The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu (8 page)

Add 4 cleaned plump chicks and bring to a boil again. Add 3 ounces of ground coriander, thyme-mint, 1 ounce of whole garlic cloves (threaded onto toothpicks) and cook until everything is done.

Finally add honey or sugar syrup (use a quarter the amount of vinegar you used), 6 grams ground saffron, and 2 grams ground lovage. Stop feeding the fire and let the pot simmer until it stops bubbling. Take the pot off the fire and ladle it, God willing.

The details of sikb
j vary from recipe to recipe, but in all of them it is a rich beef stew, often with chicken or lamb too, flavored by many herbs and often by smoked woods, and always preserved with lots of vinegar. Besides its perky flavor, vinegar has been known since Babylonian times
to be an excellent preservative (
acetic acid is a potent antimicrobial
, killing salmonella and E. coli). In fact, it seems likely that sikb
j is a variant of even older local vinegary meat stews. In the 1980s Assyriologist Jean Bottéro translated the world’s oldest cookbook: a set of clay tablets, written in Akkadian in 1700
BCE
, probably in Babylon, only 55 miles south of Baghdad.
Recipes for meat stews on these clay slabs
, the Yale Culinary Tablets, make such similar uses of vinegar, smoked woods, and herbs like rue that it seems likely that sikb
j is a variant of local stews that had been cooked in southern Mesopotamia for thousands of years.

Very quickly, sikb
j moved around the Islamic world, perhaps because it seems to have been a favorite dish of sailors, who are often more dependent on preserved foods. The story is told that the ninth-century
Caliph al-Mutawakkil was once sitting
with his courtiers and singers on a terrace overlooking one of the canals of Baghdad when he smelled a delicious sikb
j stew cooking on a nearby ship. The caliph ordered the pot to be brought to him, and enjoyed the sikb
j so much that he returned the pot to the sailor filled with money.

It’s possible that it was these sailors that first started making sikb
j with fish instead of meat. The first mention of a fish sikb
j is in
The Book of the Wonders of India
, a set of stories collected by a Persian sea captain, Buzurg Ibn Shahriyar, fantastical tales about the Muslim and Jewish sea merchants that were trading among the (Abbasid) Muslim empire, India, and China. In one story set in 912
CE
, a Jewish merchant, Isaac bin Yehuda, returns to Oman with a gift for the ruler: a beautiful black porcelain vase. “I have brought you a dish of sikb
j from China,” said Isaac. The ruler is skeptical that even a preserved sikb
j could last that long, so Isaac opened the vase to show it was full
of fish made out of gold, with ruby eyes
, “surrounded by musk of the first quality.”

This story reveals that already by the tenth century sikb
j could be made of fish. The first recipe we have for these fish sikb
j comes somewhat later, in the thirteenth-century medieval Egyptian cookbook
Kanz Al-Fawa’id Fi Tanwi’ Al-Mawa’id, or
The Treasury of Useful
Advice for the Composition of a Varied Table
. Sikb
j now is a fried fish dredged in flour and then sauced with vinegar and honey and spices. Here’s the recipe as translated by Lilia Zouali in her excellent
Medieval Cuisine of the Islamic World
: