The foundation for the following recipe was offered to me by a Tajik man named Jumbaboy, whom I met in Dushanbe. He noted that the Tajik version of the dish was most often made in late autumn, just as the fruits were ripening on quince trees. To gain a more detailed perspective on proportions of fruits, nuts, and spices relative to the lamb, rice, and onion base, I have relied on Najmieh Batmanglij’s Persian version in her fine book, Silk Road Cooking: A Vegetarian Journey.
Serve with a mixture of diced tomatoes, cucumbers, red onions, and capers marinated in cider vinegar or lime juice. Serves 6 to 8.
For the Rice
3 cups basmati or other long-grain white rice
4½ cups water
1 tablespoon sea salt
2 tablespoons butter
For the Broth
1½ teaspoons butter, ghee, or olive oil
1 white or yellow onion, thinly sliced into rings
8 ounces boneless lamb from shoulder, cut into small cubes (optional)
2 large carrots, peeled and julienned
5 cups water
½ cup turbinado sugar
1 tablespoon grated orange zest
2 cardamom pods, split
1¼ teaspoons freshly ground cumin seeds
Sea salt
To Finish
2 quinces, peeled, halved, cored, and cut into ½-inch cubes
1 tablespoon orange blossom water
½ teaspoon saffron threads, dissolved in 2 tablespoons hot water
2 tablespoons butter, cut into small pieces
½ cup slivered almonds, toasted
½ cup pistachios, toasted and salted
Put the rice in a bowl, add water to cover generously, and swirl the rice around with your fingers until the water is cloudy. Pour off the water, re-cover the rice with water, and swirl the rice again, then drain. Repeat until the rinsing water is clear, then add water to cover and let the rice soak for 30 minutes.
Meanwhile, make the broth. In a heavy stockpot, melt the butter over medium heat. Add the onion and sauté until tender and lightly caramelized, 5 to 7 minutes. Add the lamb (if using) and carrots and sauté until the carrots are just starting to become tender, 2 to 3 minutes. Add the water and bring to a simmer. Add the sugar, orange zest, cardamom, and cumin, then season with salt. Turn down the heat to medium-low and simmer for 15 minutes.
Drain the rice, transfer it to a nonstick saucepan, and add the water, salt, and butter. Place over medium-high heat and bring to a boil, then turn down the heat to low, cover, and cook until the liquid is absorbed, about 15 minutes. Let stand for 10 minutes, then stir. The rice should be fluffy and tender.
When the rice is ready, add it to the broth in the stockpot and stir well. To finish, using a large spoon, open a basin in the middle of the rice mixture. Put the quince in the basin and cover the quince with the rice mixture. Drizzle the orange blossom water and saffron water evenly over the surface, then scatter the butter and half each of the almonds and pistachios evenly over the top. Reduce the heat to low, cover tightly to prevent any heat from escaping, and cook until the quince cubes have “melted” into the rice mixture, about 30 minutes. (The covered pot can instead be transferred to a 350°F oven and baked for about the same amount of time.)
Remove from the heat and let stand, still covered, on a damp surface for 5 minutes, to loosen the rice crust that invariably forms on the bottom of the pot. The
lightly caramelized crust that forms on the pot bottom adds texture and depth of flavor to the dish. Invert the pilaf onto a serving platter and garnish the top with the remaining pistachios and almonds.
Batmanglij, Najmieh. Silk Road Cooking: A Vegetarian Journey. Washington, DC: Mage Publishers, 2002, p. 166.
CHAPTER 7
The Flourishing of Cross-Cultural Collaboration in Iberia
On a mountainside overlooking the city known as Gharnata in medieval times, I am immersed in the aromas of jasmine, lavender, roses of all colors and sizes, myrtle, and olive wood. I have pursued the promise of these fragrances throughout my travels on the way to the southern reaches of the Iberian Peninsula, and at last I have inhaled their intoxicating scents. Many kinds of citrus surround me, though the season for the release of their perfumes passed several months ago. Nevertheless, enough volatile oils are wafting through the air here to keep anyone mesmerized.
Just as I’m imagining that I have entered a garden designed by an obsessed aromatherapist, I realize that the many soothing sounds I hear are the work of human hands, as well. There is water rushing, dripping, gurgling, spraying, and puddling wherever I turn, in chutes and cascades, pools and fountains. Around these water features, leaves are rustling and some birds are chirping while others are gently mocking them.
