The Kitchen

Meat with Vinegar and Onions

Take a piece of meat and put it in an earthenware vessel together with its own weight of small onions, peeled, and a little peeled garlic; then add cinnamon, allspice, and salt, and two-thirds of a cup of vinegar, and a cup of wine, and a cup and a half of water, and a little ghee; then seal the pot with dough and leave it on the fire for an hour and a half. Shake the vessel repeatedly during the cooking, and serve with fluffy rice and bottled sauce or mustard.

A useful hint: You may fry the pieces of meat in ghee, then the onions; then add the garlic and fry it a little; then add the remaining ingredients and cook them over a gentle fire, without sealing the pot.

Clean the chicken or fowl and stuff it with the dressing of meat, pine nuts, and mixed nut kernels together with the rest of the spices; then sew it up and put it in the pot with small peeled potatoes, cover it with ghee, and treat it as you treat the sealed-pot roast.

You may also roast the fowl in this manner with the potatoes in the oven, with finely chopped onion.

1 — Put the potato purée you have prepared in a dish and cover it with egg white beaten until stiff; then bake it in the oven until the egg white turns golden.

2 — Set a round cake mold in the flat serving dish or platter; then take some of the potato purée and build it up as a wall around the mold; then lift the mold out and fill the hollow in the middle of the potatoes with the kibbeh filling of meat, pine nuts, and fried onion, or with fish, freed of spines and bones, blended with tarator sauce or with whipped cream and a little pounded almond, and bake it a little. You may also fill the hollow with cooked peas, or with leftover chicken meat, chopped, or with roast and boiled vegetables, and serve it baked or unbaked.

3 — Roll the stiff potato purée into balls the size of pigeons' eggs, then roll them in ground crumbs, and use them to garnish cooked vegetables.

Boil the potatoes, then peel and mash them, then knead them with fresh milk and a little salt. Then grease a baking pan with ghee and spread the potatoes over it in a thin layer; then spread over it a stuffing like the kibbeh stuffing, and over that lay another layer of potatoes; then cut it as kibbeh is cut, then add a cup of margarine, bake it in the oven, and leave it in a warm place. Do not divide it until ten minutes after taking it out of the oven.

After frying the fish, chop it fine — it may also be used raw — then salt and spice it and add a little mustard to it; then stuff the potatoes with it and bake them.

Beat the eggs and add to them a tablespoon of ground crumbs or of flour; then add a quarter of a cup of cream or of unsweetened tinned milk, and salt it; then fry it in oil and serve it as a round cake on the platter, surrounded by boiled beets cut in rounds.