Dolma

During medieval times, stuffed vegetable dishes were the epitome of good life. The countless mahshi recipes in the medieval cookbooks, and the recurrent references to them in The Arabian Nights, for instance, bear witness to this. The vegetable which the medieval cooks commonly used was eggplant, for which qar’, gourd, was always given as a substitute. Those vegetables were usually stuffed with a spicy mixture of ground/minced meat, onion, and other ingredients, eked out with peeled and crushed chickpeas. Rice was added to the filling of the stuffed tripe dish, called qibba mahshuwwa (details).