I start to wonder whether this might be what paradise smells and sounds like. As my nostrils take in the heady aromas, my eyes move from the brilliant sun shining on the hills of Andalusia to the shadows, where flowing water enters cavelike grottos and sanctuaries, thick-walled hammams with bathing pools carved out of stone, and underground cisterns called aljibes. These are words that I’ve learned across the strait to the south of Andalusia in Fez, Morocco. They speak to the pragmatic as much as to the paradisaical.
I turn to look out over verdant terraces, each dedicated to a different group of useful plants: an evenly spaced plantation of roses, the petals of which are picked for syrups and scented waters; a grove of olive trees whose small green fruits will be pressed into oil the following autumn; vineyards of fresh table grapes, raisin grapes, and wine grapes for making vinegars; experimental gardens called almuñias, where specially selected artichokes, garlic, onions, and leafy herbs are being tested and tasted; and orchards loaded with loquats, apricots, medlars, figs, and pomegranates. These lands were planted with more than pleasure in mind. Some pragmatists knew how to replenish local larders with sundried fruits, vinegars, pickled vegetables, and more.
Wherever I wander, I also notice that pomegranate trees have also been shaped into hedgerows, windbreaks, and field borders. As I walk down from the grounds surrounding the sprawling structures of the Alhambra and from the gardens of Generalife, the old summer palace, I realize that I am also seeing the pomegranates cast in iron and copper nearly wherever I look: resting atop fence posts, on signposts, along stairway banisters.
I laugh to myself as I ponder the language attached to the muchrepeated pomegranate. In ancient Latin, it was known as malum punicum, “the apple of the Phoenicians living in Carthage,” or as malum granatum, “the multigrained apple.”1 In botanical Latin, it is Punica granatum, “the multigrained (fruit) of the Phoenicians.” In the Berber spoken in medieval Morocco and in al-Andalus (the term used for parts of the Iberian Peninsula and France under Muslim rule from the eighth through the fifteenth century), the latter term was transformed into a brief linguistic telegram announcing the arrival of a tasty fruit, gharnata. As that term was polished and simplified for the Spanish tongue, it rolled out of the mouth as granada.
Granada, called the City of Pomegranates, might more properly be named the Orphanage for Pomegranates, for these intrepid wanderers have lost their parents and strayed far from home. As such, their own journey represents the one also taken by the descendants of some of the first Arab Muslims who carried those fruits here thirteen centuries ago.
Abd al-Rahman I, the highest-ranking survivor of the Banu Umayyah elite, rejoins our story here in the role of the Pomegranate Pilgrim. After escaping the subterfuge and slaughter at the Rusafa palace, he fled via what amounted to an underground railroad west to the Land of the Setting Sun, the Maghreb.2 Barely evading assassinations in Syria, Egypt, and what is today Tunisia, he set out to take refuge among his mother’s Nafza Berber tribe in what is now Morocco. Five years after the massacre of his father’s Arab family, he came out of hiding in the Moroccan hinterlands to join his mother’s kin near the city of Ceuta, which today joins the city of Melilla as the only Spanish territories on the African continent.
Ceu
ta was roughly fifteen miles across a strait from the small islelike promontory called Jabal al-Tariq. In time, Jabal al-Tariq became known as the Rock of Gibraltar and acted as the stepping-stone for many Arabs and Berbers emigrating to al-Andalus in particular and to Europe at large.
In addition to a sizable Berber population that had conquered the region in 711, al-Andalus harbored a number of other peoples. They included Phoenician descendants; first wave Arab settlers (baladi-yun), mostly from the “old country” of Yemen and southern Oman; Arabicspeaking Christians later known as Mozárabes (from musta’rib, or “Arabized local”); and a new wave of diaspora Arabs (shami-yun), who were largely Syrian soldiers escaping to the Iberian Peninsula in 752, just two years after the Abbasids ushered in the Umayyad collapse.
Of course, far more Catholics than Muslims remained in the southern stretches of the Iberian Peninsula, so much so that Abd al-Rahman was unsure whether these Christians would accept him as the rightful heir to the Islamic empire in their midst.
