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.

Maqluba's home has 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 early written records of this dish under the name maqluba come from the twentieth century. A record from 1907 describes rice and eggplant cooked in a deep pot and turned out upside down when served; it stops at rice and eggplant, and says nothing of meat, of frying the eggplant, or of building the pot in layers. The parts are far older, while the early records under this name are recent. That gap in time is the key to reading how maqluba came to be.

Same name, another dish

When maqluba's origin is told, the thirteenth-century cookbook has long been brought forward. Muhammad al-Baghdadi compiled a cookbook in Abbasid Baghdad 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.

Follow the recipe through A. J. Arberry's 1939 English translation of that cookbook, though, and the story changes. Pounded meat is mixed with spices and coarsely ground walnuts, eggs are broken in and worked through, and the mixture is shaped into flat cakes and fried in sesame oil in an iron or copper pan. When one side is cooked, the cake is turned over to cook the other. Neither rice nor eggplant appears. The same chapter lists further dishes that carry the name maqluba, made in the same way from cold roast meat or from fish, and these contain no rice or eggplant either. Both names come from an Arabic root meaning "to turn over." But what the thirteenth-century cook turned was one side of a cake in the pan, not a pot of cooked rice. That two dishes carry the same name, and that two dishes are the same dish, are separate matters.

Where, then, is a dish close to today's maqluba to be found? Some point to a ninth-century poem, more than three centuries earlier than that cookbook. Ibrahim ibn al-Mahdi, an Abbasid nobleman, wrote of a "covered dish," maghmuma: a layer of meat with its fat, onion, rice, and thin slices of peeled eggplant, laid up and covered with a disc of bread, set over the fire, and, once cooked, turned out onto a platter, big and wide. Meat and eggplant and rice layered, then flipped upside down at the end: the skeleton of today's maqluba is all here. The poem was gathered into the tenth-century cookbook compiled by Ibn Sayyar al-Warraq, and is said to be available in English in Nawal Nasrallah's translation of 2007; the description of the poem given here follows a commentary that quotes that translation. Later, the English translation of the thirteenth-century cookbook also carries a dish under the name "covered dish," but there fat and meat, eggplant and onion are layered and stewed; no rice goes in, and nothing is said of turning the pot out.

An early record of the dish under the name maqluba is Elihu Grant's The Peasantry of Palestine, his 1907 account of village life. Grant describes it as rice and eggplant cooked in a deep dish and turned out upside down when served, and adds that the name means "turned over." He says nothing of meat, of frying the eggplant, or of laying it up in layers. The expanded edition of the same book, published in 1921, repeats the same lines. Rice had long been grown in the Levant, but its spread as an everyday staple is thought to have come only in the modern era. The skeleton of meat, eggplant, and rice layered and flipped appears in a ninth-century poem, and a pot of rice and eggplant turned out under the name maqluba is recorded at the opening of the twentieth century. Whether the layered pot was carried across the long centuries between, and when it settled into today's form with meat and fried eggplant, is not known.

So separate spans of time lie layered in maqluba's history. Some trace the gesture of turning a pot out onto a broad platter back to that ninth-century poem. The name maqluba existed by the thirteenth century, but then it belonged to a dish of meat or fish bound with egg and fried, turned one side at a time. An early record of a pot of cooked rice turned out under this name dates from 1907, at the opening of the twentieth century, and one view holds that the present form, with rice, fried eggplant, and meat layered together, settled only from the Ottoman period onward. An old name that had first belonged to another dish: once that is untangled, the spans of time layered beneath the overturned pot can at last be told apart, one by one.