Samak Musakbaj (Fish Sikbāj, Sweet-Sour Fried Fish in Vinegar)

History

Samak musakbaj (سمك مسكبج) means "fish made into sikbāj." Al-Baghdadi has the cook cut fish into middling pieces, fry them in shīraj (sesame oil), scatter a little whole dried coriander (kusfara), then plunge them into wine-vinegar tinted with saffron and steeped with celery leaves. The parent technique, sikbāj, is a Persian/Sasanian sweet-and-sour vinegar preparation — Persian sik ("vinegar") plus the dish-suffix -bāj — that Arab cooks inherited and made a prestige signature of Abbasid Baghdad. Applied here to fried fish and a cold vinegar bath, this dish is generally held to be the most direct ancestor of escabeche: the Spanish and Portuguese word descends, through Andalusi Arabic al-sikbāj, from the same Persian root, and lexicographers list escabeche (and English caveach) as doublets of sikbāj. Frying the fish before steeping it in vinegar — exactly al-Baghdadi's method — is the defining escabeche move, and southern-Italian scapece is traced by food historians to this same medieval samak musakbaj of 10th–13th-century Baghdad. The onward link to Latin American ceviche is looser: ceviche is raw fish cured in acid, and while it is often grouped in the same soused-fish family and sometimes tied etymologically to sikbāj, that connection is debated rather than settled.

Ingredients

• fresh fish
• sesame oil
• kusfara (coriander)
• wine vinegar
• saffron
• celery leaves

Instructions

1. Cut fresh fish into middling pieces and fry in sesame oil (shīraj).
2. Throw over the fish a little whole dried coriander (kusfara).
3. Put the fish into wine vinegar (khall khamr) dyed with saffron and containing celery leaves.