Now known only as al-Dakhil (the Immigrant or Pilgrim), Abd al-Rahman was sequestered in Ceuta among his mother’s relatives, savoring his last few weeks in the semiarid heath of the Tangier coastline before deciding whether to leave Africa’s dry lands behind for the more lush and diverse Iberian Peninsula.3 Meanwhile, his Greek companion Bedr had sailed ahead to al-Andalus to gauge the receptivity of the Muslims (and indirectly, the Catholics) to having an Umayyad emir make a new home base among them.
The response was mixed. Although most of the Syrian refugees had lived in Damascus and had been trading clients of his family, the Syrian military commander was loath to see a twenty-five-year-old from a defeated family usurp his power in Andalusia. The Berbers were clearly divided, since some were angry that Abd al-Rahman did not plan to remain in Morocco among his mother’s people. In the end, it was the Yemeni old guard who told Bedr they would welcome Abd al-Rahman as an ally, in the hope that they could regain some of the political and economic power they had lost to the Syrian immigrants. At the same time, Christians and Jews were promised that they would not be forced to leave or to convert to Islam if they chose to live with the new emir’s protection.
On August 15, 755, Abd al-Rahman set sail for the small port of Almuñécar, in the heart of what had been, just a few centuries before, the Phoenician-controlled coast of al-Andalus. His Berber relatives had tried to convince him to stay and even fought to detain him as his boat left the Ceuta harbor. But within a few hours, Abd al-Rahman had arrived on the shores of the Iberian Peninsula. There, over the next three decades, he would construct a world-class palace and mosque.4
But they were perhaps the least of his legacy. He and his descendants would soon transform what they called Qurtuba, today’s Córdoba, into Europe’s most sophisticated center for intercontinental trade, translation, and education; research in the arts, sciences, and letters; and agricultural, horticultural, and medicinal plant experimentation.5 There he hoped to grow a little bit of paradise to salve the wounds of the last few years.
It is fitting that Abd al-Rahman’s point of arrival in Spain was called Almuñécar, for the name echoes the classical Arabic term munyah, or “desire,” which came to mean “farm” or “garden” in Moorish Spanish; almunia is still used in Spain today for the many private experimental gardens that the Immigrant emir fostered. He had set foot on new soil, and he spent the remaining years of his life cultivating that soil and that society. Both would bear fruit on an arguably unprecedented scale.
Abd al-Rahman and his descendants added another element to the phenomenon of globalization. They attempted to remake in perfect facsimile the entire world that they had known and loved in Damascus and that now lay thousands of miles away from their adopted home. Outside of Córdoba, Abd al-Rahman constructed an exact replica of the gardens and palace of Rusafa, the place from which he had fled just as he had come of age. He could no longer return to his original home, but he would do all he could to construct one of equal, if not surpassing, grandeur.
The meaning of this act of reconstruction has not been lost on historians such as María Rosa Menocal.6 Abd al-Rahman was not only making a gesture of nostalgic longing for his birthplace but also boldly asserting dominion over the peoples and landscape of southern Iberia by creating a culturally and economically novel ecosystem in which they would all live. As Menocal sees it,
He built his new Andalusian estate, Rusafa, in part to memorialize the old Rusafa deep in the desert steppes northeast of Damascus, where he had last lived with his family, and also, no less, to proclaim that he had survived and that this was indeed the new and legitimate home of the Umayyads. Although it would be two more centuries before one of his descendants actually openly declared that Cordoba was the seat of the caliphate, al-Andalus was transformed and now anything but a provincial seat. . . . Just outside Cordoba, Abd al-Rahman built his new Rusafa . . . a botanical garden as well, a place where he could collect and cultivate the living things that had been so central to beauty and delight in Syria.7
When Abd al-Rahman heard that his son Sulaiman and a couple of his sisters had also escaped from Damascus and were still alive, he beckoned them to sail to al-Andalus. He hoped that they could reassemble as a family at the new palace he had under construction. To assure their safe passage, he dispatched one of his best Syrian men to return secretly to the Middle East and guide his family on to al-Andalus.
