"arab" news and stories

While Arab traders helped facilitate the exchanges that shaped cooking in sub-Saharan Africa, pre-Columbian cuisine of the Middle East often gets short shrift in South Carolina, a noted outpost of African Diaspora foodways.

According to Stephen Sheehi, associate professor of Arab Studies at the University of South Carolina, the Arab world was responsible for cultivating emmer wheat and introducing enslaved Americans' ancestors to bananas and peanuts.

"In that respect, there's always been a tie," Sheehi says.

Exploring Arab contributions to Southern cookery is just one objective of Sheehi's new class, which he warns can't be reduced to a soundbite. The syllabus is also designed to introduce students to concepts of land management, local food and sustainability. Sheehi's students are planting an Arab garden on their campus in Columbia, S.C. and preparing to build a tandour oven, with the resulting bread and veggies pledged to a nearby chapter of Food Not Bombs.

Over the past few years, there has been an increased interest in foods from the Middle East and the surrounding areas. This seems to be largely because consumers are looking to cook with different grains and more spices than ever before. At first, this interested manifested itself in dinners served with a side of couscous, instead of white rice. Now, home cooks are buying tagines and looking into completely new (to them) styles of cooking.

Arabesque: A Taste of Morocco, Turkey, and Lebanon is organized by country, so the differences between each cuisine are immediately obvious to the reader. Author Claudia Rodin, a certifiable expert on the cuisines of the region, does an excellent job incorporating detailed information about ingredients and the history of the dishes into the rest of the text. There are roughly 150 recipes and all have been adapted so that they will be relatively easy to remake in, say, the average American kitchen, although a trip to a specialty grocer may be in order to pick up a handful of the less common ingredients. Recipes include many vegetarian options and lots of couscous, along with Tagine of Chicken with Preserved Lemons and Olives, Squabs Stuffed with Date and Almond Paste, Baba Ghanouj and Pistachio Cake.

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The confectioners' union in Iran ordered the change of the name of a popular breakfast pastry from "Danish pastry" to "Rose of Muhammad", reports Yahoo! News. Bakeries across the country were ordered to cover up signs advertising Danishes and only refer to them by their new name. One bakery owner said "This is a punishment for those who started misusing freedom of expression to insult the sanctities of Islam" though because the name "Danish" is not trademarked and no one receives royalties from its use, it is unlikely that anyone (except confused customers) is actually feeling punished by this change. Danish companies are feeling the pinch as some countries boycott other Danish products, however. This renaming is reminiscent of the attempted change of "French fries" to "freedom fries" in the United States in 2003 - a change which stuck in newspaper headlines longer than it did on menu boards.

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