Oman has a rich gastronomic heritage that can be traced back hundreds of years. Felicia Campbell shares the stories of her journey from kitchens in Jebel Akhdar to Salalah and everywhere in between
I watched Moza al Saqri, who sat on her tile floor in front of an oversize propane burner taking handfuls of dough and pressing them on a searing metal tawa (like a frying pan) until the little circles formed one large round of khubz ragag, Omani bread. She used a paint chipper to free the crisp bread from the hot surface. It broke into a mess of crumbs. She adjusted the heat, grabbed another handful of dough and started again. This time, a perfect circle of bread came away. She handed it to me.
“In our house, we mix ground corn flour with the wheat flour for a better taste,” she said. The bread had a more hearty texture than the simple flour and water khubz I’d eaten in Muscat and Sharqiyah and the corn added a distinct, sweet-savoury flavour to the bread. By the time I finished the piece, a stack of rounds had grown beside her.
Her cousin, Gokheh, called to me: “Come, I will show you our harees.” She had set a vat of pearled wheat berries, water, and chicken to boil on another propane burner that morning, and the comforting, starchy smell of cooking porridge had begun to fill the space. “Traditionally, we use this one,” she said, stirring the contents of the pot with a long wooden stick.
“Try.”
As easy as she had made it look, I struggled awkwardly to move the heavy stick through the thick mixture, worried I might slip and knock over the whole pot.
“Nowadays, we have found an easier way,” she laughed, pulling out a power drill with a long emersion blender attachment.
A breeze blew into the open courtyard, perfumed with the scent of the ripe apricots and sour pomegranates that grew on the sides of jagged, slate-grey cliffs in this mountain village in Jebel Akhdar, the “Green Mountain”.
I kept my eyes on Gokheh as she added a generous amount of salt along with a pinch of ginger and red pepper flakes to her harees, mixing it all into a smooth mash.
I was slightly surprised, as I’d always been taught that the spicing for harees was just salt, black pepper and a cinnamon stick.
“In my house in Jebel Akhdar, we use it for nice taste,” she smiled.
I looked over at my friend Dawn, who stood, quietly scribbling down notes. “We have to include a variation in the book,” she said. “I can’t wait to try this.”
It was hard to imagine that only a year and a half earlier I knew nothing about the Sultanate of Oman, having never given a second thought to the country wedged between Yemen, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and the Arabian Sea. I knew plenty about the Middle East, having lived, travelled, and written about places from Lebanon to Iraq and Kuwait, as both a graduate student and a journalist specialising in the foods of the region.
I thought I knew the food of the Middle East, but one day in 2012, sitting in my magazine’s office in New York City, I got an email from a friend in Yemen who I was preparing to do a story with in Sana’a, the country’s capital. He was cancelling our plans due to security issues. I sighed and opened Google maps, staring at a map of the Middle East, wondering where I should go instead.
Oman. What’s in Oman? I wondered. I imagined it was much like the rest of the GCC with kabsa rice and grilled meat. I began searching for more information and even looked through our library for cookbooks, but came up empty. Then I turned to the internet, searching for “Omani Cuisine”. A blog by Riyadh al Balushi popped up. But rather than a list of recipes, it was a collection of reviews of restaurants in Muscat, from sushi bars to burger joints. I found his contact info and sent him an email, asking about the local food of his country before turning my attention back to the story on Palestinian food that I was editing.
The next day, he wrote back. The foods he described were nothing like the Middle Eastern food I knew: Spinach boiled in coconut milk, fried triangles of mandazi bread, savoury rice and chicken porridges drizzled with cardamom-infused ghee, meats grilled on hot river rocks, layered rice dishes like the biryanis of South Asia and a speciality known as shuwa: whole goat slathered in spices, wrapped in banana or palm leaves and slow-cooked underground for a day or more. Intrigued, I begged my editor-in-chief to let me go check it out. He was sceptical, but agreed to let me take a press trip to Dubai and stay a few extra days to see what I could find in Oman.
Riyadh had to leave town for work the week I was due to arrive, but he assured me he had many friends who could help, sending me a list of emails and phone numbers. I messaged everyone and tried to set up appointments. “We will be waiting. Call when you arrive,” was the reply. So, without knowing quite what to expect, I set off for Oman.
On that initial trip, I was overwhelmed by the diversity of Oman, from the rocky mountains that jutted into the clear, azure sea; to the foods, a complex confluence of East African, South Asian, Persian, and Arabian Bedouin flavours; to the people themselves, the men uniformly dressed in crisp white dishdasha with vibrant embroidered mussar turbans and kuma caps, but with complexions and features as diverse as I might find in my own melting pot city of New York. And the generosity of every single Omani that Riyadh put me in touch with, who freely gave their time to talk to a stranger about their country, foods and lives, even inviting me to their homes, touched me deeply.
