Name: Arabian Pizza (Laham b-‘Ajeen)
Yield: Makes about 20 breads 7 in/17.5 cm across
Cuisine: Iraqi
Ingredients: 1½ lbs (675 g) ground lean meat/minced lean meat, beef, lamb, or turkey; ¾ cup (1½ oz/36 g) chopped parsley; 1 tablespoon pomegranate syrup or lemon juice; 2 teaspoons baharat; 1 or 2 garlic cloves, grated, optional; 2 teaspoons salt, or to taste; ½ teaspoon black pepper; Olive oil for flattening and brushing the dough; 3 medium onions (about 2 cups/12 oz/340 g), finely chopped; 1 recipe of basic Arabic Bread Dough; 2 tablespoons olive oil; 3 heaped tablespoons (one 6 oz/175 g can) tomato paste; ½ teaspoon allspice; ¼ teaspoon chili pepper, or to taste; 2 medium tomatoes (about 1½ cups/9 oz/250 g), finely chopped

Preparation info

Makes about
20
breads 7 in across

Difficulty
Medium

Appears in

Delights from the Garden of Eden

By Nawal Nasrallah

Published 2019

About

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