Saltah Period BOrigin theory CVerified

Saltah is a bowl of maraq, a stew of lamb or other meat, topped with whipped fenugreek (hulba, also called hilbeh) and sahawiq, a salsa of chili with garlic and herbs such as coriander. It is brought to the table still boiling in its stone pot, the madra, kept over high heat. In Sana'a and across Yemen it has long been a fixture of the midday meal.

The lead ingredient, fenugreek, is a long-established local flavoring. It was domesticated early in the ancient Near East, and its cultivation reaches back before the common era. It took root in Yemen early on as well.

Turning that ingredient into saltah takes some work. The fenugreek is soaked in water and whipped until it thickens into a light, airy froth, then the whole pot is brought to a fierce boil in the stone madra. This whipping and high-heat cooking in the stone pot is the technique at the heart of saltah. The sahawiq spooned on to finish is built on chili, one of the essential ingredients of saltah, and that chili is a plant of New World origin. Tomato also came from the New World, but it goes into only some versions of sahawiq or is served on the side; it is not an essential part of saltah.

The most common account of how saltah began places its birth in the charitable establishments of Ottoman times, the idamat, where leftovers donated by the wealthy and by mosques were gathered and cooked into a dish given to the poor. The name saltah is often traced to the Turkish salatah (salad, that is, a mixture of odds and ends), said to have entered Yemen with the advance of the Ottoman army.

This etymology, however, is not the only one. Scholars of Yemen's own language point instead to the local Arabic verb salata, to snatch something from a hot pot and eat and lick it up greedily, as the likely source of the name. The case for a Turkish borrowing is not firm enough to settle the matter.

The dating, too, has been narrowed in recent years. The widely cited frame of the Ottoman period, sixteenth to nineteenth century, carries an echo reaching back to the first occupation of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; but in 2004 the local newspaper Yemen Times reported that the dish was introduced about a hundred years ago, which points instead to the second occupation of 1872 to 1918, that is, the early twentieth century. The common label that reaches back to the sixteenth century may be dating the dish rather too early.

Even so, no contemporary record survives that fixes a particular year, a place of origin, or an inventor. As a time frame, what can be said is roughly the Ottoman period, and the second occupation in particular. Among the ingredients, the lead one, fenugreek, has been native to the region since antiquity, but the last to come together is the New World chili. When chili reached Yemen cannot be settled from the sources. What is known goes only this far: Forskål's flora, published in 1775, lists chili among the garden plants of Bayt al-Faqih, a town in the Tihama, so it was being grown in Yemeni gardens by then at the latest. The origin of saltah rests on a strong oral tradition at its core, yet still stands among several competing views.