I returned to New York with two self-published, English-language Omani cookbooks, Al Azif by Lamees Abdullah al Taie and A Taste to Remember, by Fawziya Ali Khalifa al Maskiry, the only written records in existence about this fascinating cuisine. I knew I would return, there was far too much left to explore.
Over the months that followed, I wrote two features about Oman, but still felt I had barely begun to tell the story about the place, people and food. And something had shifted in me, my typical urge to explore new places had been replaced with a hunger to return to Oman. I wanted to go deeper into the complicated world of Bedouin camps set amidst the sand dunes, beachside barbeques, cliffside pomegranate groves and urban majlis receiving rooms where I spent hours sipping Omani coffee and eating gelatinous, sugar and ghee halwa with new friends.
I found it inconceivable that there was so little written about such a distinctive and beautiful place, and so I enlisted the help of my best friend, Dawn Mobley, an amazing cook and researcher, to develop and test the recipes we collected and we began our quest to write the first commercially available English-language Omani cookbook. Over the year that followed, I travelled back and forth between New York and Oman a half-dozen times, each trip longer than the last, 10 days turning into 20, 20 into 60. With each trip, my circle of Omani contacts and friends grew, and with them, my collection of recipes.
The dishes we learned in Omani homes throughout the Sultanate echoed the practical, Gulf-wide dishes of rice and meat, but were uniquely infused with the flavours of the spice route: cardamom, cinnamon, cumin, coriander, hot peppers, nutmeg and ginger. The bounty of 1,700 kilometres of Omani coastline were celebrated in turmeric and citrus-scented paplou soup or with fish simply charred over burning palm fronds and finished with lime and salt, as they do in the deserts of Sharqiyah. Here, South Asian biryanis were made more subtle, with less piquant heat, sometimes laced with rosewater and fresh mint. East African coconut curries were prepared with malty, rich dehydrated coconut milk powder, and even ingredients themselves were transformed, as with the iconic Limoo Omani, dried black limes historically made with Malaysian “true limes” blanched in saltwater and set out to sun dry in order to preserve them for long journeys. Whole and powdered, they are now an indispensible, musty-tart seasoning used not only in Oman, but also in Persia and Basra, where Omani dhows once docked.
As we set out across the country, we found that each region had its own canon of specialties and their own twist on pan-Omani favourites. In Buraimi, on the boarder of the UAE, they cook khaleeji dishes like balaleet, sweet vermicelli noodles mixed with salty egg, while in villages like Al Hamra in Dakhliyah, they make a rustic version of stuffed, pan-fried dumplings called musanif. In the port city of Sur, they use fennel seed, a spice not found elsewhere in the Sultanate, crushing and adding it into flatbreads and mashkool rice. In the southern Dhofar region, in Salalah, there was an entire world of regional breads and chutneys; from cracker-like kak bread laced with cardamom and nigella seeds, to fried crêpes called khubz lahooh. There, smooth stones from wadis were set over hot embers to serve as grills for heavily salted meat or chicken madhbi, and seafood dishes range from delicate seared fish cooked in rice with Spartan seasonings to baby shark that’s boiled and shredded before being sautéed with turmeric and onions for rabees.
Back in Muscat, which became like a second home, both home cooks and professionals shared their recipes. Oman’s own celebrity chef, Issa al Lamki, gave me tips on making the perfect madrooba, a mash of spiced rice, vegetables, and chicken. Raiya al Sukairy, an instructor at the National Hospitality Institute in Wadi Kabir, let us sit in on her class on Zanzibari cuisine as she and her students made coconut-rich beans, spinach, and sweet pumpkin dishes. Adnan al Balushi and his wife Souad Aghsan al Barakah, the owners of Aghsan Al Barakah Omani Foods, a restaurant in Mabela, walked us through their saltfish variation of madrooba, along with classic chicken kabuli, pan-fried meat kabuli, and countless other Omani dishes, while friends enlisted their mothers to teach us family favourites, from the Lowati version of thareed to Zanzibari biryani.
The resulting book, a collection of recipes and stories from the coasts, mountains and deserts of the Sultanate, is hardly a complete record of the vast variety of Omani cuisine, but I hope it proves to be a celebratory introduction to this phenomenal food and the families who opened their homes and kitchens to me.
They taught me about far more than just cooking, introducing to me to the hospitality, insatiable hunger to engage with the world and steadfast rootedness in heritage and tradition that is at the core of Omani culture. The Food of Oman is my love letter to them, and to the place that transformed my palate and heart. Sahteen.
Felicia Campbell is author of The Food of Oman: Recipes and Stories from the Gateway to Arabia (Andrews McMeel, 2015)
The post Oman’s Culinary Melting Pot appeared first on Y Magazine.
Y - Pulse of Oman. All rights reserved. 2014.
https://www.y-oman.com