Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
jwāz, dwāz , clearly expresses this idea;
however, the interested parties probably
do not take into account the imbalance
which they create in thus adding lipids
to the proteins and glucoses contained in
bread. It should be stressed however that
not everyone was in a position to eat it
regularly, and even today, it still consti-
tutes a rare luxury for certain particularly
impoverished populations; for the more
affluent, the basis of the diet is often, in
many regions, boiled rice, ground corn
( burul ) or kuskus.
Since the classical period and, to a large
extent, to the present day, there have
existed various categories of bread which
can be reduced to the following, while it
may be noted that the dialectical vocabu-
lary, extremely variable and rich, deserves
to be the object of a linguistic-geographi-
cal study, whose ethno-sociological results
could yield useful information:
- barley bread, more coarse, mention
of which appears frequently in the adī;
ascetics judged it to be sufficient, but
many poor families even today, must be
content with it; in North Africa, kesra , and
in the Near-East, ur , are often nothing
more than pancake of barley-flour, pure
or mixed with a little wheat-flour;
- to this list it is appropriate to add the
bread manufactured, in times of hardship,
with flour of maize, millet or sorghum
( ura ) or even of some wild plant, such
as same in Jordan.
Apart from various pastries based on
wheat-flour, bread was presented, with
variations on which we cannot dwell here,
in two principal forms;
- ruā , very thin, was cooked on a
slab of iron (or later, of stone) heated on
a hearth or a brazier. This slab, called
āba/ābil in the Middle Ages, is still in
use in the Near East where it is convex
and bears the name ā; in the Marib,
similar baking is not unknown, but a type
of earthenware casserole is more often
used, and bread thus prepared is called
marū or malū ;
- raīf , or (from Persian) arda/ara
is a round bread ( muawwar ) quite thick
and cooked in an oven. But there is a dis-
tinction there between the domestic and
the communal oven. The former ( tannūr ;
currently ābūn/ābūna ) has the form of an
upturned jar without a base or of the frus-
trum of a cone open in the upper part;
it is heated by means of embers placed
inside and the raw dough is spread on the
sides, on the outside. In certain regions
there is also still to be found a tannūr dug
into the earth, while in Jordan ābūn refers
to a small construction in which is placed
a sort of cooking-pot, surrounded by
embers to cook the dough in the interior.
In encampments the oven is replaced-by
a pottery plate ( annāy or ammā in Tuni-
sia) which is heated on a brazier ( kānūn ) or
even, on occasion, by heated stones.
- in Iraq, rice cultivated in the region
of Bara was used probably by a limited
number of bakers (among whom a popu-
lar poet, al-ubzaruzzi was to become
famous) to make a bread which was quite
cheap and accessible to the poorer classes,
as well as to those who lived an ascetic
life-style; in the other regions where it was
cultivated, notably in Palestine and Egypt,
rice was more often consumed in other
forms;
- white bread, made with pure wheat-
flour ( uwwārā ) was in general confined to
the more affluent families, but it seems to
have been in widespread use in a num-
ber of countries, such as Palestine and
Egypt; physicians actively recommended
it, although it was less nutritious than
- bread of coarse-ground flour ( ukār
and vars.) which was consumed by people
of less means;
- bread made from common wheat,
perhaps mixed with a little barley-flour;
- semolina bread ( samī/samīd );
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