The Gulf and Arabia · Volume 59, The Tigris Fire, the Shrine Kitchen and the Table That Left
Qeema of Najaf
Najaf, at Ashura
Illustration
- Researched
- Researched from 44 sources in the brief
Ruqayya Adib, writing for Noon Post, calls qeema a Najaf speciality of Ashura and gives the reason it is cooked: rich and poor eat the same dish. It is cooked in large pots over wood, slowly, and distributed by the mawakib. The same table carries khubz al-Abbas on the seventh of Muharram, bread stuffed with meat, vegetables and spice; zarda, milk rice, white or saffron yellow; and the Zain al-Abidin soup of wheat, rice and lentils or mung beans, topped with date molasses and fat. Only the qeema is written up here; the other three are named and not weighed.
As tradition built it
For a crowd, a kilo of each. Hours over wood.
Ingredients
The pot, a kilo of each
- 1kg chickpeas, soaked overnight
- 1kg lamb or beef, in pieces
- 2 onions, chopped
- for frying fat or ghee, and the pot is better the richer it is
- 1 tin tomato paste
- to taste nomi Basra, pierced
- to taste cumin
- to taste cardamom
- to taste cinnamon
- to taste black pepper
- to taste salt
To serve
- to serve rice, cooked by Rung 1
- to serve saffron
- to serve cardamom
Method
- Fry the onions in the fat in a very large pot, then add the meat and fry it until it has lost its raw smell. Cover it with water, put the lid on so no steam escapes, and cook until the meat is done.
- Add the soaked chickpeas and cook them with the meat, covered, until they are soft.
- Mash the meat and chickpeas together in the pot with a pestle until they have become one. Stir in the tomato paste and salt it.
- Keep stirring over the heat until it is as thick as you want it, then add the nomi Basra, the cardamom, the cumin, the cinnamon and the pepper. Leave it on a low heat for half an hour or more, stirring so it does not catch.
- Ladle it over rice with saffron and cardamom on top, and give it to whoever comes.
Notes
The ratio is the one given on the Alkafeel forum in Karbala, the shrine community's own: a kilo of meat to a kilo of chickpeas, a tin of paste and two onions, with the nomi and the spice added by the eye of the cook stirring. Know the amounts a Najafi cook uses for those? Tell us.
What a modern chef changes
A long cook held properly
Rungs 4 and 5
Method
- Cook the chickpeas in a pressure cooker, then finish the stew in a wide pot over low heat, which gives the surface the wood fire gives without a day beside it.
- Mash a third of the chickpeas into the stew for the thickness that hours at the fire produce.
- Bloom the cumin and cardamom in the fat before the meat goes in.
- Keep the dried limes whole, and let whoever is served press one against their bowl.