Allow me to wish you a wonderful Jewish New Year.
Le Shana Tova to all my friends.
Let us hope in a brilliant future and peace in the M.E.
We have already paid our due!! Mish Keda?
Ah bamia that most delightful vegetable known to Greeks, Turks and Arabs in general.
There are two types of Bamia. One is small and the other long.
The small ones are best because the long ones leave slimy threads and it’s nauseating.
So rather than have that impression it is preferable not to cook the long Bamia.
It is a very long job to prepare Bamia. It has a little hat on top and you have to eliminate it going round and not cutting it off. Then the tip is slightly cut off, not too much because the bamia will open!
Having prepared your vegetables, you wash them and prepare your tomato sauce not forgetting to add lamoun (lemon), felfel (pepper) as much as you can bear, the usual korkum (curcuma), kumein (cumin) and the gracious basal, (onion).
It is to be noted that our tomato sauces were always prepared from Fresh tomatoes therefore giving out all the aroma of tomatoes with the spices.
Then you add your bamia to your sauce and allow simmering for a long time. Be careful not to agitate (!) them, because as soon as they start cooking they become very fragile!
Always accompanied with roz (rice).
Outa ou basal were the main ingredients of peasants. They ate a tomato or an onion with their eish baladi (peasant bread).
And when they went to the army because they did not understand the meaning of left and right, a tomato was put in one hand and an onion in the other.
So the corporal cried out outa, bassala for left and right!
Enjoy this most delightful meal. It will fly you to the stars!
There were two halawas in Egypt: one was the depilatory that came to us from Pharaoh’s times and the other one, the halva, which we in Cairo called Halawa.
Hairy legs, arms or armpits, moustachioed upper lip and other secret
parts were very poorly considered. Foreign women were distinctive by
their hairy bodies. Perhaps the most distasteful sight in summer was to see
long armpit hairs waving in the breeze, not mentioning the stale smell they produced.
My halawa today is a candy sugar depilatory of the very old days. The ladies then were very conscious their appeance, taking milk baths and massaging essential oils into their bodies to make them smooth, desirable and caressing!!
We think that today we have invented all the beauty products or essential oils whereas in truth people like Cleopatra or Nefertiti knew them!
When you have cooked your halawa (recipe on demand here) and it has been pulled and twisted adding a spot of saliva to make it malleable, you stretch it out on your forearm and shutting your eyes, pull it off in one decisive movement. You can suffer it out in a solitary session or have a martyrdom-shared one! Armpits were sore spots and the halawa had to be pulled out correctly and swiftly before the pain hit you. Anyone trying to pull off the sugar depilatory and failing was in for intense suffering.
Sometimes the armpits bled, but that was because the sticky halawa had not been pulled out correctly or quickly enough.
The nightmarish part was the inside of the knees. You had to twist your body to spread out the paste and it was practically impossible to pull unless you were a contortionist in a circus.
To look human and not apish, you stuck the halawa on your moustache and after a quick agonising jerk your smooth upper lip was rewarding.
It is not any worse than going to the dentist’s!
A fool once said that to
be beautiful, one must suffer!
That lovely name was one I hated. You will say “what a difficult person to please”.
That was my mom’s opinion too!
What was a shakshouka? First and above all you prepared the spiciest tomato sauce possible.
Not just a drop but a
pan full of it. It was so spicy.
you could light a
cigarette with it or fly off in a rocket!
When it was
ready and boiling, you broke fresh eggs in it one after the other.
Immediately
the eggs consolidated except the centre, which remained soft.
The usual roz
be senebar (rice with kernels) was prepared because shakshouka without rice
was not shakshouka.
Each person
helped himself to rice and added an egg with its very spicy sauce. Mmmm.
What a
delight!
But not for
yours truly.
When finally
to please my mom I did eat shakshouka, my lips were chapped, torn and hurt by
that sauce not to talk of the egg that had become red in the process!!!
Was I
really too difficult to please?
Considering things today: yes I think I was
difficult to please!
Though I am considered a good cook, I have never managed to obtain the taste of those Mahshis of my past!
IT IS PROBABLY DUE TO THE KOSSA ITSELF; here we have fat and watery courgettes not at all convenient for el mashi. In Italy they have those delicious zucchini almost as good as the Egyptian ones.
To prepare kossa mashi you need above all a NAKHWARA. It’s an instrument to void the insides of the courgettes without making a hole at the other end.
You insert the Nakhwara and turn it delicately till you have only the outer skin left.
Your stuffing will need to be prepared as well. As no minced meat was found, you had to mince it with that old-fashioned machine. You needed good arms for that.
Then roz (rice) was added to the minced meat, basal(onions), malh (salt) lamoun (lemon) korkom (curcuma), kamoun (cumin), ou zeit (and oil), karafs ( minced parsley) that gives it a cheerful colouring.
Mix all this with CLEAN hands and stuff your courgettes one by one without breaking the courgettes.
In a very large pan quickly fry the stuffed courgettes and then put them in a spicy tomato sauce you have prepared yourself. And don’t forget to add the inside of the courgettes you have cleaned out with the nakhwara.
The secret of success is to let your mahshi cook gently and for a long time.
The ones I prefer are the slightly burned ones!!!
This delight will take you to the top of the world!
When my mother prepared Baccala, I went on strike. For her and my father it was a real delight, not for Sultana.
« Mais mange un bout, c’est délicieux !’
« Non ! »
Baccala at the outset is dried cod in salt. It is hung out in the air to dry.
It has a strange aspect, like a greyish dead leaf. Of course the smell is tremendous;
So you bought your baccala at the market and put it in a basin with water overnight.
This way it lost a good part of its salt.
As it could not be cooked in that state, the old-fashioned mincing machine was attached to a table and the baccala, cut into smaller pieces, was introduced one after the other into the horn-like opening and the handle twisted. That was how meat and baccala were minced.
The operation was repeated as many times as was necessary using strength and patience!
Finally when all the baccala was minced, my mother added a boiled potato and an egg and
kneaded it till it became a unified paste. Then one after the other she formed balls the size of a golf ball. When all the paste had been turned into balls, it was time to fry them. There were no deep fryers so it was a slow job to fry all these balls.
After that a very spicy tomato sauce was prepared from fresh tomatoes tabaan (of course) and one by one the baccala balls were put into the sauce to absorb part of it. It was served with rice greatly appreciated with every meal!
I do not know if I could ever eat baccala even now! But I keep baccala day in my mind and I remember what an extraordinary cook my mother was!
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