shīrāz labān

Discussion

This recipe appears among a panoply of dairy recipes which include the basics of cheese and yogurt-making, thirteen recipes in all. The introduction to the chapter gives the basic instructions for cheesemaking that modern cheesemakers would easily recognize: Take milk, warm it slightly, then add rennet and wait about an hour for curds to form. It further includes directions on how to make a cheese mold ring from woven esparto grass, the same material use to make the sieve to drain the product (and instructions on making cheese specifically for Mujabbanat.) This particular recipe appears second, and is translated as “Very Thick Drained Yogurt” but I believe the modern diner would recognize it more easily as “fresh cheese.” The process for making cheese and yogurt is a continuum, and in this recipe our target is a very firm, un-soured product. For this reason, I suspect most people would think of this as “cheese” rather than “yogurt.” In the context of the author’s writings, however, it is clear that cheese is a thing that is pressed into a mold, even if unaged, whereas this is merely allowed to drain. I chose to serve this because it is straightforward and likely to be popular, but at the same time we are given explicit instructions on how to serve it and what with, giving diners direct access to as close to exactly as it would have been as we can manage.

The recipe itself is simple and does not require much interpretation. We take our rennet-curdled milk and hang it in a basket until all of the liquid is drained away. We know that this is different from Rayib, the more common word for yogurt, because the author tells us in the first recipe for Rayib, VI.2.1, that is has most of the liquid drained whereas shīrāz has all of the liquid drained. Once fully drained, we’re instructed to take it down and press it by hand through a hair sieve and add some salt. From there, we are to store it in a clean, dry earthenware vessel until needed, but later advised that it is “most delicious before it sours.” When it’s time to serve the shīrāz labān, the author directs us to take a shallow bowl, fill it to its rim, garnish it with olives and caperberries all around the rim, place preserved lemon in the center, and give the dish a sprinkle of nigella seeds and a drizzle of olive oil. We are also explicitly told to eat the dish by taking tender green onions, discarding the outer layer of each one and washing them in salted water, then scooping up a mouthful of the shīrāz with the green onion and eating it all.

The only significant departures I made from the recipe are ones of obvious modern convenience and safety that should have minimal impact on the final product. We used a non-homogenized, though low-temp pasteurized, whole cow’s milk and extracted rennet rather than whole ruminant stomach in a sachet. Since this project is in large part about the food product and the dining experience, we also used modern cheesecloth and wire strainers rather than building the tools described. While the sources do describe a number of different breads, which I did test several of, in the end this scale of event requires that we purchase good quality bread that is as similar as possible, as well as the preserved olives, caperberries, and lemons.