Iraq
Mesopotamian cooking - the oldest written recipes on earth came from here, and some of them still work.
The world's oldest recorded recipes are cuneiform tablets from Mesopotamia, roughly 1750 BC, and they describe stews of meat, leek and garlic that a cook in Baghdad today would recognise. Masgouf is the national dish and the clearest link back: carp from the Tigris, split flat, propped upright around an open fire of apricot wood and cooked slowly by radiant heat, then finished on the embers with tomato and onion.
Dolma here means a whole tableful - vine leaves, onions, aubergines, peppers and courgettes all stuffed with spiced rice and meat, layered into one pot and inverted onto a platter. Quzi, slow-cooked lamb over spiced rice with almonds and raisins, is the celebration dish. Bread is samoon, a diamond-shaped loaf baked in stone ovens, and it accompanies everything.
Baghdad's medieval kitchens produced some of the earliest cookbooks in Arabic, and the sweet end of the meal still shows Ottoman and Persian influence: kleicha, date-filled pastries considered the national biscuit, cardamom-heavy tea, and shredded-pastry desserts soaked in syrup.
- masgouf
- dolma
- quzi
- biryani baghdadi
- kleicha
- samoon
