet of “zuhumat” – unpleasant greasy odours, the books advise.

Medieval Arab diners largely ate with their hands, so it was important to wash, preferably with a sweet-smelling soap, both before and after the meal. In Scents and Flavors, there are soap recipes that quote from books on perfumery, most of which did not survive; these are written in a more formal Arabic than its other recipes.

The washing powders begin with a base of gentle white ash, and many of the recipes are associated with particular famous hand-washers: one saffron-and-carnation-based powder promises it was used by Caliph al-Ma’mun, while a clove-and-cardamom washing powder was the favourite of al-Rashid. Or you might arrive at your dinner party scented of cinnamon and sandalwood, like ‘Ali ibn Rabban al-Tabari.

But not only the rich and famous liked to have clean hands. There are also recipes for “lesser washing powders” in Treasure Trove, where simpler ingredients such as ash, clay, and citronella are mixed with distilled camphor water. If you have been watching over the chef in a hot kitchen all day long, Scents and Flavors also offers an “incomparable antiperspirant”, made of zinc oxide, violets, and tree moss.

But if you are pressed for time and cannot find distilled camphor water, the author of Treasure Trove would also surely approve of commercial hand soap.

In her introduction to Treasure Trove, Nasrallah tells us that meals would often begin with an array of small dishes that arrived on a beautiful large tray, called “sukurdan”. The word, she writes, is thought to be a combination of the Arabic ” sukr”, or “imbibing alcoholic drinks”, and the Persian “dan”, or “vessel”.

On the sukurdan would be a variety of small appetizers that were served before the meal, lest anyone get too tipsy before the main dish arrived. Treasure Trove has the best collection of pickle recipes, including 75 different pickle-making methods. You could, of course, make the English and American standby of pickled cucumbers.

But Treasure Trove also includes recipes for pickled capers, carrots, celery, Damascus citron, eggplant, fennel, garlic, gourd, lemons, onions, quince, radishes, rose petals, turnips, and fresh walnuts. Scents and Flavors adds varieties of raisin pickles, grape pickles, pickled celery and cauliflower, as well as pickled peppergrass, which, according to the collection’s anonymous author, “is very nice but does not keep long”.

Most of the pickles are soured with vinegar, yoghurt, or sour fruit juice. One in Scents and Flavors uses sourdough, which is apparently a technique still used in northern Iraq. One of the easiest-looking recipes was one for sweet and sour pickled rose petals. Indeed, Treasure Trove promises that the dish will “will look nice, and it is quite easy to make”.

To make it, you must start with the petals of white Nusaybin roses, grown in an area on the border between Syria and Turkey. But probably any fleshy white roses will do. The recipe suggests you coat them in honey and then leave them in the sun until they wilt. After they have wilted, “Fold wine vinegar and a bit of mint into them.” Finally, put them in a jar and use.

“One of the reasons for the popularity of pickles, or ‘mukhallalat’ as they were called, was that they were believed to arouse the appetite and facilitate the digestion of dense foods.”

Throughout the medieval cookbooks, authors slip in medical advice: about the correct temperature for water, how to fatten up a young woman, how to feed a fever, and so on. But they were not married to medical advice, especially when it contravened good taste. Eggplant, for instance, was said to be an unhealthy vegetable, generating black bile, cancer, melasma (kalaf), and blockages.

The recipes in medieval Arabic cookbooks are generally structured in ways that make sense to 21st-century eaters. They are separated by ingredient (“eight eggplant recipes”) or part of the meal (“cold dishes”). Yet they are not separated by origin. Persian, Baghdadi, Turkish, Egyptian, Moroccan, Amazigh, Georgian, and Frankish recipes all jostle one up against the next.

The longest section in Scents and Flavors is all about lamb, and the cookbook offers a variety of ways to cook it that range from methods borrowed from the Franks (or Europeans) to those taken from the Bedouin peoples, who baked lamb in an earthen pit.

If you want to eat your lamb like those strange Frankish people to the north – if, for instance, stories about the Crusaders had piqued your interest – you could try a “Frankish roast”. For that, you would want to rub a fat lamb with salt, sesame oil, and rose water, after which you would skewer it on a long section of pole. As long as you make sure there is charcoal on either side of the lamb, taking care that there is no fire directly under the beast, “it will come out very nicely and cooked all the way through.” You can baste the cooked lamb with sesame oil, rose water, and salt.

You might, on the other hand, be interested in exotic Georgian kebab, which the author of Scents and Flavors promises he once “made for my uncle al-Malik al-Ashraf, may God the Exalted shower him with mercy”.

Medieval cookbooks were not just for meat-eaters. They also had sections on “fake” meatless dishes. These were for Christians to eat during lent, or else were prescribed by physicians, Nasrallah writes in Treasure Trove, because “they were deemed lighter and easier to digest”.

The chapter title for “fake meatless dishes”, she writes, is identical to the one in al-Warraq’s cookbook from four centuries prior. Meanwhile, the opening segment seems to be copied from the 14th-century cookbook, Kitab Wasf, or “Book of the Description of Familiar Food”. This, in turn, was copied from a book by the Christian physician of Baghdad, Ibn ‘Abdun.

Nasrallah suggests that this section “must have been a widely circulated pamphlet and a valued source of meatless recipes for the sick and fasting Christians”, but it will work just as well for your dinner party’s vegetarian guests.

