Iraqi recipes on the map

Annia Ciezadlo is the author of this recent article on targeted attacks by the Assad regime on bakeries as a method to subdue the Syrian population. It is well worth your attention. 

In an older article "They Remember Home" (PDF, 2008) on the food culture of a group of Iraqi refugees in Lebanon she includes recipes for the Iraqi dishes Kabset Baitenjan and Tashreeb Dijaaj. Of course I could not resist running them through Map you Recipe. 

Now remember that Map Your Recipe displays where the vegetable ingredients of a recipe were first domesticated according to the 'food hearth' theory proposed by the Russian plant scientist Nikolai Vavilov.  

The recipe above resulted in the map below.  


Canola is made from rapeseed and therefore 'Mediterranean'. Sumac is a large family of shrubby trees that also include the American cashew, the type here suggested as optional is sumac spice typical for Middle eastern cooking. 

The Kabset Baitenjan results in this map:

As said before: Map you Recipe makes no claims about originality and does not endorse food crop nationalism. But what immediately strikes me about these two recipes is a total absence of ingredients associated with the Middle East that includes staples like barley, figs, lentils, alfalfa, pomegranates, quinces and fenugreek. 

If you take an Italian or Indian or Chinese or Ethiopian dish you will nearly always find an ingredient associated with the region apart from the source of carbohydrates (wheat/rice/potatoes). But not here. 

I am not saying it means anything but I would like to offer the theory, 98% in jest, that in the deep past these dishes started out as foreign food and became naturalized. What would be Nebuchadnezzar equivalent to Jane Austen's curry? Think of it as Babylonian fusion food enriched with the later and inescapable potato.