Maqluba Period COrigin theory CVerified

When and where it took shape

Maqluba belongs to the Levant, the eastern shore of the Mediterranean, and above all to Palestine. In the pot, rice, fried eggplant, and chicken or lamb are layered and cooked together; once done, a dish is set over the mouth of the pot and the whole thing is flipped in one motion. The meat and the browned eggplant that sat at the bottom come to the top, and a steaming mound rises onto the table. The name, "upside-down," describes that very gesture.

This is not a dish that came down from a high courtly table. Its home has always been the household, and the shared table of the community, where a large pot is turned out and divided at feasts and gatherings. The murmur at the moment of the flip, and the dish standing up without collapsing, become the center of the occasion.

The ingredients are all long rooted in this land. Rice was grown in the Levant from the early Islamic period, and eggplant had spread widely across the Arab world even earlier; together with the meat, all of these were materials at home here. Cooking in the pot and then turning it out upside down was likewise a method that medieval Arab cookery already held. The parts that make up today's maqluba had, in other words, been gathered close at hand for a very long time.

And yet the form we know today, rice and fried eggplant and meat layered and flipped, shows up clearly in the written record only at the start of the twentieth century. The parts are old, but the assembled dish is described with certainty only late. That gap in time is the key to reading how maqluba came to be.

An old name over a newer dish

When maqluba's origin is told, the thirteenth-century cookbook has long been brought forward. Muhammad al-Baghdadi, of the Abbasid era, compiled a cookbook in the thirteenth century in which a dish called maqluba, "upside-down," appears, and this was spoken of, almost as settled fact, as the direct ancestor of today's rice-eggplant-and-meat maqluba. Both the idea of turning the pot out and the name itself, the argument ran, were already present in that age.

Read against the sources, though, the entry tells a different story. As Nawal Nasrallah's edited English translation of the medieval Arab cookbooks shows, al-Baghdadi's maqluba was not rice and fried eggplant turned out together but a patty of ground meat turned in the pan to brown both sides. The Arabic root meaning "to overturn" can attach itself to any dish that involves flipping. The shared name was no more than a coincidence around that root, not a link between the dishes themselves. That two dishes carry the same name, and that two dishes are the same dish, are separate matters.

Where, then, is the true ancestor of today's maqluba? It lies three centuries earlier still, in a ninth-century poem. Ibrahim ibn al-Mahdi, an Abbasid nobleman, sang of a covered dish, maghmuma, and described it thus: a layer of meat, its fat, onion, rice, and thin slices of peeled eggplant, laid up and covered with a round lid, set over the fire, and, once cooked, turned out onto a large platter. Meat and eggplant and rice layered, then flipped upside down at the end: the skeleton of today's maqluba is all here. This poem was gathered into the tenth-century cookbook compiled by Ibn Sayyar al-Warraq, and can be read today through Nasrallah's translation.

An early clear record of the present form, rice and fried eggplant and meat layered and flipped, is found in Elihu Grant's account of Palestinian life at the start of the twentieth century. Rice had long been grown in the Levant, but its spread as an everyday staple came only in the modern era. The skeleton appears in a ninth-century poem, and the present form is recorded at the opening of the twentieth; how to bridge that long span is a question that remains, its sources not yet found.

So two spans of time lie folded together in maqluba. The gesture of turning the pot out and calling it "upside-down," name and act alike, reaches back to medieval Arab cookery. The present form, rice and fried eggplant and meat layered and cooked, was assembled far later, on the tables of this land. An old name that had first belonged to another dish: only when that mix-up is undone does the true lineage, hidden beneath the overturned pot, come into view.