One of the wonderful aspects of medieval Arabic cookbooks are the titles of the individual recipes. There are three recipes for a dessert called “ma’muniyyah”. One is subtitled “The first recipe”, while the next is “The second recipe, better than the first”, and the third is “The third recipe, which is better than the second”.

Chilled drinks were also served near the end of a meal, to aid digestion. According to al-Warraq, pomegranates have healing powers, so a pomegranate drink should leave guests feeling refreshed and healthy. In Nasrallah’s translation of al-Warraq: “Choose ripe sweet-and-sour pomegranate with red seeds. Extract and strain the juice and put it in a clean soapstone pot. Boil it on slow fire until it is reduced to a third of its original amount then strain it and store it in glass jars.” She has also posted an adapted recipe on her website.

Medieval cookery books were not only a guide to food preparation, but also to health and etiquette.

“It is good manners to use toothpicks,” Treasure Trove informs us. “One needs to clean the teeth and remove the tiny pieces of meat between them. If meat stays in the mouth it rots, especially the solid particles.”

People of all social strata were encouraged to avoid such a situation. The common folk could make “khilal ma’muni”, or toothpicks from esparto grass stems, while middle-class people could use Egyptian willow twigs for picking their teeth.

Nasrallah guessed that the anonymous author/compiler of a cookbook like Treasure Trove was not a member of the upper classes. They “might have earned good money from selling his copies”, she said over email, but, “writing cookbooks was not the road to riches”.

There were certainly celebrity foodies of the era, and medieval biographies mention cookbooks that belonged to caliphs, princes, and famous chefs.

“Ironically,” Nasrallah says, “none of the celebrities’ cookbooks survived.”

Now – with that mouthwatering background out of the way, let us commence with My genius adaptation of the medieval Arabic recipe for mishmishiya – lamb and dried apricot stew with almonds!

Mishmishiya is the distant ancestor of lamb tagine, enjoyed today throughout Morocco as one of the country’s great national culinary treasures! Mishmishiya is very reminiscent of today’s tagine, but employed different seasonings and cooking techniques. The original recipe for mishmishiya was first translated into English in a cookbook published by Canadian medieval scholars – Pleyn Delit.

Mishmishiya — “Lamb Stewed in Apricot Sauce” (Recipe #80)

Cut fat meat small, put into the saucepan with a little salt, and cover with water. Boil, and remove the scum. Cut up onions, wash, and throw in on top of the meat. Add seasonings: coriander, cumin, mastic, cinnamon, pepper, and ginger, well ground. Take dry apricots, soak in hot water, then wash and put into a separate saucepan, and boil lightly; take out, wipe in the hands, and strain through a sieve.

Take the juice, and add it to the saucepan to form a broth. Take sweet almonds, grind fine, moisten with a little apricot juice, and throw in. Some colour with a trifle saffron. Spray the saucepan with a little rosewater; wipe its sides with a clean rag, and leave to settle over the fire; then remove.

Adapting the medieval mishmishiya recipe to include some more modern culinary techniques such as searing, I am extremely happy with My supremely succulent variant adaptation – and so shall you be as well! 😀

My first change is to include some smoked salt in the dish to properly emulate the wood-fired stoves of the medieval period – this Icelandic version is My preferred choice. The original recipe called for both black pepper and cinnamon – as it happens, I find cinnamon to be overwhelming in flavor and FAR prefer the milder Ceylon cinnamon in its place – you can buy it here.

Black pepper WAS used in medieval cooking but Javanese long pepper was the original pepper used in Europe before black pepper became prevalent in the 14th century. It has a very nice flavor, similar to black, but more floral and spicy and I find its piney essence better suited to My adaptation of this mishmishiya recipe, as well as more historically accurate – you can buy it from here on Amazon.

Mastic (aka mastiha) is a common spice used throughout Southern Europe and the Middle East. Chios Mastiha is the 100% natural resin of pistacia lentiscus var. Chia, a tree that grows only on the Aegean island of Chios, Greece that comes in the form of medium-sized “tears”. Chios Mastiha is a unique product with many beneficial qualities and wide-ranging uses since antiquity and is included in UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity list. Buy it here.

Dried apricots are obviously a key part of mishmishiya and I recommend only the finest California Blenheim apricots, which are both sweet and succulent beyond compare – buy top-quality ones from here. The stew is further thickened with ground almonds in the original recipe – I still use them as I am the Auteur of Authenticity – but I am also the Sovereign of the Sublime and thus I use truffled skinless Marcona almonds from Spain for added savor – buy them here.

Rosewater is also used lavishly in this ancient form of mishmishiya – this was for two reasons: the first is it was rare and expensive, thus generating an automatic desire for it by all chefs. Its powerfully aggressive aroma also hid any spoiled meat smell or taste – remember this was made in very hot climates with no refrigeration! I recommend this delightful rose extract made from Bulgarian roses (the most fragrant in the world!) – a little goes a LONG way, so be careful using it!

Lastly, to bring my mishmishiya more in line with the modern Morocccan lamb tagine, I do call for a generous pinch of the unmatched spice blend known as ras-el-hanout that is not used in the original recipe. My version of ras-el-hanout is – of course! – unmatched, but this commercial version is also very good. Saffron is a must in both the classic mishmishiya recipe and the modern tagine – this is an excellent brand.

Citizens, whether you are a devout follower of the Prophet (PBUH!) breaking your Ramadan fast with the iftar meal or just seeking a classic, historical recipe that is supremely delicious as adapted by Mine own blessed hand – mishmishiya will satisfy you as few other dishes ever could!

Battle on – the Generalissimo

Print