A Holiday Treat: Maamoul

As Easter approaches, NPR offers a hunger-inducing tribute to "Maamoul: An Ancient Cookie That Ushers In Easter And Eid In The Middle East."

Egypt Makes World's Record Koshary Dish; Well, They Did Warn Us It Was Coming

This blog has often dealt with the curious phenomenon of Middle Eastern food fights: Lebanon and Israeli Arabs competing to make the world's largest hummus, or Jordan's 75 kilogram falafel. The link will take you to the previous stories, and they did warn us this was coming last fall.

Now Egypt claims to have produced the world's largest plate of koshary. Since all of Egypt's other problems are presumably now solved, they're putting their effort into massive carbohydrates.

The traditional street dish of macaroni, rice, lentils and other ingredients reportedly weighed in at somewhere in the range of 7,000 to 8,000 kilograms, not recommended for those on a low-starch diet. (Would you like fries with that?)

While they say it breaks the Guinness Book record, no one says what the previous record was. Was there one? I've never seen koshary anywhere but in Egypt or in Egyptian restaurants serving expatriate workers in the Gulf or in he West.

Try to fit this on a street cart. Dig in:

About that Falafel...

It's been a busy day with Journal work, hence no blogging. But I can't resist this one: Lebanon's Health Minister says testing of samples from restaurants and supermarkets throughout the country has found traces of "human excrement and sewage water." Or as the Al-Akhbar English website puts it more colorfully, "Lebanese consumers learn they are eating shit."

Food Fights Revisited: Now, Egypt Aims for Biggest Plate of Koshary

Egypt, having no other problems to preoccupy it at the moment, is planning to break all records with an eight-ton dish of koshary;

The restaurateurs have invited a panel of judges from the Guinness Book of World Records to Egypt on November 22 to witness the creation of this record-breaking koshary dish.

According to the website of the Koshary and Egyptian Food Festival, the dish will be 10 meters wide, 1.2 meters high, and is estimated to weigh eight tons.

The signature Egyptian dish consists of pastas, rice, lentils, chickpeas and sauce and was traditionally a staple of street food carts, though now there are upmarket restaurants featuring it.

This follows a string of earlier efforts we've covered on this blog;

Back in 2009, Lebanon announced that it had broken the Guinness records for largest plates of hummus and tabbouleh, The following year the Israeli Arab town of Abu Ghosh fought back with a hummus that beat the Lebanese. In no time the Lebanese struck back with 10 tons of hummus. (It was getting a little silly; Haaretz had a headline referring to the "peas process.") (Video link here.)

10 tons of hummus

Hopes that food fights would replace actual wars were disappointed.The Arab uprisings seem to have abated the silliness for a time, but sure enough, in 2012 Jordan raised the stakes: a 74.75 kilogram falafel.

Egypt is late to the party but it has one thing going for it: I don't think these other countries know how to make koshary.

Cultural Notes: Getting KFC Delivered Through the Gaza Tunnels

Since tomorrow happens to be Nakba day (fuller post coming), some Palestinian readers might feel I'm being overly flippant by posting this piece tonight.  Please accept my assurances that I intend it as the sort of quirky cultural story I frequently post, and the date is purely coincidental, at least on my part.

We have heard much about the Gaza tunnels, usually in connection with arms smuggling, infiltration, and the like, with both Israel and Egypt portraying the tunnels in a sinister manner, and I don't doubt some highly dubious material and personalities do pass through them. But, if this Xinhua Chinese news agency report is accurate, you can also use them for KFC delivery. Yes, since Colonel Sanders isn't available in Gaza, you can order from al-Arish in Egypt. The English, presumably translated from the Chinese by the same people who translate computer manuals and Chinese menus, is a little rocky, but the meaning is fairly clear:

At Al-Yamama delivery company in the Gaza City, the floor is filled with boxes of fast food with the famous face of Colonel Sanders, the founder of KFC.

However, there are no KFC restaurant in this Palestinian coastal sliver of land as the regular absence of raw materials and Israeli restrictions on Gaza crossings make it difficult to open an international fast food branch here.

But ordering fast food from one of the world's most popular restaurants has become possible in Gaza after Al-Yamama started to bring the food from the Egyptian North Sinai, which borders Gaza.

