Muhallabiyya (Sweetened Rice with Meat, also called al-Bahaṭṭa)

History

Muhallabiyya (مهلبية), which al-Baghdadi also calls al-bahaṭa, appears here as a savoury dish: fatty meat browned in clarified butter, simmered with salt, dried coriander (kusfara), mastic and sticks of cinnamon (darsīnī), then cooked with rice, tinted with saffron and sweetened with rosewater syrup (julāb) or sugar. By tradition the dish is named for the Umayyad-era Arab general al-Muhallab ibn Abī Ṣufra, for whom a Persian cook is said to have first made it in the late seventh century as the Sasanian empire gave way to Arab rule — a naming legend rather than a documented fact. Its earliest written recipes appear not here but in the tenth-century Kitāb al-Ṭabīkh of Ibn Sayyār al-Warrāq — a separate, larger book of the same title — which gives several versions, including milk thickened with ground rice, a rice-and-chicken version, and an egg custard. Al-Baghdadi's meat-and-rice recipe thus belongs to the dish's long savoury phase, which persisted into Ottoman times; a meatless rosewater milk pudding is recorded by 1530, the ancestor of the sweet muhallabia eaten today and sometimes linked to European milk puddings such as manjar blanco and panna cotta.

Ingredients

• fatty meat
• clarified tail-fat
• salt
• dry coriander
• mastic
• cinnamon
• rice
• saffron
• julep or sugar

Instructions

1. Sweat and boil medium-cut fatty meat in clarified tail-fat; add water and boil an hour, then season with salt, coriander, mastic and cinnamon sticks.
2. When the meat is done, thin with lukewarm water proportioned to the rice.
3. Once boiling, add washed rice, color with a little saffron, and sweeten with julep or sugar to taste.
4. Rest on the fire an hour until settled, then lift off.