Kibbe Continued….

Well that was a spirited debate.

It took place offline, but the folks who wrote in about kibbe were gracious enough to let me share their comments. First up was Mimi Sheraton, former New York Times restaurant critic and the author of, I don’t know, 300 books….slightly edited version of our exchange follows:

MIMI: Grind kibbe? Tsk, tsk…in 1960 when I was in Beirut and spent a few mornings in the restaurant kitchen of a famous chef there, I was taught that the meat for kibbe must be worked in a stone mortar and pestle…never a grinder…and I brought back two cookbooks then that say the same thing…ever heard of that? Big stone mortars and pestle, first pulping meat, then working in the rest..I love kibbe in all of its forms, but especially raw…very good here at Ilili…Best, Mimi

ME: Mimi, this is so interesting. I have not heard of the mortar and pestle.

MIMI: The book says the mortar and pestle are called the jorn and the modakka…Book..”Food from the Arab World” by Marie Karam Khayat and Margaret Clark Keatinge..publ. in Beirut (in Eng.) in 1959…Just FYI the other book is by the chef Georges Reyes who was famous at the Bristol Hotel in Beirut.

ME: are they talking about working the meat with the mortar and pestle, or working all the ingredients together in the mortar and pestle?

MIMI: First work cubed lamb to paste in the m & p..then remove and pound onion with salt in m & p also to pulp…then combine meat and onion and pound some more…then knead washed, squeezed dried bulghor into meat and back into m & p, to pound yet again…salt to taste…dip mallet in ice water intermittently during pounding…they say properly prepared kibbeh must be pounded for at least 1 hour and that the whole neighborhood knows when kibbe is being made. rhythmic motion by the way…also say time can be shortened by grinding meat a couple of times before pounding in m & p but you can tell it’s a compromise.

ME: Wow. That is not what i grew up with. Maybe it was a regional thing? (or maybe my grandmother/aunts were very, very lazy…)

MIMI: Or maybe peculiar to Lebanon at that time.

Turns out that was the answer. Before I heard from Mimi, I checked in with Anissa Helou, an award-winning Lebanese journalist and cookbook author who runs a London cooking school. I asked Anissa what the texture of kibbe was like these days in the Middle East — whether something had changed in the way people prepared it since my Sittau’s parents came over. She told me that “the kibbe has to be very smooth but not without some texture.” Mostly she was horrified that we froze the meat. “Did your sitto freeze the meat on purpose?” she asked with barely veiled alarm. Though I never asked, I’m guessing it arrived frozen because she was bringing it to our house from her butcher in Brooklyn, about an hour’s drive. Being a grandmother, she probably froze it to make sure it wouldn’t spoil during the cross-county journey. I asked Anissa how many times she grinds her kibbe:

ANISSA: I mince it in the food processor which is not ideal but I don’t have a meat grinder, although most of the time, I get my Lebanese butcher to prepare the meat for me and he grinds it twice. [okay, me interjecting here -- SEE!!! TWICE!!! Take that Lebanese butcher guy....] It has to have a smooth texture but not so smooth as to not have any texture. I guess it’s a fine line and this is why the food processor is not ideal as you can let it go on too long and the meat then becomes too smooth. Not sure about frozen though. We would never eat nayeh if the meat has been frozen.

ME: And what about using mortar and pestle to make the kibbe?

ANISSA: This is a hundred years ago. Well, I am exaggerating but hardly anyone pounds the meat now. Only in remote villages.

So, one mystery solved: mortar and pestle was the way it used to be done. But that doesn’t answer why kibbe, at least to my mind/taste, seems to have become a mush in many restaurants and even butcher shops in US. I will make this my life’s work….

Thanks, Mimi and Anissa, for writing and for allowing me to share your comments.

photo courtesy of “A Taste of Syria”