Capers appear in archaeological records from the Mediterranean to southern Russia, but their prehistoric use did not extend much farther east than Turkey and the Levant. It appears that the Arabic term al-kabar, or perhaps even an older form from some other Semitic language such as Phoenician or Nabataean, has become the loan word into most other languages in which these buds and berries are known. In Turkish, we hear kapari; in Hindi, kobra or kabra; in Japanese, keipa; in Italian, cappero; in Portuguese, alcaparra; and so on. There may have been direct diffusion of this semicultivated plant, its curing techniques, and its consumption from the earliest Semitic spice traders to the rest of the known world.
Capers love ruins. I have seen the bushes growing feral among the stones of Baalbek in the Bekáa Valley of Lebanon; in Jerusalem’s Old City, twining up light posts outside the Arab Quarter; in Athens, crawling up the walls of the Parthenon; and in Andalusia, spreading along the garden walkways of the Alhambra. I was most surprised to find them in the ruins of the ancient city of Jiaohe in the Taklimakan Desert of western China, where they have become the most dominant plants within the nearly forgotten two-thousand-year-old metropolis.
There is, in fact, an Asian caper that is recognized by botanists as a distinct variety (C. spinosa var. mariana). It is native to India, Pakistan, and Southeast Asia, but I am not familiar enough with it to know whether it is what I actually encountered in western China, or whether the Persians and Arabs had brought their own caper with them when they settled at the far eastern reaches of the Silk Roads.
I first saw caper vines being cultivated under fruit trees at food historian Mary Simeti’s farm in central Sicily. There they grew scandent, that is, they had become shrublike at their bases, but then twined up the trunks of trees like true vines. Giuseppe Barbera, a Sicilian agronomist friend of Mary’s, told me that capers had long been one of the most precious commodities shipped from Sicily to the rest of the world. No Sicilian American can visit the homeland without hiding a package of this high-priced delicacy in his or luggage on leaving, and so, I kid my Sicilian friends that long before their mafioso neighbors smuggled drugs, they smuggled capers! I remain envious of Mary’s biodynamically grown caper bushes, for each time I have tried to transplant caper seedlings into the limestone soils of my own orchard, they have withered and died after a few weeks, perhaps for the lack of Mediterranean breezes and their humidity.
Capers are used in all kinds of sauces for meats, fish, and fowl, including pescado a la veracruzana, which speaks to Andalusian, Moorish, and Lebanese influences in colonial Mexico; the picadillos found throughout Latin America and Spain, salsa puttanesca in Italy, and the rémoulades found in Acadian, Cajun, and Creole cuisines. In France, capers flavor Montpellier butter, and in Slovakia, Hungary, and Austria, they join onions, herbs, and other flavorings in Liptauer cheese. In Greece, Crete, and Cypress, they seem to garnish nearly every kind of salad and are added to a wide range of sauces. In Lebanon and Palestine, they are ever-present among the many mezes, and if a cook there ever runs out of capers, he or she can simply go out to the closest stone wall and immediately retrieve a few for the next dish.
Green, Aliza. Field Guide to Herbs and Spices. Philadelphia: Quirk Books, 2006.
Katzer, Gernot. “Gernot Katzer’s Spice Pages.” http://gernot-katzers-spicepages.com/engl/index.html. Accessed September 1, 2011.
Weiss, E. A. Spice Crops. Wallingford, UK: CABI Publishing, 2002.
• NABĀTIYYĀT •
Nabataean Chicken, Pasta, and Garbanzo Bean Stew
As Charles Perry notes in the foreword to Lilia Zaouali’s Medieval Cuisine of the Islamic World, nabātiyyāt literally refers to the soups, stews, and other dishes of the ancient Nabataeans, as passed down and refined by Arab and Persian chefs. Zaouali’s text goes on to explain that this particular recipe was recorded by Ibn Sayyār al-Warrāq in the second half of the tenth century, but it clearly goes back to the Nabataean era between the fourth century BCE and the second century CE. Although the popular but erroneous assumption persists that pasta was introduced by Marco Polo from China to the Middle East and Europe, Iran-born cookbook author Najmieh Batmanglij observes that various forms of pasta appear to have been documented in Mesopotamia and Persia far earlier than that. Pasta then spread eastward into Central Asia and China.