But one of his sisters declined to travel that far with the others. Instead, she insisted that the party carry back to al-Andalus a living gift from her to her brother. She urged the family’s Syrian guide to sneak back to the ruined Rusafa palace and rescue any plant still surviving in the deteriorating gardens around it. He clandestinely dug up a few young date palms and grabbed several pomegranate fruits that had somehow survived. He boarded these treasures on the same ship that carried Abd al-Rahman’s son and sister, hoping that they, too, could be newly established in al-Andalus.
The next episode of this story has been recorded and retold in heartbreaking detail over the ages. We can almost see the tears of joy in Abd al-Rahman’s eyes when his family arrives and places a homegrown but somewhat overripe pomegranate in his hands. It had both the aroma and taste of his onetime home. As the famous historical geographer Ibn Said al-Maghribi later recalled to the Algerian-born historian Ahmed ibn Mohammed Maqqari,
The monarch [Abd al-Rahman] held the unspoiled portions of the remaining pomegranate fruits [taken from al-Rusafa] and marveled at what was left of their beauty, for he had a strong desire to share with others. So he passed them on to a respected nurseryman who resided in the small qariya or hamlet of Reyo near Malaga and the port of Almuñécar. There the nurseryman named Safr b. Abd Allah undertook a khabara, or experimental treatment of the seeds, so that they would germinate. They produced “pippins,” or seedling pomegranates, which he transplanted and cared for in his nursery. He then nurtured them along with ample water and nutrients so that they could be transplanted out into an orchard. They grew into trees that soon bore fruit, and he carefully protected some of the first fruits until they were ripe and ready to eat.8
Safr then selected a particularly beautiful fruit that had been kept in the shade (to prevent it from cracking open or spoiling from sunburn). With the help of his staff, he immediately carried it to Córdoba, so that it could be presented to Abd al-Rahman while it was still fresh.
When the emir received the fruit, the nurseryman asked him if he could confirm whether it was identical to or at least similar to those he had eaten as a child at Rusafa. The emir tasted it and quickly confirmed that it had the very same qualities of the fruit he had known as a boy. The emir then asked Safr how he happened to propagate it successfully.
Safr carefully explained his procedures, and the emir expressed his admiration for the nurseryman’s horticultural skills. He was delighted that Safr had discovered how to propagate pomegranates from seed rather than from a cutting. The emir thanked him profusely and then generously compensa
ted him for his work.
Over the following years, the emir showcased pomegranate seedlings at his Rusafa palace and also offered them for planting in other gardens and orchards in the Muslim community. He then distributed rooted cuttings of the variety to other Muslims all across al-Andalus, where it became known as the safarí pomegranate, in honor of the nurseryman who enabled it to survive.
Ironically, the name safarí also implied (by way of pun) that this pomegranate was a “traveler”—out on safari from the Middle East—just as the emir himself was. It is remarkable that the story of the safarí pomegranate endures with so many details still intact thirteen centuries after this horticultural rescue took place.9
According to horticultural historian D. Fairchild Ruggles, this is “the first reference to the deliberate and controlled acclimitization of an exotic species, and perhaps even to a botanical garden”10 documented anywhere in the world. And yet the very fact that a single plant received such attention and acclaim hints at the longing that Abd al-Rahman must have felt to taste the finest fruit of his childhood once again. He clearly wished to share this experience with future generations of Muslims in al-Andalus. His emotional attachment also comes through in the short but poignant poem he composed about his introduction of a date palm variety to the West:
A palm tree stands in the middle of Rusafa
Born in the West, far from the land of palms
I said to it, “How like me you are, far away and in exile!
In long separation from family and friends
You have sprung from soil in which you are a stranger
And I, like you, am far away from home.11
And so it is clear that this Immigrant Emir, this Pomegranate Pilgrim found solace in living among “immigrant” plants. Once the plants were in hand, he and his descendants used them to reconstruct in al-Andalus a semblance of entire landscapes they had known back home. Dates, Damascus apricots, figs, olives, and pomegranates were planted everywhere that the Iberian soils could support them, and beneath or between their canopies sprouted capers, saffron, anise, and spearmint. Thus began the process of truly comprehensive ecological imperialism—the wholesale overhaul of the composition, structure, and function of cultural landscapes—that predated the ecological imperialism accomplished by the Spanish in central Mexico by some seven centuries.
Cumin, Camels, and Caravans Page 21