How to Milk an Almond Stuff an Egg And Armor a Turnip A ...

Wheat Starch (Amidoun): Can be found in
Iranian grocery stores.
Other Spices: For cubebs, grains of
paradise, and long pepper try a good specialty
spice store or merchants at Pennsic; if you
cannot find them, substitute pepper. Saunders
is ground sandalwood root used as red food
coloring. We have heard that World Spice
Merchants is a good online source:
wsm@worldspice.com; www.worldspice.com
Murri
Islamic recipes frequently contain an
ingredient translated as “murri” or “almori.” It
was extensively used in early Islamic cooking,
rather as soy sauce is in Chinese cooking, and
vanished sometime after the fourteenth
century. Al-Baghdadi gives the following
recipes for making it; if you try one and it
works, let me know. According to Charles
Perry, the translator of the Kitab al Tibakhah
mentioned above, the penny-royal in these
recipes is a mis-translation and should be
budhaj (rotted barley). He gives the following
instructions for making budhaj:
“All the recipes concur that budhaj was
made from barley flour (or a mixture of
barley and wheat) kneaded without leaven or
salt. Loaves of this dough were rotted,
generally in closed containers for 40 days,
and then dried and ground into flour for
further rotting into the condiments.”
(First recipe) Take 5 ratls each of pennyroyal
and flour. Make the flour into a good
dough without leaven or salt, bake, and leave
until dry. Then grind up fine with the pennyroyal,
knead into a green trough with a third
the quantity of salt, and put out into the sun
for 40 days in the heat of the summer,
kneading every day at dawn and evening, and
sprinkling with water. When black, put into
conserving jars, cover with an equal quantity
of water, stirring morning and evening: then
strain it into the first murri. Add cinnamon,
saffron and some aromatic herbs.
(Second recipe) Take penny-royal and
wheaten or barley flour, make into a dry
dough with hot water, using no leaven or salt,
5
and bake into a loaf with a hole in the middle.
Wrap in fig leaves, stuff into a preserving-jar,
and leave in the shade until fetid. Then
remove and dry.
As you can see, making murri is an
elaborate process, and tasting unsuccessful
experiments might be a hazardous one.
Charles Perry has experimented with this, and
some years ago became the first person in
recent centuries, so far as we know, to make
murri. He says it tastes a little like soy
sauce—which contains, in addition to soy
beans, fermented grains.
In addition to the surviving recipes for
murri, there are also at least two surviving
references to what was apparently a fake
murri, a substitute made by a much simpler
process. If one cannot have real murri, period
fake murri seems like the next best thing. The
recipe is as follows:
Byzantine Murri
Kitab Wasf, Sina'ah 52, p. 56, Sina'ah 51, p.
65: Charles Perry tr.
Description of byzantine murri [made]
right away: There is taken, upon the name of
God the Most High, of honey scorched in a
nuqrah [perhaps this word means 'a silver
vessel'], three ratls; pounded scorched oven
bread, ten loaves; starch, half a ratl; roasted
anise, fennel and nigella, two uqiyahs of each;
byzantine saffron, an uqiya; celery seed, an
uqiyah; syrian carob, half a ratl; fifty peeled
walnuts, as much as half a ratl; split quinces,
five; salt, half a makkūk dissolved in honey;
thirty ratls water; and the rest of the
ingredients are thrown on it, and it is boiled
on a slow flame until a third of the water is
absorbed. Then it is strained well in a clean
nosebag of hair. It is taken up in a greased
glass or pottery vessel with a narrow top. A
little lemon from Takranjiya (? Sina'ah 51 has
Bakr Fahr) is thrown on it, and if it suits that a
little water is thrown on the dough and it is
boiled upon it and strained, it would be a
second (infusion). The weights and
measurements that are given are Antiochan
and Zahiri [as] in Mayyafariqin.