Isfānākhiyya (Spinach Stew with Rice and Meatballs)

History

*Isfānākhiyya* is a spinach stew. Al-Baghdadi browns fatty meat in rendered tail-fat, simmers it with soaked chickpeas and pounded fresh spinach, seasons it with coriander, cumin, pepper, mastic, cinnamon and garlic, thickens it with rice, and finishes it with small fried meatballs, *kubab*.

The name carries the vegetable's history. *Isfānākh* is the Arabic borrowing of Persian *aspanākh*, and spinach is generally held to have come from ancient Persia. From that Iranian homeland it travelled east: the king of Nepal sent it to the Tang court in 647, and in China it kept its origin in its name — the Taoists called it the Persian herb, and the ordinary Chinese word for it still marks it as Persian.

Travelling west it took a longer road into English. The word reached Anglo-French and Old French *espinache* by way of Old Provençal and Catalan, from Andalusian Arabic *isbinakh*, from Persian *aspanākh* — although the dictionary of record is not convinced the Middle Eastern words are native to those languages either, and calls the ultimate origin doubtful. Al-Baghdadi's recipe is a late witness, from 1226, to a dish built on a green long at home in Abbasid cooking.

Three things here we could not stand behind. An earlier version of this note placed the Persian-vegetable name in Nepal rather than China, and routed the English word through Medieval Latin. Both are corrected above. It also reported that a twelfth-century Andalusian agronomist called spinach the chieftain of leafy greens, and that the plant is recorded in a tenth-century medical treatise and reached Sicily by 827. Those we learned from popular reference and food-writing sources, and we were unable to locate the evidence they rest on — in the agronomist's case because the volume of his book that covers the kitchen garden is not one we could open, not because we found it wanting.

Ingredients

• fatty meat
• fresh tail-fat
• salt
• 1 handful peeled chickpeas
• fresh spinach
• dry coriander
• cumin
• ground pepper
• mastic
• cinnamon
• garlic
• rice
• red meat

Instructions

1. Cut fatty meat into medium pieces; render fresh tail-fat and discard the cracklings.
2. Brown the meat in the fat, cover with pre-heated water, add a little salt, boil and skim, then add a handful of soaked peeled chickpeas.
3. Wash fresh spinach, trim the lower roots a finger's length, cut it, pound in a stone mortar and add to the pot.
4. Near doneness, add dry coriander, cumin, ground pepper, mastic, thin cinnamon sticks and a little finely pounded garlic; add lukewarm water as needed.
5. After boiling about an hour, add cleaned washed rice and cook until it sets and turns smooth; rest on a gentle fire an hour, then lift off.
6. Form finely pounded red meat into small meatballs and fry them in fat with the usual spices.
7. Top the dish with the fried meat and its fat, dust with finely ground cinnamon, and serve.