Eating together

Fayza Hassan gets a taste of the past
During the first half of the 20th century, Egypt's elites adopted many Western manners and customs, shifting, for instance, to Europe's more frugal and rapid ways of cooking and eating. Even though family meals often remained faithful to indigenous traditions, they prided themselves on serving guests fare more familiar to the connoisseurs of Paris, Rome or Vienna.
When barbecue became the fashionable way of cooking meat and poultry, the smell of roasting flesh permeated the air of fashionable summer resorts as hosts prepared poulet de Brest for their guests on their terraces or in their gardens: the recipe required the chef to inject, into plump Danish chickens, a concoction of olive oil, salt, pepper, a little crushed garlic and minced tarragon before setting them to grill on a home-made pit, basting them constantly with the aromatic mixture.
Caviar, smoked salmon and pâté de foie gras were expected to feature at any respectable buffet, and turkey gained in popularity over other meat dishes. Fresh butter displaced samna (clarified ghee), condemned as unhealthy and relegated to the servants' kitchen.
When vegetables appeared at all at a formal meal, they were no longer stewed but rather sautéed in a little fresh butter; the pedestrian potato shrank almost to oblivion and was served vapeur, together with small zucchini and carottes Vichy. Indigenous dishes lost their appeal, except when, in a show of reverse snobbism, fuul nabit (germinated broad beans), a staple food of the Egyptian fallah, was presented, generously sprinkled with cumin and salt, in chic bars as a mezze.
After the 1952 Revolution, gourmets who stayed on had to make do with food produced locally. The lack of imported delicacies together with a revival of nationalism in the upper classes produced a change in dietary habits and a return to (or even rediscovery of) one's roots. Old family recipes were retrieved from bottom drawers, and not only used successfully but boasted about as well-guarded family secrets.
Egyptians discovered their own homegrown food. Beans, lentils and the incomparable rice mifalfel (literally like grains of pepper: rice fried in butter until partly golden, the grains well separated, then covered with water and simmered until tender), eggplant and tahina took pride of place on the family table as well as being offered to guests. Fuul and ta'miya parties often replaced the cookouts featuring exotic meats.
Kishk was one of the dishes that witnessed a revival. Eaten in childhood and forgotten, it made a glorious comeback and has become a specialty in many households.
Usta Abdu, who has been employed as a cook for many years by renowned gourmet Mohamed Makhlouf, gives the following recipe for kishk:
Bring half a kilo of milk to the boil and let it cool. When lukewarm, beat in half a cup of flour and two cartons of yogurt. Beat until mixture thickens. Add salt to taste.
Cook half a cup of rice in three or four cups of chicken broth until grains are tender. Cool, and then beat the soup into the milky concoction. Mince two medium onions and five or six cloves of garlic. Fry the onion in butter and when golden add the minced garlic. Turn up the heat and continue frying until the mixture begins to brown, then quickly throw it onto the kishk, reserving a small quantity for decoration. Beat the kishk once more with the onions and garlic and turn in into a bowl, sprinkling the top with the reserved onion and garlic.
But does Usta Abdu know the origin of the dish he prepares so well? "We eat it in the country," he says vaguely, "and there are other types of kishk too, but I don't know all the recipes."
In fact, kishk has a long and complex history dating back to the fifth century if not before. The word is present in different linguistic families and cultural areas, and designates different substances according to the region. The original word is derived from the Persian, according to Françoise Aubaile- Sallenave (in A Taste of Thyme, Culinary Cultures of the Middle East, Sami Zubaida and Richard Tapper, eds., London, 2000). It is mentioned for the first time by an Armenian author of the fifth/sixth centuries, Elishe; "certainly borrowed from the Pahlavi kashkin... it meant then barley bread," she writes.
The word appears in several texts produced during the following centuries with the same meaning, then variations begin to appear from the 16th century on: in Iran kashkak is a complex dish; kashkab means barley water and is a medicinal infusion; kashku is barley broth; kashkin and kashkina refer to breads and different kinds of preserves. In contemporary Iranian, kashk means dry yogurt. Among Iranian-speaking peoples, adds Aubaile-Sallenave, keshk or kashk designate all milk products. Among the Greeks of Macedonia, quacheq (a Turkish loanword) designates cheese.
In Arabic, kishk had different meanings in the past. The various preparations are classified according to the main ingredient, the flavour and the region. In Syria, Lebanon and Palestine, kishk was well known in the 10th century and is mentioned in cookbooks and medical treatises to this day.
