Mishmishiyya (Apricot Meat Stew)

History

Mishmishiyya (مشمشية) takes its name from mishmish, the Arabic word for apricot. In al-Baghdadi's 1226 version, fatty meat is simmered and skimmed, then seasoned with onion and finely pounded coriander (kusfara), cumin, mastic, cinnamon (darsīnī), pepper and ginger; dried apricots are soaked, mashed by hand and strained, and their pulp-water becomes the cooking broth, thickened with finely pounded sweet almonds, tinted with a little saffron and finished with rosewater (al-Baghdadi, Kitāb al-Ṭabīkh, recipe #19). The dish is not al-Baghdadi's invention: a mishmishiyya already appears in the oldest surviving Arabic cookbook, compiled in 10th-century Baghdad, and cooking meat with apricots reaches back much further, to an Assyrian bean-and-apricot stew. It belongs to the broad Abbasid taste for sweet-savoury fruit-and-meat cookery — apple and sour-orange stews fill the same chapters — a fashion generally traced to the Persian and Sasanian sweet-sour stews the Arab conquerors adopted and part of the refined Baghdadi table of the caliphate's opulent age. The apricot itself travelled the opposite way from the dish: domesticated in Central Asia and China, it spread west along the Silk Road through Persia, while its European name passed through Arabic al-birqūq and Byzantine Greek from Latin praecoquum, "early-ripening". Such fruit stews, once prized here, have not survived in present-day Arab cooking.

Ingredients

• fatty meat
• salt
• onion
• coriander
• cumin
• mastic
• cinnamon
• pepper
• ginger
• dried apricots
• sweet almonds
• saffron
• rosewater

Instructions

1. Cut fatty meat small, boil in a little salted water to cover, and skim the froth.
2. Add cut washed onion, then finely pounded coriander, cumin, mastic, cinnamon, pepper, and ginger.
3. Soak, wash, and lightly boil dried apricots; rub by hand, strain, and moisten the pot with the apricot juice.
4. Enrich pounded sweet almonds with apricot water and add; optionally dye with a little saffron.
5. Sprinkle rosewater, wipe sides, leave to settle, and remove.