Milky, silky tricolour pudding

Muhallabia is a white pudding that shares its intriguing thousand-year-old roots with the French blancmange, Italian panna cotta and other similar white puddings everywhere.

It starts with isfidhabaj (‘white stew’), which in medieval texts on Arab cooking is often mentioned as a Persian dish. The name is in fact Arabised from the Persian sepidba, with sepid meaning ‘white’ and ba ‘soup’. The Iranian lexicographer Dehkhoda defines s