Mujaddara

Recently I have had loads of fun helping M, a friend of mine reposition furniture in her home to make it more appealing for potential short term tourist rentals. The results have been pleasing and only required the addition of a few select decorative pieces to finish it off. After a successful trawl through Mall of the Emirates the items were purchased and we sat down for a healthy, satisfying and delicious lunch of lentils and rice otherwise known as mujaddara with salad.



Mujaddara is a Middle Eastern staple. It is found in one form or another throughout the Levant, Iran and Arab Gulf countries. In India the dish is known as Kitchari. The Middle East offers a tempting selection of good vegetarian dishes some of which have become staples for us and as M and I enjoyed our meal I decided it was time to incorporate mujaddara into my newly emerging vegetarian cooking repertoire.

While the Indian version commonly uses red lentils, the Middle Eastern one found in Dubai uses brown lentils, a seemingly simple enough ingredient to find one would think but on perusal of the legume section at the supermarket I was surprised to find that the humble brown lentil comes in many forms. With further research I discovered the kind I have at home which looks like the French puy is actually a whole red lentil with the skin on. These cook much faster than your regular brown or green lentils and turn to mush very quickly, so it is important to know which type you are dealing with.

The ingredients are basically just oil, onions, cummin and cinnamon, lentils, rice and water and they are all cooked together. My first attempt has worked quite well although could do with a little more spicing. Mujaddara is usually accompanied with labnah salad and pita bread.

Glorious Wild Madder

“Hello, I am Mr.Kadoo, would you like to buy a Persian carpet?” a thickly accented voice asked at the other end of the phone. Back then we were living in Hong Kong which seemed to be a destination for many of the beautiful rugs from the East. I always abruptly terminated these calls however this time I paused. Perhaps we could do with another rug or two.

The next day at the appointed time a truck pulled up at the bottom of our apartment block and two men pulled out an assortment of rolled carpets piling them into the lift. They were soon in our apartment and my daughter Rosie and I exclaimed with delight as rug after rug was unfurled. What clever marketing tactics these Indian salesmen had devised. They were happy to bring the rugs to my home and even offered to leave my favourite ones with me for a few days to see how they felt to live with before making a final acquisition. I couldn’t allow that though as I knew that inevitably by the time the salesmen returned to remove the unwanted carpets I would have been thoroughly seduced by them all.

As good architecture adds incalculably to the quality of a living environment so can these rugs equally enhance living spaces. A wise old aristocratic Danish woman I once knew used to say that really you don’t need anything else but Persian rugs and nice paintings on the walls to create a beautiful, harmonious living environment. A total lack of furniture just cushions on the floor and it all still feels and looks wonderful. Of course with such an intriguing history, spiced with “…imperial kings, swordsmen, folktales and cauldrons of steaming colors, lumbering caravans and scheming merchants” as Brian Murphy describes in his book In Search of Wild Madder, how can they fail to provide a Bohemian flourish to any home.


I’ve always been most attracted to the tribal hand woven rugs of Iran and Afghanistan. Traditionally these are dyed with the warm rich muted colours of vegetable dyes extracted from plants such as indigofera, chamomile and wild madder root from which comes the most gloriously perfect reds through to softest delicate pinks. Murphy tells us that the madder root was used by master artists such a Vermeer as in his famous painting Girl in a Red Hat below, to provide glowing red glazes and by alchemists to empower their spells.



At this point I must seize the opportunity to share a little more of the spellbinding account of Azhar Abidi in The Secret History of the Flying Carpet (more of which is written about in the post below) It seems the power to fly inherent in a these carpets was not imbued through special weaving techniques or sorcery but from the dying process using a special clay ‘procured from mountain springs and untouched by human hand which, when superheated at temperatures that exceeded those of the seventh ring of hell in a cauldron of boiling Grecian oil, acquired magnetic properties’. Abidi explains that the earth is overlaid with trillions of magnetic lines and that as the carpets were completed they would be magnetically pulled away from the earth along these ley lines, hovering a few feet or hundreds of feet in the air.

And one more juice morsel - according to Ben Shira, “…the great library of Alexandria, founded by Ptolemy 1, kept a large stock of these flying carpets for readers. They could borrow these carpets in exchange for their slippers and glide back and forth, up and down, among the shelves of papyrus manuscripts. Housed in a ziggurat that contained forty thousand scrolls… the ceiling of this building was so high that readers often preferred to read while hovering in the air”. Ah dear, what heady stuff!

Anyway back in Hong Kong on that day of the unfurling of the rugs in our apartment Rosie and I chose three beautiful small rugs from Afghanistan and Persia, which is far less romantically and less evocatively named Iran these days. After the men left I overheard my daughter making a phone call, her wicked sense of humour getting the better of her. It was a crank call to some poor unsuspecting person. When they picked up the phone Rosie said in an unnaturally deep thickly accented voice, “ Hello, I’m Mr Kadoo, would you like to buy a Persian rug?” followed by smothered giggles. Here is a detail of one of the rugs. As usual, Archie managed to squeeze a piece of himself in.