The fried chicken make their [sic] way from one of the many underground smuggling tunnels beneath the Gaza-Egypt border.

As cheap fast food goes, it's neither cheap nor fast:

Since late last month, they have made four deliveries of KFC food to Palestinians in Gaza, with every delivery including about two dozens of combos.

The clients include both those who have traveled outside Gaza and the people who never stepped a foot out of Gaza.

"It's delicious even as it's not hot," said Aboud Fares, a 22- year-old student, as he bit a mouthful of a chicken breast. His sister, who traveled several times to Egypt, was enjoying the KFC apple pie.

The price of a KFC family meal is about 80 Egyptian pounds ( about 11 U.S. dollars) at el-Arish KFC restaurant, but getting it in Gaza costs as much as 100 Israeli Shekels (30 dollars).

The delivery company says the higher price is due to the transportation and smuggling fees.

Those seem steep prices for Gaza. And there are other impediments:

Al-Madani also said that they do not face a lot obstacles in bringing the food to Gaza, but the delivery may be delayed due to various reasons.

"Sometimes Hamas checks the meal boxes and sometimes the taxi that picks up the orders from Sinai is late," he said.

I'm pretty sure KFC is halal unless it's cooked in lard (highly unlikely in al-Arish, I should think),but maybe Hamas inspectors like the Colonel's products too.

To Start the Week: Food Fights: World Champion Falafel

A couple of years back, before the wave of Arab revolutions distracted people, we had a string of articles about competitions to make the world's largest plate of hummus (See here and here and here), with one of those articles also dealing with the world's largest plate of tabbouleh.

Well, apparently the food fights are on again. Jordan has weighed in (literally) with the world's largest falafel, at 74.75 kilograms. The previous holder, according to the Guinness book, was only 23.94 kilograms and was prepared in California. The hummus battles were usually between Lebanon and Israel, and were preferable to the more explosive sort of battles, but the idea of a giant falafel is somehow more daunting, I'm not entirely sure why.

The falafel in question

Sham al-Nassim

Today is Sham al-Nassim, the spring holiday celebrated in Egypt (and Sudan) on the Monday after Coptic Easter, though it is a holiday celebrated by Muslims as well as Christians, and said by some to be a survival of the ancient Egyptian festival of Shemu. (Despite the similarities of the name, "Sham al-Nassim" is Arabic for "smelling the breeze," and since everyone near the Nile goes to picnic by the river, it's a perfectly descriptive and appropriate name.) I've posted on the questions of origins before, but it seems to me that what makes this Sham al-Nassim worth mentioning is that, at a time when Muslim-Christian relations are tense, and Islamist-secular relations as well, this is a holiday celebrated by all Egyptians, not specific to one religion, or the creation of the modern state like National Day, Military Day, and various anniversaries. It shares that distinction with one other Egyptian holiday that is definitely of Ancient Egyptian origin: Wafa'a al-Nil, the mid-August celebration of the Nile flood, still celebrated though the High Dam has ended the annual floods.

[UPDATE: Some Islamists called for boycotting Sham al-Nassim as "un-Islamic." It isn't working: turnouts are as big as ever according to Ahram Online.]

So for Sham al-Nassim I send greetings to all Egyptians and Sudanese, Muslim and Christian and Jewish, secular and Islamist, whether they are near the Nile today or anywhere else in the world. It's also a holiday associated with certain foods: with coloring eggs (sound familiar?), eating the dry salt fish called fasikh, and other foods such as green onions and other vegetables. Here's a photo celebrating the symbols of Sham al-Nassim:

Sham al-Nissim delicacies (Al Kahira-Cairo-LeCaire)

5,200 Year-Old Take-Out Windows?

And now for something completely different: Did the Early Bronze Age Invent the Drive-Through Carry-Out Window?

That would seem to be the take-away (sorry, couldn't help it!) from "Beer and Bullets to Go: Ancient 'Takeout' Window Discovered."  (No, they haven't discovered bronze age "bullets" in the modern sense: they mean clay pellets for slings.) A tip of the hat to Diana Buja for the link.

