Mira’s blog —
Still thinking about Montreal: Diana’s family was particularly wonderful in taking us under their wing, and making sure everyone knew of the event. Most impressive though was the totally awesome Iraqi dinner. I haven’t enjoyed such a feast in years.
My mother’s Baghdad was a world in microcosm where Muslims, Christians and Jews lived side by side and ate much the same kind of food. However, each group followed its own traditions and prescribed ways of preparing certain dishes. I have a small collection of some of the recipes, handed down through the centuries, which have survived among Iraq’s Jews wherever they are today, thus ensuring that while the community is no more, its spirit lives on at the table.
Mother used to say: ‘ Don’t forget, getting a meal ready in the old days was a big operation; all food had to be bought from the market daily and then prepared. The vegetables still had mud on them, beans had to be shelled, meat cleaned and koshered, chickens emptied and koshered, fish scaled and gutted etc. Ice was brought in every day but unlike today’s fridges they could not really keep food fresh for longer than 24 hours.’
Many of the dishes were prepared in advance and benefited from being served an hour or more later. The daddy of them all was baked chicken with rice, otherwise known as t’beet (from tybeyet, overnight) when it was eaten for the Sabbath lunch. It was prepared on the Friday and cooked on cooling embers overnight. (The same dish cooked by faster means at other times was known as tannouri (from tannour, oven).
In Part 2 tomorrow I’ll tell you how to cook it.
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