Kitchen Matters

This section is edited by Mrs. Tamam Dawud

We are now, Madam, in the orange season, and we should like to store away some of its delicious juice so as to put up a few bottles of the drink for the coming summer. Here, then, is this excellent method for orange syrup.

1 — For every glass of orange juice, put two glasses of sugar.

2 — For every ten glasses of orange juice, put three glasses of lemon juice.

3 — And for every glass of lemon juice, put three additional glasses of sugar.

4 — Grate about twenty oranges, which should be washed and dry; put the gratings in a piece of gauze and squeeze it over the whole of the juice.

5 — Keep stirring, and cover it well, until all the sugar has dissolved. This may take as long as two days; so, if you are in a hurry, set it over the fire and stir until the sugar dissolves — then fill it into clean, thoroughly dry bottles, stopper them tightly with new cork, and keep it for the summer.

Peel a head of garlic clove by clove and pound it. Knead half of it into three-quarters of the quantity of meat pounded in the mortar with the salt and allspice, then spread the meat out to an even thickness. Take the remaining meat and knead into it the rest of the garlic and a little walnuts and pine nuts; then roll it and twist it like a stick and lay it in the middle of the spread-out meat. After that, roll the one around the other as a cigarette is rolled. Then fry it in ghee, gradually, for an hour and a half; and when it is done, lift it out of the ghee, cut it into rounds, arrange them in the form of a wreath on the platter, scatter a few walnuts around it, and in the center of the wreath place pickles garnished with parsley and mint.

Pound the meat in the mortar as kibbeh is pounded, then season it with salt, allspice, and pepper. Then spread it out and divide it into pieces the thickness of the palm of the hand. Hard-boil some eggs and take out the yolks; place an egg yolk on each spread-out piece of meat, roll it up around the yolk, and fry it in ghee. After frying, add to the remaining ghee the juice of a lemon and a little water, and thicken the sauce with a little flour; and pound it with boiled spinach mashed with butter.

You may use boiled chestnuts to stuff the pounded meat instead of the egg yolks.

Ingredients:

2 — two uqiyyas of dates

1 — one uqiyya of walnuts

1 — one teaspoon of vanilla essence

Sugar, as much as needed

1/4 — a quarter uqiyya of lemon peel candied in sugar and dried

A piece of chocolate, or more, from a large chocolate bar

Method:

Take the dates and remove their pits, then add the walnuts and the lemon peel and put them through a clean meat grinder. Then add the vanilla essence and knead it all together. After sprinkling the wooden board with a little sugar, roll the dates out to the size of a quarter qirat and cut them with a knife. Then melt the chocolate by placing it, with a little hot water, in a vessel set inside another vessel of boiling water; dip each piece of the dates in the chocolate mixture, lift it out, and set it on oiled paper to dry; then keep them until needed.