Egyptian Street Food Guide

Thanks to Raymond Stock for this link, which I pass to Old Cairo Hands, new ones as well, and those who hope to be: a guide to Egyptian (Cairene) street food.

Wretched Excess Department: Abu Dhabi Moves into Caviar

From today's New York Times: "The Fish that Lay the Golden Eggs,": "Abu Dhabi is talking caviar on a scale that would make czars blush." They're building the world's largest indoor caviar factory which, at full production, could account for over a quarter of global production.

I guess if you're a major consumer you ought to get in on the production end as well, but so much for dispelling stereotypes about the lavish lifestyles of the rich and Emirati.

YNet: Israel Fears Sushi Shortage

YNet's Headline: Israel Fears Sushi Shortage After Quake.

And it's not from The Onion, but from the online site of Israel's largest-circulation newspaper, Yediot Aharanot. And it's not April 1, either.

Sure, the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown are tragic events, but can we still get our seaweed and wasabi?

Falafel Wars

More food fights, this time involving falafel. (Sorry: link was wrong but now fixed.) At least, unlike the various hummus and other battles documented in that first link, they aren't trying to make the world's biggest falafel. Oh, the beans, the beans! But I'm still always bothered over the fight about whether hummus, or baba ghanouj, or falafel, or whatever, is Israeli or Palestinian. The similarities of the dietary laws between Judaism and Islam has often meant that in the modern US, if no halal grocery was available, observant Muslims would buy from kosher shops. Conversely, many Jews in Arab countries welcomed the fact that Muslim dietary taboos tracked so closely with their own, so even food without a rabbinical stamp might be quite kosher if it was halal.

Israelis should remember that the pioneers of the state got to know hummus and falafel becsuse that was the food available when they started their work. Israelis should also remember that their own pioneers had only arrived in the land a short time previous.

It's a harder task for Palestinians. They see every Israeli claim to hummus or falafel as a piece of cultural genocide. To us., it sounds absurd until we think about it. If we are what we eat, is it any surprise that our most intractable dispute today has a culinary competition?

A Timely Encounter with Kushary

A personal anecdote, if I may, with a bit of fortuitous synchronicity: last night my daughter's school had an "international cuisine night." Parents were urged to share national dishes from their countries of origin, wear native dress, etc., and there was music and dancing from various parts of the world. As we live in a rather multi-ethnic neighborhood in northern Virginia, we expected there to be a good variety, and there was. Though my daughter herself comes from China, none 0f us are good at Chinese cooking, so we toyed with something Middle Eastern, and while I can whip up some good Middle Eastern dishes, it isn't really our cuisine, so we settled on being one of the few families attending to come up with something American, and made my wife's chili. (My own chili is better, in my opinion, but since it causes bleeding gums and requires extensive liquid refreshment afterward, if not resuscitation, we went with the mild stuff.)

It was crowded and chaotic and though the foods were supposed to be labeled, most weren't. I was pleased that among the many flags on the wall, one was Egypt's, since obviously many of us are cheering on Egypt in the first week without Mubarak. When we got to the serving table there was a lot of Middle Eastern, Latin American, and African food, though surprisingly little East Asian since there are many Vietnamese and Korean families in the area, though perhaps not in the school.

Anyway, I filled my plate with lamb couscous and Latin rice, curried lentils and some kind of kifta, and then came to an unlabeled plate.

Hmm. Noodles, macaroni, sauce, lentils, maybe a little rice, and chickpeas on top. Sounds like ... OMG, Kushary!

Now, Kushary is Egyptian street food. Like ful mudammas and ta‘amiyya, (the former is fava beans; the latter is a version of falafel made with fava beans instead of chickpeas), it is a distinctively native Egyptian dish. It can be found elsewhere, but most commonly where there's a big Egyptian expatriate population, such as the Gulf. It is sold in street carts or small, specialized kushary restaurants.

Of course, I took some. To be honest, kushary was never my favorite Egyptian specialty, but it is so typically Egyptian that I couldn't not eat it as we approach the first week since the fall of Mubarak. A nice little bit of synchronicity.

