Cooking Recipes

One cup of rice.
One kilo of small zucchini.

For every uqiyya of meat use from half a cup to three-quarters of a cup of rice; season it with ghee, allspice, pepper, and salt, and add a little finely chopped fat. Stuff the zucchini after washing and hollowing them, leaving about a qirat's worth of space empty. Wash the outside, then arrange them in layers in the vessel; add to them a little tomato juice, water, and salt, and cook over a gentle fire for an hour and a quarter; serve at once when they are done.

Clean the casings well, then rub them with lemon and salt, then wash them in cold water, then rub them with pure spirit or arak, then wash them. After that, stuff them with the rice, meat, and pine nuts, then tie them well at both ends and clean them again as we described at first. Then put them in the vessel with cold water, a stick of cinnamon, a few allspice berries and peppercorns, and the lightly beaten white of an egg; then skim the scum off them and boil them for half an hour; then place them in the pot beneath the grape leaves and cover them with their own liquid.

Boil the macaroni, then drain it. Fry a few pine nuts until they turn golden, then add a head of onion, finely chopped, and stir it a little. Then add the meat, minced, and stir it with the onion until it browns; then add the salt, the allspice, and grated nutmeg. Then grease the baking tray with ghee and spread over it a layer of the boiled macaroni, and over it a layer of the meat and pine nuts and some grated white or yellow cheese. Then spread another layer of macaroni, then add a little strained tomato juice and a bit of butter, then grate cheese over it and bake it in the oven.

Follow the method for macaroni with tomatoes, but in place of the tomato juice add a cup of fresh milk or cream with a spoonful of butter; then grate cheese over it, brown it in the oven, and serve it.

Useful hint: sometimes eggs, or egg whites, beaten and mixed with milk, are added.

Grease a mold with ghee. Sprinkle a layer of ground rusk, then put a layer of the rice [...]

the pepper, and over it a layer of the meat fried with the pine nuts, a little of the spices, and some salt; then spread over it another layer of rice. Then add a cup of tomato juice or half a cup of broth. Then spread a layer of ground biscuit and bake it in the oven.

After baking, turn the mold out at once onto the serving dish; beat the whites of two eggs or more, spread them over the rice, and bake it in the oven a little.

Useful hint: you may use any meat you like, such as kidney and heart fried in ghee, or chicken, or minced roast.

Soft Sfiha

Knead bread flour, softer than kmaj dough, with two teaspoons of ammonium carbonate and two spoonfuls of European yeast, and leave it for an hour. Then grease a wide tray with ghee, and roll out with ghee a piece of dough the size of an egg into a round — and so on, until the tray is filled with the rolled-out pieces. Then fill each disk with the filling fried in ghee, composed of meat, onion, pine nuts, spices, salt, and green parsley, with lemon juice, or with vinegar, or yogurt, or tahini beaten with vinegar; then bake them and serve them hot with laban.

Bouchées

6 cups of flour.
3 eggs, well beaten.
A quarter teaspoon of salt.
A teaspoon of ammonia.
Fat (lard), preserved in tins.
Water, as much as the dough needs to be stiffer than kmaj dough.

Beat the eggs, then add the flour mixed with the salt and the ammonia, then add water until the flour is kneaded into a dough. Then sprinkle flour on the board and roll out the dough as thin as it will go, then brush it with the melted fat and fold it in a piece of cloth. Roll it out, fold it, and grease it again three times over; then fold it and roll it out to the thickness of a finger; then cut it with a cutter into round pieces, and from the middle of each of these pieces take out a small piece with the small glass, so that a thin layer remains at the bottom. Then bake all the pieces on the biscuit mold or the tray. After baking, fill the hollow formed in the middle of each piece with boiled fish, or with cooked marrow, or with meat and pine nuts, fried. Then serve them hot.