Arabian Pizza

This is the Arabic counterpart of pizza, and what it literally means is ‘meat in dough’. To my knowledge, the earliest medieval lahm bi ‘ajeen recipe is given in the thirteenth-century Aleppan cookbook Al-Wusla ila ‘l-Habeeb. Here is the recipe: ‘meat is sliced, spread on flattened discs of dough, and then put in the brick oven furn’ (Ibn al-‘Adeem).

When I was a child in Baghdad, not many people knew of it. We used to order it from the neighborhood bakery owned