Barmakiyya
Recipe for Barmakiyya. It is made with a hen, pigeons, doves, small birds or lamb. Take what you have of them, after cleaning, and cut up and put in a pot with salt, an onion, pepper, coriander and lavender or cinnamon, some murri naqî', and oil. Put it on a gentle fire until it is nearly done and the sauce is dried. Take it out and fry it in fresh oil without overdoing it, and leave it aside. Then take fine flour and semolina, make a well-made dough with leaven, and if it has some oil it will be more flavorful. Then roll out from it a flatbread and put inside it the fried and cooked meat of these birds, cover it with another flatbread and stick the ends together. Put it in the oven, and when the bread is done, take it out. It is very good on journeys. You might make it with fish and that can be used for journeying too.
From: 13th century Anonymous Andalusian Cookbook, trans. by Perry
Barmakiyya:
What I did:
- I used lamb (I have made up this dish with chicken on a few occasions as well and found it was really good), this is cut up and put into a pot (in the picture, the chunks are fairly large, however I find it works out much better with the meat cut fairly small)
- In the same pot add: salt, an onion, pepper, coriander and lavender or cinnamon, some murri naqî', and oil. --I used a bit of salt and pepper, a small chopped onion, coriander and a few dashes of lavender... this smelled really really good cooking! try adding just a little murri, adding more to taste if it is not flavourful and wet enough, wetness being somewhat of a challenge (I find it's harder to eat if too dry, though it should be fairly dry when done)
- This is cooked until the sauce is reduced (it says "dried")
- Take this out of the pot and fry it in fresh oil.... TAKE NOTE: I think this is meant to be cooked quite dry where I reserved some of the sauce for my pie. I also was not using it for travel, was eating it fresh, and really liked the sauce it created... though there was very little of it. (there is no gravy/sauce for the "pastry" which is a shame after what I tasted which was quite good.)
- Dough: I took a cup of white flour and a cup of semolina, to this I added a little oil and enough leaven (think active yeast in a flour/water environment) to make it into a dough. After kneading, (I rested and worked it again, but it does not give any explicit direction here) and divide it in two... roll these out into flatbreads, then put the meat on top of one and seal the over over top of it.
- Bake in the oven until it is done (the dough should be golden and sound hollow if you knock on it)
This can, apparently, be done with fish as well!
Notes: This is an excellent travelling pie and I have brought it with me camping. It's easy to just grab either a small pie or a section of a larger one and walk about with it.
On one occasion, I attempted to make an oversized one with wetter filling, this does not work out well as it both loses it's portability and too much filling to 'pastry' causes it to taste unbalanced. The one in the picture only worked out at such a size because the meat was cut large, though ideally it should have been chopped much smaller and the pie much thinner.
For the murri, I sometimes cheat and have had great success with miso (such as barley miso) and have attempted, on occasion, to make a decent approximation. There is a good website with an aticle on it where you can find pretty good instructions on making it.
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