NB So enamored have I been with the gorgeousness of the reds in madder I was inspired to do a painting to simply explore them further. Here is a small slice of it.

Flying Carpets

I have always had a penchant for Persian rugs. The thought of anything from Persia conjures up associations with Shahrazad, the magical, the mystical, exquisite art works and sensuous exotica, as D.W.Ellwanger writes in The Oriental Rug

The very word Persian is a synonym for opulence, splendour, gorgeousness: and Oriental means beauty and wonder and magic of the Arabian Nights. From the Aladdin’s cave of the mystical East, therefore we may still hope to gather treasures and spoil.



Arabian Nights and Aladdin's Cave hmm… the humble rug suddenly assumes an aura of magic. As a child I marvelled at tales of magic rugs. I relished dreams of flying, especially when this ability snatched me from situations of dire peril. There is nothing like soaring upwards into the ethers making a speedy escape. Magic rugs offered a host of possibilities including similarly quick exits, so you may appreciate my excitement when I recently happened upon an extraordinary document by Azhar Abidi titled The Secret History of the Flying Carpet. In his own words Abidi tells us,

"Long before the broomstick became popular with witches in medieval Europe, the flying carpet was being used by thieves and madmen in the Orient. Factual evidence for what was a long-standing myth has now been found by a French explorer, Henri Baq, in Iran. Baq has discovered scrolls of well-preserved manuscripts in underground cellars of an old Assassin's castle at Alamut, near the Caspian Sea. Written in the early thirteenth century by a Jewish scholar named Isaac Ben Sherira,' these manuscripts shed new light on the real story behind the flying carpet of the Arabian Nights.

The discovery of these artifacts has thrown the scientific world into the most outrageous strife. Following their translation from Persian into English by Professor G.D. Septimus, the renowned linguist, a hastily organized conference of eminent scholars from all over the world was called at the London School of Oriental and African Studies. Baq's discovery came under flak from many historians who insisted that the manuscripts were forgeries.

M. Baq, who could not attend the conference because of the birth of his child, was defended by Professor Septimus, who argued that the new findings should be properly investigated. The manuscripts are now being carbon dated at the Istituto Leonardo da Vinci, Trieste."

What scintillating news! This story is getting long but I have to continue. Adihi explains that Muslim rulers regarded the carpets as contraptions of the devil, denying their existence, suppressing their science and their manufacture. They finally received some acceptance around AD 1213, "... when a Toranian prince demonstrated their use in attacking an enemy castle by positioning a squadron of archers on them, so as to form a kind of airborne cavalry; the art otherwise floundered, and eventually perished in the onslaught of the Mongols."

The earliest reference to flying rugs comes from two ancient texts telling a story not told any where else of the Queen of Sheba and King Solomon.

"Located at the southern tip of Arabia, the land of Sheba occupied the area of present-day Yemen, although. This country was ruled by a beautiful and powerful queen who is remembered in history as the Sheba of the Bible, the Saba or Makeda of the Ethiopian epic Kebra Negast, and the Bilqis of Islam.

At the inauguration of the queen in 977 BC, her alchemist-royal demonstrated small brown rugs that could hover a few feet above the ground. Many years later she sent a magnificent flying carpet to King Solomon. A token of love, it was of green sendal embroidered with gold and silver and studded with precious stones, and its length and breadth were such that all the king's host could stand upon it.

The king, who was preoccupied with building his temple in Jerusalem, could not receive the gift and gave it to his courtiers. When news of this cool reception reached the queen, she was heartbroken. She dismissed her artisans and never had anything to do with flying carpets again. The king and the queen eventually reconciled, but the wandering artisans found no abode for many years, and eventually had to settle near the town of Baghdad in Mesopotamia in c. 934 BC."

A carpet embroidered with gold and silver, studded with precious stones and able to fly to boot? Wonders never cease! I could never have imagined a jewel incrusted carpet. Who could picture such a thing? I certainly couldn’t until today when yet another article of news regarding carpets came to my attention.

On March 19 in Doha, Sotherby’s will auction The Pearl Carpet of Baroda. An extraordinary piece and supposedly the most expensive carpet in the world, it is embroidered with one and a half million pearls from the Gulf region, embellished with diamonds, sapphires, rubies and pearls. It was commissioned by the Maharaja of Baroda circa 1865.



Sotherby’s says, "Instantly legendary, this work of art is mentioned by foreign travellers as early as 1880. The exquisite execution, the remarkable state of preservation, the unquestionable rarity, and the highly unusual combination of form and material make this piece undeniably one of the most remarkable objects ever created.



The starting price at auction will be US 5 million. Certainly such a creation is evocative of Alladin’s cave, but at that price how disappointing that it doesn’t fly.

More of Abidhi’s Secret History at later.