Salona Period COrigin theory CVerified

Saloona is an everyday stew that reaches the daily table across the Gulf, above all in Bahrain and Kuwait. Lamb is simmered with onion, the broth reddened and thickened with tomato, and given depth with spices. It is no festival dish but a home meal rooted in the land.

Two distinctly different layers lie one over the other in this single dish. In the older layer is the stewing tradition of the nomadic Bedouin. This kind of stew, called marag (murraq) in Arabic, grew out of the knowledge of a life lived on the move: put into the pot whatever the land and the season made available, and simmer it. Lamb and onion and a little spice were long part of desert life, and the marag that simply simmered them stayed close to nomadic living for a long time.

The red stew we now call saloona is the newer shape that emerged when tomato joined that old simmering. The tomato is a New World crop native to South America; it spread through the world after the Age of Exploration and reached the markets of the Gulf, across the sea, only in the 19th century. Once tomato entered the kitchens of this land, the local stew took on a red broth and turned into the tomato-based saloona made in homes today. The rich, tomato-forward stew handed down as Bahraini home cooking is the fruit of that shift.

Curiously, the very name saloona seems to have reached the Gulf on the same wind as the tomato. The word appears to be a borrowing of an Indian Ocean trade term for a broth of meat, fish, or vegetables (Hindi and Urdu sālan), and its route runs along the 19th-century comings and goings between the Gulf and India through the pearl trade. The red tomato and the name saloona alike were carried to this land by the same century's same wave of trade.

In the Gulf, it has been told that saloona was a dish the Prophet Muhammad favored, fit for breaking the Ramadan fast. This story lends the dish a sacred pedigree, and it is a fine one, but read as an origin tale for present-day saloona itself, it loses its footing on the calendar.

The reason lies in the tomato that reddens today's saloona. The tomato is a New World crop native to South America, and it appears in European records only in the 16th century. It is noted in the Spanish garden book Agricultura de jardines (1592) and is said to settle into Spanish cooking by the mid-18th century. In the 7th-century Arabia of the Prophet's lifetime, this red fruit could not exist. A present-day saloona built around tomato cannot be told as the favorite dish of a 7th-century figure.

Where, then, does the tradition come from? The clue is in the very primary source that reports the Prophet's favorite. The hadith collection Sahih al-Bukhari (no. 5418, narrated by Abu Musa al-Ash'ari) names as the favorite not saloona but tharid, crumbled flatbread soaked in a broth of meat and vegetables. As tharid and saloona came to be mentioned side by side in the Gulf, the religious authority residing in tharid was transferred to saloona. Trace the confusion back to its source and the tradition falls into line. And tharid too is a 7th-century dish, with no tomato in it either. The footing that would carry present-day tomato-stewed saloona back to the 7th century thus gives way twice over.

Even so, it would be hasty to conclude from this that saloona as a dish is entirely new. What is set aside is only the single point that a tomato saloona goes back to the 7th century. The Bedouin stew made from local ingredients alone before the tomato, the marag/murraq tradition, exists as a separate and far older layer than the tomato form. Culinary writing also places saloona in the lineage of this marag-family stew, and the age of the stew as a genre is not in doubt. Keep the old stewing tradition as tradition, and see the present tomato-clad form apart, as a 19th-century thing in which both the tomato and the name crossed to the Gulf together. That is the order in which to read the two layers of this one dish correctly.