Muhamara, Yllera, etc.

One day during our vacation last summer in the Stockholm archipelago, my wife and I made our way from our island cottage to a suburb of the city called Haninge, to do some shopping at the mall there. After walking awhile through this characterless locale, we decided to stop at at an undistinguished-looking place called Café Roma for a coffee and something to eat. Perusing the menu-boards we noticed that they served a Lebanese meal, which sounded interesting: some kind of marinaded chicken, I think, with grilled vegetables. It was all very tasty, but what really caught our attention was the delicious dip that accompanied it, a reddish paste that, the proprietor explained, was kind of like a Lebanese pesto. We asked the man if he’d sell us a bowlful of it (and one of his equally good hummus) that we could take back to our island, and he happily obliged.

Post-vacation, I figured out the the dip was called muhamara (aka mouhamara or moharama), and tracked down a couple of recipes for it on-line. Alas, my first attempt to re-create it failed, owing to what must have been a typo in the quantity of lemon juice in the first recipe I followed. Recently, though, I tried again, with much better results. Last night, I used the recipe from a book we bought only a few days ago, during a quick trip to Malmö, Crazy Water, Pickled Lemons (‘Enchanting Dishes from the Middle East, Mediterranean and North Africa’). From the book, I’ve learned that muhamara is often served with other little snack-type dishes which are collectively called mezze.

So, last night, I halved and de-seeded four red (bell-) peppers and a red chili pepper, and my wife set about them with a blowtorch to blacken & blister their skins such that they could be readily rubbed off under running water. I toasted 125g of shelled walnuts in a dry pan, and put these and the peeled peppers into a food processor with a couple of chopped garlic cloves, 25g of dry breadcrumbs, 2tbsp of pomegranate syrup, 2tsp of ground cumin, a couple of pinches of chili powder (our chili pepper being of the mildest kind) and some salt and pepper. While blending that lot together we added 125ml of extra virgin olive oil, and, tasting as we went, added lemon juice until it seemed just about right. And after that, we rustled up a bowl of hummus, too.

A different holiday memory was evoked by the arrival of a parcel of booze we’d ordered from vinosencasa.com in Spain. This contained a couple of bottles of the Torres white wines my wife had enjoyed during our stay in Catalonia two years ago, and should have contained two bottles of the Yllera red that I’d developed a taste for during our week in Andalucía the year before that - alas, one of the two broke in transit. I opened the surviving bottle and savoured a couple of glasses before going to bed. Also in the parcel, but not yet uncorked, a bottle of Conde de Osborne Spanish solera brandy, the one in the Salvador Dalí-designed bottle…

Lilacs

Lilacs (1900) is one of my favourite works by the Russian painter Mikhail Vrubel - although I’d have to add that I only know this artist’s paintings from images in books, and on-line. His famous works are held by Russian and Ukrainian museums, and I have never visited either country: Lilacs is in the Tretyakov Gallery, in Moscow.

  

The book from which I scanned the images above is a Soviet-era publication (compiled by one S. Kaplanova, and issued by Aurora Art Publishers, Leningrad) with texts in English, French, German and Russian. I noted with interest that the Russian for ‘lilacs’ is, if my exceedingly shaky grasp of the Cyrillic alphabet did not mislead me, something like ‘sireny’. I wondered then whether the figure in the painting might be a siren of some kind, and her presence on the canvas due to a straighforward play on words. Having said that, her gesture seems more one of farewell, than a beckoning one. The accompanying text in the book, while poetic, offers no further clue:

The cool, fragrant clusters of lilac blossoms set off the woman’s pale face, wistful and enigmatic. A cold violet light emanates from the blossoms, spectrally luminous in the darkness of the night. Their beauty is the beauty of life…

lilac Obs. Fr. (now lilas ult. f. Pers. līlak (whence also Turk. leylâk) var. of nīlak bluish, f. nīl blue + dim. suff. -ak - SOED.

Common lilac is a native of the northern Balkan Peninsula. Around 1560, the German ambassador in Constantinople sent off specimens to Vienna, and the culture quickly spread to the rest of Europe […] Etymology: Gr. syrinx, tube or flute, because of the hollow, marrow-filled branches; Lat. vulgaris, common. Like jasmine, lilac belongs to the olive family - source here.

The lilacs in the parks and gardens in the town where we live are now all in full bloom, and the night air is rich with their fragrance. I took a few photographs of the lilacs in the park near our apartment the other evening: the images above are small snippets cut from these.