Okra Stew

In the modern Iraqi cuisine, okra is the queen of all stews. It is surprising, however, that of all the extant Arabic medieval cookbooks only the anonymous fourteenth-century Egyptian Kanz al-Fawa’id includes an okra recipe, sifat al-bamya. It calls for cooking the meat and then adding to it diced onion, pepper, cilantro, garlic, chopped okra, and fresh lemon juice. The other mention is by the famous botanist Ibn al-Baytar (d.1248) in his entry on okra in Al-Jami’ li Mufra