The itriya pasta mentioned here was likely made from durum wheat (although emmer was probably used as well), which was cracked and then mixed with water, aniseeds, and salt into a thick paste. The paste was then extruded into thin strands, much like angel hair pasta, and the strands were twisted into nests before drying. Al Taie notes that this pasta is still made in Oman. A similar Italian pasta called tria survives in Calabria and Sicily, and an Egyptian one known as treyya is found in settlements along the Nile. The use of legumes and pasta together to thicken the broth reminds me of Moroccan harira and chorba. The true distinctiveness of this particular stew, however, is the addition of rose water in the final stages, which succeeds in ratcheting up all of its flavors several notches.
Spikenard, an aromatic herb from the Himalayas, was commonly used in Roman times as a culinary flavoring. Long pepper, which originated in India and was also a popular ingredient in the Roman kitchen, is sold as small dried whole fruits. Related to the common peppercorn, the fruits release piperine when ground, the same pungent alkaloid found in pepper. During the era in which this recipe emerged, the chicken would likely have been grilled over charcoal. To achieve a smoky flavor reminiscent of that traditional preparation, brown the chicken on your backyard grill, rather than on the stove top. To add additional flavor to this dish, once you have boned the chickens, make a broth from the bones and use it in place of the water added to the crushed beans and chicken.
Accompany the stew with a platter of spinach or mustard greens sautéed with pearl onions and porcini mushrooms in olive oil. Serves 6 to 8.
1 cup dried garbanzo beans
2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
6 cups water
¼ cup olive oil
2 whole chickens, 7 to 8 pounds total weight, boned and cut into large pieces (or equivalent amount of chicken thighs)
1 white onion, chopped
1 cinnamon stick (not cassia)
½ teaspoon black peppercorns
½ teaspoon white peppercorns
½ teaspoon long pepper
1 teaspoon coriander seeds
1 teaspoon whole cloves
1 teaspoon sea salt
1 teaspoon freshly grated or ground nutmeg
1 teaspoon ground galangal, or 1/2-inch piece fresh galangal, peeled and finely chopped
1 teaspoon peeled and finely minced fresh ginger
¼ teaspoon culinary-grade spikenard oil, or 1 teaspoon fresh spikenard root, peeled and finely minced
2 cups rose water
3 to 4 ounces dried pasta nests such as anise-flavored itriya, tria, angel-hair pasta, or other herb-infused thin pasta noodles
5 eggs, hard boiled, peeled, and sliced
4 ounces pecorino or other aged sheep cheese, sliced
In a bowl, combine the garbanzo beans with water to cover and stir in the lemon juice. Allow to soak for 8 to 24 hours at room temperature or, if preferred, in the refrigerator. Drain, rinse, and transfer to a pot. Add the water, place over medium-high heat, and bring to a boil. Turn down the heat to medium-low and simmer gently, uncovered, until the beans are very tender and soft, 2½ to 3 hours. Drain the beans and crush with a metal or wooden spoon until a rough paste forms.
Pour the olive oil into a soup pot or Dutch oven and place over medium heat. When the oil is hot, working in batches, add the chicken pieces and brown on all sides. Using a slotted spoon, transfer to a plate. When all of the chicken is browned, add the onion to the oil remaining in the pot and sauté over medium heat until translucent, about 5 minutes. Add the crushed beans and cinnamon stick and return the chicken to the pot. Pour in just enough water to cover the chicken and beans and bring to a simmer. Adjust
the heat to maintain a gentle simmer and cook until the chicken is tender, 30 to 45 minutes.
Meanwhile, in a mortar, combine the black and white peppercorns, long pepper, coriander, and cloves and grind finely with a pestle (or use a spice grinder). Stir in the salt.
When the chicken is tender, add the ground spices, nutmeg, galangal, ginger, spikenard, and rose water to the pot and stir well. Bring to a boil, toss in the noodles, stir just to combine, and cook until the noodles are al dente.
Using a large spoon, transfer the chicken and noodles to a deep-sided platter and pour the broth remaining in the pot over them. Arrange the egg and cheese slices around the edge of the platter and serve.
Al Taie, Lamees Abdullah. Al-Azaf: The Omani Cookbook. Muscat: Oman Bookshop, 1995, p. 48.
