The author traces Iraqi cookery back to the dawn of recorded history and the civilization that sprang up about 6000 B.C. in the Fertile Crescent between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, where Sumerian mythology placed the mythical mound of creation and a tree of life in a garden that became known as Eden.
Three Akkadian cuneiform clay tablets dating from around 1700 B.C. and stamped with the triangular symbols of some of the world's first writing turned out to be covered with recipes, Ms. Nasrallah wrote. They were for meat and vegetable stews, birds, and chopped meat and spices in bread crust. Over the years, some people who tested the recipes liked them, but Jean Bottéro, a contemporary Assyriologist who deciphered the tablets, concluded that he would not wish them on his worst enemies.
Iraqi antiquity was rife with legendary feasts, Ms. Nasrallah recounted, including a banquet held in the ninth century B.C. by the Assyrian King Ashurnasirpal II that, according to records found inscribed on a brick, drew 69,574 guests. Over 10 days they consumed 25,000 lambs and sheep, 500 stags, 500 gazelles, 30,000 birds, 10,000 eggs, 10,000 loaves of bread and thousands of gallons of wine and beer.
Pickled locusts and boiled heads of sheep aside, Ms. Nasrallah found a wealth of recipes for no fewer than 300 types of bread, 100 kinds of soup, medieval sandwiches that existed long before the Earl of Sandwich, and a fried eggplant casserole, al-buraniya, which she calls "the mother of all moussakas."
Turning her research into toothsome reality, she made flatbread ("as ancient as the Sumerian civilization itself") and, from a 10th-century recipe, oven-browned eggplant in yogurt sauce drizzled with olive oil and garnished with cumin and chili pepper.
From another medieval recipe she prepared sweet and sour salmon in almond prune sauce and mustard. Next she made kubbat halab, balls of crunchy rice dough stuffed with ground beef, currants, toasted almonds and spices (it can also be made with lamb). "I love stuffed dishes," she said. "It's the cuisine of intrigue."
The New York Times, 2 April 03
