tharīdah muthawwamah

Discussion

Al-tujibi tells us that this dish is explicitly for the Nayrüz holiday, and that it is “Wonderful” (in at least one version of the FKH manuscript.) Additionally, while it is listed as a chicken dish, the author gives us other protein options, including rabbit – known to be abundant only in al-Andalus. Tharid is typically a modest dish, said even to be the Prophet Muhammad’s favorite, being at its heart stale bread and broth. This recipe, however, like everything for the holiday, is made extravagant by its ingredients if not its process.

We are instructed to begin by taking fat chickens or capons, but at the end of the recipe we’re also told we can use rabbits, hares, or partridges. We are to poach the meat in salt water, but not before taking a great deal of walnuts and painstakingly removing the skin. This results in two significant changes – a dish that is markedly less bitter and more white in color. Next, we take garlic (for which the dish is named) and we cook it “to remove their odor.” Without specific instruction, I chose to boil the garlic until soft, though roasting it seems like a valid and delicious interpretation that certainly meets the goal. Lastly, we take hard cheese and use a special tool that sounds identical to a modern rasp (in food we call it a micro-plane, but it is what it is) to render it into dust. Distinctions were seldom made in the texts about which types of cheese other than “hard” or “fresh” but we know that Cow, Sheep, and Goat were all possible.

From here, we set the grated cheese aside, and pound together the softened walnuts, garlic, and whatever cheese remains until it is “smooth as marrow.” I find this description fascinating because it is used many times in our sources, alongside recipes for faux marrow, but now mention or use of animal marrow itself. “Whatever cheese remains” poses a significant problem as there’s no way to deduce the measure of this. By the end, we have an extremely cheesy dish, so my advice to the modern cook is to only add the cheese in the later step, to taste, as indicated. Meanwhile, we also make a semolina flatbread as instructed from another recipe, and par-cook the protein before coating it oil and fishing cooking it by roasting in the oven.

Once we have all of the components, we’re directed to build the Tharid. First, we disjoint the protein fresh from the oven, and coat it in our sauce of walnuts and garlic. Then we layer the grated cheese and broken flatbreads in the serving dish until the bowl is full. Finally we take our walnut and garlic sauce and add enough cheese so that it is “thick and white due to the amount of cheese added to it.” Since this direction gives us a clear target, now we can try to divine an appropriate amount of cheese. We spread this across the top of the bread, as well as olive oil, and then we add broth from the cooking of the meat until it can be seen in the bottom. As we do that, we are to fold the whole thing, moistening the bread, and ultimately creating a sauce that coats it. We then top the dish with more cheese, our pieces of meat, more cheese, and more olive oil.

Overall, my interpretation does not stray far from the original directions. I chose rabbit to best match our theme for the event, and I chose Manchego because it is a readily available and well-loved regionally appropriate option to this day. A blended-milk cheese like Iberico may have been a more accurate choice that you could make. As mentioned above, we are only told to “cook” the garlic, so simmering it or roasting it are both valid options. For the flatbreads, after testing the recipes from the texts, I was able to find a commercially produced modern product that gave nearly identical results, so no instructions for making it appear here.

My biggest departure from the directions is the final assembly. After making it twice in the way described, it became clear to me that there is a purpose to it, but one we can accomplish another way that is especially helpful when producing a large quantity. By layering the cheese and bread, and then adding the broth, with the sauce on top, two things happen – the broth has a moment to moisten the bread before being incorporated into the sauce, and to heat the cheese enough to make it easy to incorporate. As a bonus, it uses one less dish and requires one less transfer of food between dishes.

For my recipe, I moisten the flatbread pieces with broth directly, then fold the flatbread with the sauce, and coat the meat with the sauce before placing it on top. In the original recipe, the sauce coating the meat does not have cheese added. I thought at first this might be intentional to preserve some flavor variation, but layering more cheese above and below the meat in the final preparation defeats that idea. It is more straightforward to finish the sauce to start, and again significantly better when scaling up the recipe for a large event.