The word kashk begins to appear in Arabic in the early ninth century in a medical text by Al-Andalus Ibn Habib, then in the texts of Persian and Arabo-Persian writers such as Al-Warraq in his Kitab Tabikh (Cookbook) and the Qanun Fil-Tibb of Ibn Sina (980- 1037). A dish called kishk musba'un was prepared in the kitchens of the Mamelukes, but there is unfortunately no indication of its composition.
"The word is diffused over a large but continuous geographical area," writes Aubaile- Sallenave: "Iran, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Kurdistan, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Arabia Petrea, Turkey, Egypt; but it was also known at the other end of the Arabic area in medieval Spain... The fact that the word is found in several language families implies relations of contact and borrowing, not tradition. Therefore we can speak of an areal diffusion, since all those populations have long had economic, social and cultural contacts with each other."
Kishk in its various linguistic forms has long puzzled scholars: why does the same word sometimes designate bread made with water and cereals (usually but not always barley), sometimes byproducts of milk curd, and at yet other times a mixture of both? The combination of ingredients is particularly intriguing:
The 10th-century writer Al-Warraq gives the following recipe for a dish he calls kishk shami: "Wheat coarsely cracked, then cleaned and boiled in water, then dried and cleaned again until there is no more bran. Knead with hot water in the right quantity, add a little leaven and put in a large container in the sun for six days, covering it during the night, until it becomes well soured, then add thinly cut vegetables, not chicory or rocket since they do not enhance it, but many leeks, fresh coriander, rue and, for those who like it, onions cut into small rounds and pieces, aubergines, squash, cabbage, Khaukh Al-Dibb, which are sour little plums, and good verjuice [vinegar made of unripe green grapes]. Knead all that together and allow to dry in the sun for five days. Then shape into round flat cakes."
A 16th-century variation refers to a kind of preserved food made of fried wheat, which, with onions, beets and purslane seeds, was steeped in fish jelly and dried in the sun.
In 19th-century Egypt, E W Lane, remarking that Muslims observed certain Coptic customs, explained that, on Good Friday, for instance, they ate "a dish of khalta composed of kishk with fool nabit... lentils, rice, onions, etc." He describes kishk as "prepared from wheat, first moistened, then dried, trodden in a vessel to separate the husks and coarsely ground with a hand-mill: the meal is mixed with milk, and about six hours afterwards is spooned out upon a little straw or bran and left for two or three days to dry. When required for use it is either soaked or pounded, and put into a sieve, over a vessel, and then boiling water is poured on it. What remains in the sieve is thrown away; what passes through is generally poured into a saucepan of boiled meat or fowl over the fire. Some leaves of white beet, fried in butter are usually added to each plate of it." In the 17th century, however, kishk had also been known in Egypt as a sweetmeat made from curdled milk, flour and honey. It was usually prepared to celebrate the birth of a child: "Several dishes were prepared by the women of the house... and sent to friends and female relations on the fourth or fifth day after the birth," writes Lane. Those dishes were mufattaqa, libaba, hilba (with fenugreek) and kishk. "The first three were based on or sweetened with honey, and we can suppose," adds Aubaile- Sallenave, "that the kishk was sweetened too."
Today, kishk refers to complex dishes including flour and yogurt in Syria, Lebanon, Iran and Egypt that are so common and well known among the population that we must deduce a continuity of practice.
Concluding her detective work, Aubaile-Sallenave proposes the hypothesis that "Persian kashk originally designated a barley preparation, a barley gruel, which correspond to the oldest alimentary preparations recorded under that name. From that gruel, after adding leaven, two products are obtained which can be preserved: first, with the addition of a little water, bread... secondly, with the addition of much more water, a fermented gruel, which can then be dried." She then suggests that Iranian pastoralists who had no easy access to barley may have applied the word kashk to dried sour milk, which was their staple and looked and tasted somewhat like the other variety made of barley and leaven, especially when the leaven was replaced by sour milk in the preparation. The term then passed to the rest of the Middle East, and came to designate "complex preserved foods made from cereals and a ferment, whether leaven or sour milk." In an evolution of vocabulary and by analogy, the word came to encompass a great variety of dishes with a similar basis.
Finally, she writes, "the diffusion of such a humble cultural artefact may throw new light on social relations between culturally different populations: Zoroastrians or Sassanian Iran and Christian Armenians; Muslim Persians, Kurds and Arabs; Persians and Turks. In fact the Persian kashk of the pastoral tribes was diffused as far as the prestigious dishes of the Baghdad court... We can see that kishk occupies a prominent place in the diffusion of cultural objects in the Middle East, through the prestige of Persian culture spread in those countries by the Arabs since the beginning of their expansion, and some of the effects remain with us today."
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