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Great Goodies From the Gulf
Review:
The Arabian Nights Cookbook
By Habeeb Salloum
Published by Tuttle Publishing
It’s an odd thing to hear, but you can’t write about Arab cuisine without mentioning petroleum. The oil wells of the Arabian Peninsula have played an integral role in the evolution of the region’s food culture, says Habeeb Salloum, author of “The Arabian Nights Cookbook”.
The oil lured people from all over the world, he notes, and the results were a blending of their disparate tastes and the startling diversity of Arab food. Otherwise the local cuisine would be frugal, basic and not nearly so eclectic.
Toronto-based travel-and-food writer Salloum ushers us into kitchens where external influences are wholeheartedly embraced. He found this world in the early 1980s when he went to Dubai to attend a wedding and has since travelled extensively in Oman, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait.
Everywhere, there was something new on Arab dinner tables, both at home and in restaurants: traditional dishes were routinely served alongside foreign fare. Cosmopolitanism ruled.
Traditionally Arab cuisine was never complex. The nomadic Bedouin of the desert ate red meat, the coastal inhabitants preferred fish. Meals were rounded out with rice.
Much of the food – and eventually the spices – came from East Africa, India and Indonesia aboard Arab trading dhows. The fragrant herbs and spicy flavours of India and Pakistan were a huge influence – coriander, mint, ginger, cinnamon, cumin, nutmeg and cloves.
Modern Arab Gulf cooking is “multinational”, writes Salloum, with more recent derivations from Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan. Steaks from the US and spicy dishes from further east, places like Malaysia, have also turned up on the dinner table.
The book brings together traditional and contemporary Arab Gulf recipes, which are all “authentic”, the author asserts, because they come from the everyday cooks and chefs he encountered during his travels.
There are 11 chapters, detailing in turn the structure of Arab food, basic recipes, tools and notable ingredients.
This last section is an education for anyone unfamiliar with things like allspice, bulghur, cardamom, cloves and cumin, which control the aroma and flavour. Together with the use of lentils, they confirm the Indian element in Arab cuisine.
Other chapters cover appetisers and snacks, salads, soups, breads, rice and side dishes, desserts, drinks and the various dishes made with chicken, meat, seafood and just vegetables.
Photographer Suan I Lim beautifully illustrates all of the food – everything looks delicious.
Among the appetisers, the eye can’t resist the roasted eggplant puree and aromatic chickpea fritters that, interestingly, look like Thai fishcakes.
The salad section reflects the wealth of ingredients from around the world, as in the orange-and-olive salad and the spicy eggplant salad. The quintessence of them all is tabbouleh, which consisting of bulghur, fresh parsley and mint and lettuce leaves.
Noodle soup with lamb and spinach, spicy broad-bean soup and spiced lentil soup with lemon lead the soup chapter.
Tandoori chicken, hearty lamb stew and baked lamb kebabs represent the notable meat dishes. The use of spices from India is central to the fish dishes in the seafood chapter, which reveals how notable dishes from neighbouring countries come to the Gulf region, via mostly India.
Even though Arabs are coffee drinkers, Saudi-style chai is very popular at the moment, as is cinnamon-and-aniseed tea.
Arab food is a world of colourful flavours, and with Salloum’s accessible recipes, modern home-style Arab cooking is just as friendly to the palate as it is to the Western and Asian kitchens – as long as you love the aromas of spices.
Manote Tripathi
The Nation