Bazmāward (Rolled Bread Stuffed with Pounded Roast)

History

Bazmāward (بزماورد) is a pinwheel sandwich bearing a Persian name, generally connected to *bazm* ("feast, banquet") and reflecting the heavily Persianized vocabulary of Abbasid court cooking. Al-Baghdadi's 1226 version pounds cooled roast meat together with mint, walnut kernels, vinegar, salted lemon and rosewater into a fine paste, packs it into the hollowed crumb of fine white *samīdh* bread, and slices the roll into neat oblong rounds — eaten fresh or, he adds, pleasantly the next day. The dish long predates this late-Abbasid text: it is set down in the tenth-century *Kitāb al-Ṭabīkh* of Ibn Sayyār al-Warrāq — a separate, earlier book of the same title, not to be confused with al-Baghdadi's. Al-Warrāq gives five sandwich recipes, one reportedly made for the caliph al-Mutawakkil (d. 861); his bazmāward spreads fillings over a thin *ruqāqa* (lavash-like bread), rolls it and cuts it crosswise into discs, and also carried the by-name *muyassar wa muhannī*, "easy and pleasant." Its standing is caught in an eighth-century dream manual, where dreaming of bazmāward was read as an omen of easy prosperity. Food historian Nawal Nasrallah traces a living heir: the Levantine ʿarāyes are, she argues, none other than the bazmaward and awsat of medieval times. No reliable source credits any single caliph or vizier with inventing or naming it; the courtly associations belong to the tradition, not to one man.

Ingredients

• hot roast meat
• mint leaves
• vinegar
• salted lemon
• walnut kernels
• rosewater
• fine semolina bread

Instructions

1. Cut up hot roast meat (shiwāʾ) once its heat has died down.
2. Add mint, a little vinegar, salted lemon, and walnut kernels; sprinkle with rosewater.
3. Pound finely with a cleaver, feeding in vinegar until it is well absorbed.
4. Hollow the crumb from fine semolina bread and stuff it well with the pounded roast.
5. Cut into medium oblong pieces.
6. Wet and dry a clay vessel, sprinkle rosewater inside, and line with fresh mint.
7. Pack the pieces in layers, cover with more mint, rest an hour, and serve (also good the next day).