Al-Buraniyya

During the medieval Islamic period, some eggplant dishes were given the name Buraniyya, and others Buran. The credit for inventing such dishes is given to Buran, wife of the Abbasid Caliph al-Ma’moun, who lived in Baghdad during the ninth century. What concerns us here is the Buraniyya casserole which al-Baghdadi gives in his thirteenth-century cookbook (Arberry).

It is a dish composed of a layer of finely chopped meat cooked with onion and cilantro, and seasoned with cumin, coriander, and cinnamon, murri (fermented sauce), and colored with saffron. On top of the meat layer, meatballs are spread, and the entire surface is covered with fried eggplant and onions. The pot is sprinkled with a little rose water, and is left to simmer for a while. Two similar recipes, also attributed to Buran, are given in the Andalusian thirteenth-century Anwa’ al-Saydala, and another one called naql maleeh (excellent mezze dish) is included in the Aleppan thirteenth-century Al-Wusla ila ‘l-Habeeb by Ibn al-‘Adeem. According to this recipe, eggplant was fried in rendered sheep’s tail fat. Ground/minced meat is cooked with vinegar, lemon juice, and hot spices (abzar harra), and some of the ground meat is made into spicy banadiq (small meatballs, the size of a hazelnut). Then – and here is an important detail – you take a miqla skillet, and arrange the prepared ingredients in layers, sprinkle them with lemon juice and a little vinegar, drizzle with rendered sheep’s tail fat, and simmer on low heat until cooked. The significance of the recipe is that it makes it quite clear that the dish is cooked not in a regular pot but in a shallow pan similar to a casserole pan – in today’s Iraqi terminology, tabsi.