World-Class Falafel Bagger

For something a bit lighter, from The Arabist, who got it via Anonymous Arabist, a falafel bagger who would hold the Guinness record, no doubt, if they had a category for falafel bagging, in a restaurant in Jenin:

"Take Five Goats and 200 Chickens . . ."

Iftar in Ras al-Khaimah. If you're fasting, don't read this till sundown.

Egypt Wants to Patent Koshary, Other Foods

In keeping with such stories as the food fights between Israel and Lebanon over hummus, I must call attention to this story that says Egypt intends to patent such foods as koshary, ful, fateer, etc. I'm not sure about patent law and wonder if trademarking it as "real Egyptian koshary" or some such wouldn't be the way to go, if indeed there are other countries trying to claim it.

I won't comment on the specific foods, since some of them I love and some I can't stand, and I'll offend somebody.

Lebanon Raises the Ante:10 Tons of Hummus

The battle between Lebanon and Israel over who can make the largest pot of hummus continues: the Lebanese have more than doubled the previous record with 10 tons worth. There's video at the link. Ha'aretz has the chutzpah to run the headline, "Peas Process Takes a Leap Forward as Lebanon Mashes Israel's Hummus Record."


Earlier rounds here, and here. Let's hope this is the only war between Israel and Lebanon anytime soon.

Trying to Find Avocados for Cinco de Mayo in Abu Dhabi

Happy Cinco de Mayo to all you non-Mexicans who use it an excuse (as if one were necessary) to drink Dos Equis and eat enchiladas. Here's an article in The National about the problems of making real guacamole in Abu Dhabi, where avocados can be in short supply (they import them from Kenya), among other things related to Mexican food in the Gulf. The article notes, correctly, that Cinco de Mayo tends to be partied heartier outside Mexico than at home, where September 16 (Independence Day) is bigger, so I'll wish Mexican readers an early independence day instead. (Saint Patrick's Day in Ireland is somewhat parallel: people go to church in Ireland while in Chicago they're dyeing the river green. And the Irish Prime Minister never gets to be at home on the saint's day since he traditionally visits the US President then.)

Anyway, I thought the guacamole shortage in Abu Dhabi was appropriate for today. I'll be at this event through the morning, so posting's likely to be thin till later.

¡But at least I found a Middle East link for Cinco de Mayo!

Ouch: Department of Irony

Those of my generation will recall when severe famines gripped Ethiopia, and tasteless jokes were made about starving Ethiopians, and US soldiers dubbed their MREs (Meals Ready to Eat) as "Meals Rejected by Ethiopians," and so on.

So for lovers of irony and recognizing those days were a while back: Egypt, to offset a beef shortage that has sent prices soaring, is importing 6000 head of cattle from Ethiopia and another 5000 from Djibouti. (Article is in Arabic.)

Just noting the irony.

Yep-Roc Heresay (or Yabra Harissa)

Okay, for the record, don't blame me for posting on something less serious than Netanyahu. Here's the isnad or chain of transmitters for this one: Qifa Nabki started this here; (he in turn ultimately blames Josh Landis, though I haven't seen anything on Syria Comment); then The Arabist piled on; so I'm really just piling on what they began. I'm not sure if several specialized Middle East bloggers counts as going viral, but anyway: The YouTube video is via The Arabist, but the best explanation is Qifa's:



He's jazz musician Slim Gaillard, and the song is usually known as something like "Yep-Roc Heresay." And now the explanation:

That’s right, he’s singing about food: yabra (i.e. stuffed graped leaves), harisseh (a semolina dessert), kibbeh bi-siniyyeh (a dish of meat and bulgur), lahm mishweh (grilled meat), etc.

A great tune. So what’s the back-story? I’ve been able to dig up various bits and pieces, but perhaps one of the readers can help out. The Wikipedia page on Gaillard suggests that he was reading from an Arabic menu, while this page claims that it was an Armenian menu, and that the song was actually “banned on at least two Los Angeles radio stations for its suspicious lyric references to drugs and crime…” (!)

The song has since become something of a standard, as evidenced by this rendition by what looks like some kind of wedding band. (I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything so hysterical. Who knew that Levantine cooking lent itself so well to vocalese?)

So enjoy. It's more diverting than arguing about settlement building. Good music, and it makes you hungry for Lebanese food.