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West Africa · Volume 22, The Three Glasses, the Mullet Run and the Grain Rolled by Hand

Belghman and zrig

The Sahrawi table, in the towns and the camps, and the Moorish one for the drink

Belghman, toasted barley meal bound with butter in a wooden bowl, and zrig, milk thinned with water in a bowl, on a mat at dawn: a wooden bowl of coarse pale brown toasted barley meal worked with melted butter into a soft mass with a spoon in it, beside a wide wooden bowl of thin white milk.

Illustration

Time
10 minutes

The belghman is toasted barley ground to flour and bound in a bowl with hot water, sugar, salt and fat; the zrig is milk thinned with water and sugar. They are eaten together, which is why they share a card, and they are sourced the same way. The belghman is from a Moroccan news site's account of Sahrawi custom, which calls it the Sahrawi's official staple and which speaks from a position; the one timing is the article's and there is no ratio. The zrig is soured milk, water and sugar in the Gulf press, fresh camel or goat milk in the Moroccan and Mauritanian pages, milk and yoghurt in a third; the compositions vary and the ratio is nobody's.

As tradition built it

Serves a household. About 10 minutes for the belghman.

Ingredients

The tradition's method, with the ingredients named. Quantities follow as we verify them.

For the belghman

For the zrig

  • camel or goat milk, fresh or soured
  • as needed water
  • to taste sugar

Method

  1. Toast the barley and grind it to flour.
  2. Put the flour in a bowl, mix it with hot water, sugar and a little salt, and bind it with the clarified butter, camel hump fat or olive oil; it is ready in about ten minutes, and is eaten at the pre dawn meal in Ramadan.
  3. For the zrig, thin the milk with water, sweeten it, and drink it from a bowl, thick or thin to taste.

What a modern chef changes

The barley roasted dark, the milk cultured

Rung 5

Method

  1. Roast the barley on the Egg at 180 degrees until it smells of bread and grind it fine; the smoke is the camp fire's.
  2. Bind it with brown butter, which is dhen taken further, and a little hump fat where a halal butcher will sell it.
  3. Culture goat's milk with kefir grains overnight and thin it cold with still water and a spoon of sugar; it approximates the soured zrig and is not camel milk, which in Britain is a raw frozen product from one supplier and a decision for the reader.
  4. Serve the two together at dawn, which is when they belong.
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