Maalouba (a variant in spelling) at Cairo Takeaway in Enmore.Credit: Jennifer Soo
Plate up
You will notice something above: there’s no country that the dish maqluba is attributed to, but rather a vast swathe of the world, the Levant. This area takes in the likes of Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine and Syria, a region of shared culinary history, where the exact origins of certain dishes are impossible to untangle – and indeed, many foods date back to times before these modern borders existed.
We will get to the assumed history in a second. First though, the dish itself, that has a name meaning “upside down” in Arabic. This is a classic and much-loved rice pilaf, a little like an Indian biryani in that it’s a one-pot wonder of meat, vegetables and spices. The difference is that the bottom of the maqluba pot is layered with eggplant slices, and at the end of cooking the dish is flipped upside down, revealing that delicious cap of soft, flavour-rich vegetables. It’s beautiful to look at and even better to eat.
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First serve
As fair warning, we don’t really know when and where and even how maqluba was invented. It’s probably one of those things that was never actually invented, but which gradually morphed over decades and centuries into a form that was recognisable as maqluba. Some will tell you it was so named by Saladin, the Ayyubid conqueror, upon his capture of Jerusalem in 1187. Others point out the first recorded mention of the dish is in a 13th-century cookbook published in what was then the Abbasid Empire. Still more claim it was conjured by a Syrian cook trying to impress a dignitary. Regardless, this is a dish with a long history and plenty of modern passion.