Batmanglij, Najmieh. Silk Road Cooking: A Vegetarian Journey. Washington, DC: Mage Publishers, 2002, p. 14.
Perry, Charles. Foreword to Medieval Cuisine of the Islamic World: A Concise History with 174 Recipes, by Lilia Zaouali. Translated by M. B. DeBevoise. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007, p. x.
Zaouali, Lilia. Medieval Cuisine of the Islamic World: A Concise History with 174 Recipes. Translated by M. B. DeBevoise. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007, 119–20.
CHAPTER 4
Omanis Rocking the Cradle of Civilization
It is late spring, and I find myself on the shores of the Gulf of Oman, walking around Sohar Fort with my friend Sulaiman Al-Khanjari. I approach the fort’s pale, stuccoed walls, which have been plastered with lime year after year over the centuries. They rise above me nearly as high as the date palms planted alongside them. It is a hot, sunny day and the brilliant sheen on both the sea and the snow white walls of the fort nearly blind me with their intensity.
Sulaiman must see that I am squinting. He beckons me to follow him, and so I walk down a cobblestone stairway to where he is standing in the shade of a wall covered with deep green bougainvillea vines punctuated with blood red flowers. I duck into the shade with him and turn to face a low stone wall surrounding a hole in the ground. I let my eyes adjust to the shadows, and then open them widely to take a look around.
A crowd has aggregated around an Arab historian who is waving his arms and pointing to a protected pit, explaining to a group of students that it is the site of an earlier archaeological excavation. “Come here and listen,” Sulaiman whispers to me. “I’ll try to translate what he is saying.” I huddle near him, glad to be in the shade.
“If the Gulf of Oman is the ancient cradle of navigation, Sohar is one of the first ports from which our navigators departed. . . . The ancient stone-walled port was another two hundred yards out past the fort, but it was destroyed by the storms. By the tenth century, Muslim geographer al-Istakhri called it ‘the greatest seaport of Islam,’ for it was situated in the largest and wealthiest trading hub on the east coast of the Arabian Peninsula. Portions of the present Sohar Fort that we stand within were built by the people of Hormuz in the thirteenth or early fourteenth century to hold soldiers who would protect the now-destroyed harbor. But well before that—during the Nebhani dynasty—the harbor was used for trading copper and spices for wood for shipbuilding.”
“The Nebhani dynasty?” I ask.
“It extended from the mid-twelfth century to the end of the fifteenth century. That’s when your ancestors, you know, the Banu Nebhani, controlled this port, ruling this region. Of course, trade activity at this site preceded them, and probably even preceded the building of the first fort, around the first century CE. Let’s listen.”
“It seems that some seafarers . . . they began around here as early as 3000 BCE, with the boats at first hugging close to the coast. The earliest written manuscripts from this coast were from the era of King Abi Sin [who ruled from 2029 to 2006 BCE].1 They document the trade of copper and incense from Magan [Oman] for wood from Mesopotamia and spices from India. Later on, maritime trade expanded to cross the gulf, the sea, the ocean. Here, right below us, in the lowest levels of later forts constructed on this site, they have found Chinese porcelain, perhaps carried from India. For centuries, not only Arab traders were harbored here but Jewish ones, as well. In fact, some of the names we think of as Muslim may have been Jewish to begin with, and then were modified slightly when the people converted to Islam.”
“But the Omanis then, like now, didn’t stay put.”
Sulaiman smiles, clearly having shifted from translating to offering his own commentary. “My own family has roots in East Africa, where Omanis have been involved in the spice trade of Zanzibar for millennia. Others, like your Nebhani ancestors, settled in the Lamu Archipelago off the coast of Kenya. Omanis historically established their own colonies in India, Iran, Pakistan, Abyssinia, Zanzibar, and perhaps Madagascar. Yes, many were spice traders.”
“Was frankincense traded up through ports this far north in Oman, or was it all through al-Balid in Dhofar Province to the south?”
