Recipes

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Ful Medames

Ful medames is stewed fava beans dressed with olive oil, cumin, garlic and lemon, and it is Egypt's national dish. It is eaten at any hour, though breakfast is when it belongs most, and it is sold from carts across Cairo and Giza in the mornings. Traditionally it is cooked and served in a large metal jug, the qedra, over a very long slow heat, often overnight, which is why street ful has a depth that a quick home version does not. What the beans are dressed with varies endlessly: parsley, onion, chilli, tomato, hard eggs, tahini. Its versions across the region are worth knowing. In Somalia, fuul is a breakfast staple served with eggs and laxoox or canjeero flatbread, spiced with xawaash, the blend of cumin, coriander, cardamom, cloves, turmeric and more that makes it noticeably hotter than the Egyptian version. In Morocco it is bissara, made from fava beans and split green peas cooked with garlic, eaten especially in the north during cold weather. This particular recipe includes tahini, which is a Levantine addition rather than a classic Egyptian one, and it uses tinned beans rather than the overnight cook.

25 minEasyEgypt

Recipe by Nympha · Africook

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Chtitha Batata

Chtitha batata is the Algerian potato stew, and it is built on dersa. Dersa is a paste of garlic and chilli ground in a mortar with cumin, paprika, black pepper and cayenne, and it is the starting point for a whole family of Algerian dishes, chtitha among them. The technique is straightforward and the order matters. The dersa is fried first until fragrant, which is what opens up the spices, and the potatoes go in and are turned through it so every surface is coated before any liquid arrives. Tomato paste follows, then just enough water to cover, and it cooks until the potatoes are soft and the sauce has thickened around them. It is vegan as written and eaten as a main course on its own terms, not as a compromise, which is unusual for a stew of this kind. Meat can go into the sauce and often does, and chickpeas are a common addition that the source's prose mentions though the recipe itself does not include them. It keeps four days refrigerated and reheats well, and the flavour improves overnight as the dersa works into the potatoes.

55 minEasyAlgeria

Recipe by Blessing · Africook

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Shlada (Moroccan Tomato Salad)

Shlada is the Moroccan tomato and cucumber salad, dressed with lemon and olive oil and seasoned with cumin. It goes by shlada 'arobiya, meaning country salad, and shlada Nationale, the national salad, which tells you how ordinary and how ubiquitous it is. Everything depends on the knife work. The tomatoes, cucumber and onion are chopped very small, so that a single spoonful carries all three rather than one at a time. The contributor is emphatic that this is the secret of the salad, and it is a fair claim: the same ingredients in rough chunks make a quite different and much less interesting dish. It also needs to sit. Ten minutes before serving lets the flavours combine, and up to an hour improves it further, which is unusual for a salad. Preserved lemon peel is the optional addition that makes it unmistakably Moroccan, and only the peel is used, never the pulp. It is eaten as a side, as a light lunch, and as a dip scooped up with khobz, the Moroccan bread. Parsley substitutes for mint, vinegar for lemon juice, and vegetable oil for olive oil, all of which are made.

15 minEasyMorocco

Recipe by Blessing · Africook

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Asida (Flour Pudding)

Asida is a cooked flour pudding from the Maghreb, eaten with honey or date syrup and melted butter. Its first recorded appearance is in the Arabic cookbook Kitab al-Tabikh, around the tenth century, which makes it one of the older dishes in this collection with a documented date. It is communal food. Like bazeen, asida is served on a large flat plate called a gas'a and eaten with the fingers, though spoons are used. The distinction the source draws between the two is worth keeping: bazeen has Amazigh origins and is purely North African, while asida has an Arabic name and versions of it are made across the Arabian Peninsula as well. In Libya it is a breakfast dish, eaten to carry someone through a working day, and it appears at celebrations: births, Eid, Mawlid. The plain version is simply flour cooked in water, turned out, and served with a hollow pressed into the top for honey or date syrup, with melted butter or ghee poured around it. This particular recipe is a considerably richer version built on a date paste with cardamom, cinnamon, fenugreek, saffron, rose water and walnuts, which is a celebration preparation rather than the everyday one.

35 minMediumLibya

Recipe by Blessing · Africook

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