The Levant and Anatolia · Volume 04, The Jameed, the Taboon and the Zarb Pit

Qidreh

Hebron and Gaza

Illustration

Time: 2 hours 30

Researched: Researched from 121 sources in the brief

Lamb, rice and chickpeas cooked together in a single clay or brass pot taken to a communal oven, a dish Hebron and Gaza both claim as their own.

by Hebron and Gaza

Sumaqiyeh and qidreh, Gaza's two most distinctive dishes, both carry real, well-documented histories that predate the current crisis by centuries in one case and generations in the other. Sumaqiyeh's own name appears in the medieval Arabic culinary record: a "sumaqiyat" section is documented in the tenth-century cookery collection Kitab al-Tabikh by Ibn Sayyar al-Warraq, mentioned again by the eleventh-century writer Abu al-Mutahhar al-Azdi, and a thirteenth-century Syrian version and a fifteenth-century instructional version both survive. This medieval "sumaqiyat" was a wider Arab category rather than proof the specific modern Gazan stew is that exact age in this exact form, and this chapter treats the deep-antiquity framing as a claim the tradition makes about itself, loosely rather than firmly corroborated by the textual record. What is firmly documented is the dish as it is cooked today: Al Jazeera Arabic's 2019 reporting recorded named women, Bushra Abu Fadl, seventy-two, of Shati refugee camp, with fifty years' experience making it, and Samira al-Ajla, sixty, of al-Shuja'iya, describing the dish's real method and timing, a genuinely rare thing for this atlas to be able to cite, an oral-history record with named speakers rather than an anonymous recipe. Saadia, eighty, born in Beit Duras before her family's 1948 displacement, told the same reporters that the dish's modern form is itself a blend, original Gazan families' recipes merging with those the 1948 refugee families brought with them, each contributing their own variant to what is cooked today.

Read the history

As tradition built it

About 2.5 hours in total.

Ingredients

3kg, cut into pieces lamb
1 tsp, ground cinnamon
3 leaves bay leaf
1 tsp, ground black pepper
7 pods cardamom
4 cups, soaked 30 minutes rice
1 cup, soaked chickpeas
2 heads, peeled whole garlic cloves
to taste samneh, often
2, sliced onion (Gaza's more heavily spiced version)

Method

Boil the lamb with cinnamon, bay leaf, black pepper and cardamom.
Add the rice and chickpeas to the same pot, traditionally an unglazed clay or brass qidra taken to a communal wood or coal-fired oven, and cook through together, roughly two and a half hours in total.
Fold through whole garlic cloves and, often, samneh; for Gaza's own version, spice more heavily with chickpeas, onion and garlic than the plainer Hebron tradition.

Notes

This account draws on a published recipe from Palestinian chef Reem Assil and Mohammad Abutaha, whose grandparents came from Jaffa, though the full ingredient list and exact weights behind it sat behind a paywall this chapter's research could not clear; Laila El-Haddad's own recipe in The Gaza Kitchen exists but was equally inaccessible. This chapter states plainly that a fully quantified, named-source recipe should be sourced directly from either of those two texts before this account is treated as more than a credible outline.

What a modern chef changes

The lamb held at a precise sous vide temperature, and a communal oven's radiant heat approximated on the Big Green Egg

Sous vide lamb, dry-toasted spices, Big Green Egg dome finish

Method

Cook the lamb sous vide first at a precise temperature across the full two and a half hours tradition allots, for total, even tenderness with none of the risk an open-pot simmer against a communal oven's variable heat carries.
Toast the whole garlic cloves and spices briefly in a dry pan before they join the pot, releasing more of their own oil than a raw addition ever does, in keeping with the dish's own already heavily spiced Gazan register rather than departing from it.
Finish the assembled pot under the Big Green Egg's own dome for the final twenty minutes rather than a domestic oven, for a genuine approximation of a communal clay oven's dry, radiant top heat.

Open in the atlas: cook mode, scaling and tick off lists