“Well, if you look at old maps, there were several inland trade routes from the land of frankincense all the way up through what we now call northern Oman. Everyone thinks they know the Frankincense Trail, which they describe as running from Sanaa and Ma’rib in Yemen, up through Mecca and Yathrib to Petra, and then to Jerusalem or Alexandria. But there were other routes for the caravans as well—many different routes—even ones that ventured across absolutely barren parts of the Rub‘ al-Khali. Here, we had one that ran somewhere up the east coast of the peninsula from Dhofar to Muscat and Nizwa—I’m not sure where exactly—and then it went on to Ibri and Yabrin and to Basra and Baghdad.
FIGURE 8. These ruins of an ancient Omani trading center in the desert below the Jabal al-Akhdar plateau are reminders of the vagaries of trade-route use over centuries. (Photo by the author.)
“I don’t think it would run right along the coast, for fear of pirates. Instead, it was hidden back in the interior, so that the goods could be protected in fortified oases such as Bahla. Then, when they were ready to take their goods to sea, whether it was copper, leather, or hojari incense, they would caravan them out to ports like Sohar.”
I close my eyes again, trying to make sense of all of this. Seafaring relatives. Inland hideaways. Ancestors with connections to islands off the coast of Africa. I am humbled by how little I know of the roots of my own bloodline.2
Although the Omani kingdom of Magan had its own indigenous Semitic tribes, including some that early on practiced a form of Judaism, it accommodated other Semitic peoples as well, mostly immigrants from Yemen. These Yemeni Semites included those who had moved northward in droves after a breaching of the Ma’rib dam on Wadi Adhanah in the second half of the third century CE.3
It is possible that my own clan, the Banu Nebhani, may have been part of this diaspora, as they had first fled to the highlands of Jabal al-Akhdar to get as far above flood-prone ground as an Arab could possibly reach. It would be naive to assume that they had simply left Yemen of their own volition, for the entire balance among nomadic herders and incense foragers, traders and oasis farmers had convulsively and irrevocably shifted around them, prompting many tribes to flee at the same time. It appears that whenever the loose symbiosis between nomadic forager-herders and sedentary agriculturalists was stressed by natural or political pressures, something innovative and unusual began to emerge out of these demographic upheavals.
The breaching of the Ma’rib dam in the third century sent many of the original Arabic tribes out across the rest of the Middle East to find new homes or even new occupations.4 These refugees included both nomadic herders and the more sedentary al-Hadr clans that once farmed the larger irrigated oases like those surrounding the agricultural hub of Ma’rib along Wadi Adhanah. The spread of irrigated agriculture across the Middle East and beyond is sometimes attributed to the diffusion wrought by these al-Hadr tribes, who, from the late fourth millennium onward, had been constantly refining their techniques for using canals to water crops.
Once these people left their ance
stral homelands in Yemen for good, it is clear that they kept on moving, and they did not restrict their movements to land masses. As soon as they mastered marine navigation, they stepped out into the wider world and seldom returned to their natal grounds. The harbors of Oman became their springboards, and the shipping of aromatics became their mostly widely celebrated trade.
While the Phoenicians had perfected their navigation skills in the Red Sea and the Mediterranean before venturing farther, the seafaring Arabs out of Oman and Persians from Basra focused first on the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean and then on the Horn of Africa. Of course, Gujarati, Hindu, and Serendip sailors had already been sailing these waters and trading with one another for centuries, and the Arabs built on their maritime experience. They also used their own knowledge of the movements of some forty-eight stars, the placement of thousands of coastal landmarks, and the seasonal shifting of winds to guide them on their way across the seas or along their coasts.5 They established permanent way stations and spice warehouses in the ports of Africa and Asia that functioned much the way their caravansaries in the Arabian deserts had always functioned.
It was in the ports along these coasts that they came on some species of spices that were far more abundant and valuable than those growing wild in the desert interior. Although the populations of aromatics of the peninsula were undeniably potent due to their desert upbringing, they were few and far between compared with those of India, Sri Lanka, the Moluccas, China, Zanzibar, or Madagascar. These culinary ingredients began to transform the simple cuisine of nomadic herders into the Middle Eastern cuisines we know today: laham mishwi, skewers of spiced lamb or goat meat cooked over wood fires; hays, a mix of dates, curds, and ghee; tharīd, unleavened bread crumbled into a simple savory stew; khazira, thin meat broth laced with bran and herbs; and sariq, a porridge of barley, durum, or emmer wheat.6
Cumin, Camels, and Caravans Page 12