All dishes / Middle East & North Africa
Marag (before tomato saloona) Period COrigin theory CVerified
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Marag, the lamb stew the nomads of the Gulf gathered around. The tomato that reddens today's saloona is not yet in this old layer. It was a stew before the tomato, its sourness carried by dried lime.
Verification highlight popular claim → verdict → evidence
Saloona today is a red stew simmered with tomato, and it is sometimes spoken of as though the Bedouin had already been eating it in that form. The tomato is a New World crop, and the earliest record of it in the Gulf dates only to 1908, with its arrival there falling somewhere in a window running from 1800 to 1908; before that no red fruit could go into the pot. What carried the sourness instead was loomi, the black-dried lime whose making and whose names belong to the Gulf and Oman, limoo amani and noumi basra, and which has served there as a keeping provision for more than a thousand years (Slow Food Ark of Taste; Arab News), some nine centuries ahead of the tomato. The lime tree itself is native to South and Southeast Asia and came west on Islamic-era trade, reaching the Mediterranean by the tenth century (Langgut), so the fruit is no wild native of the Gulf, though it long precedes the tomato there. The word runs the same way: maraq (مرق) is Classical Arabic for a broth-stew of meat, and such simmering is written down in the tenth-century Kitab al-Tabikh of Ibn Sayyar al-Warraq. The stew beneath saloona is old; the tomato in it came later, as a replacement, and this older stew's latest possible date is set, conservatively, at 1800 — the early edge of the tomato's arrival window.
The three gates
- Ingredient-supply gate
- There is no tomato in this older stew, and nothing else in the pot pins it to a late date. Lamb and goat and onion had long been settled in the Gulf. The souring came from loomi, the black-dried lime, and that one ingredient is not, strictly speaking, native to the Gulf: the lime is native to South and Southeast Asia and moved west with Islamic-era trade, reaching the Mediterranean by the tenth century, with the Gulf sitting upstream on that route and able to draw on it earlier still. Sourness could be had from other things as well, so the lime does not settle how old this stew may be. What separates this older stew from today's tomato-based Saloona is simply the tomato's arrival in the Gulf: it appears in a contemporary record only in 1908, in a window running from 1800 to 1908, and while the window's later end is solid, its earlier end rests on no Gulf-specific source. For that reason this older stew's latest possible date is set conservatively at 1800, the early edge of that window. The tomato may in fact have reached the table only in the early twentieth century, in which case this older stew remained the only form of the Gulf stew until then.
- Cooking-technique gate
- Simmering, as a stew.
- Venue gate
- Everyday food of the nomadic Bedouin.
Overview
Marag (murraq, مرق) is the simmered dish of the nomadic Bedouin who moved across the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula. Lamb or goat is stewed slowly with onion and dried provisions. Into the pot went ingredients that the desert life could obtain and that kept for a long time.
The sourness is carried by dried lime. On the Persian Gulf, the black-dried lime called loomi (also limoo amani or noumi basra) had long been in the kitchen as a keeping provision alongside salted and dried goods. It is an ingredient rooted in the land, lending deep sourness and fragrance to the fish and rice dishes of the Gulf. Combined with lamb, onion, dates, and the like, it was cooked up in a single pot. With only fire and a pot, it could be made wherever the journey led, a dish that was the very knowledge of the nomadic life.
This old layer would later gain the tomato and change into the red stew, saloona. Marag stands as its prehistory, preserving the shape of an age when sourness and color alike were the work of dried lime rather than tomato.
How we know
From today's image of saloona as a red stew simmered with tomato, it is sometimes told as though the dish were already complete in the age of the Bedouin. But the tomato is a crop that came the long way across the sea from the New World. In the Gulf, the red fruit first shows up in the record in a gazetteer of the whole region that the British government of India compiled and published in 1908 (Lorimer, Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf). It notes tomatoes being grown in the fields of Jahra, near Kuwait, and adds that the crop has "no Arabic name." At the start of the 20th century it was still a newcomer, without even a name of its own. When the tomato first reached the Gulf before then, no local source has been found to say.
What carried the sourness before the tomato was dried lime. Loomi has its home ground in the Persian Gulf and Oman, and food-history records report that it has been used as a Gulf keeping food for more than a thousand years (Slow Food Ark of Taste; Arab News), some nine centuries before the tomato first appears in the Gulf record. Further, the word maraq (مرق) itself is Classical Arabic for a meat-broth stew, and the record of such simmering reaches back to the time of the 10th-century Arabic cookbook Kitab al-Tabikh (Ibn Sayyar al-Warraq).
The history of the ingredient and the history of the word point to the same place. The Bedouin stew built on the sourness of dried lime came first, and the tomato was a much later replacement folded in afterward. The age of marag as a genre stands as it is, and no ground is to be found for lifting the red saloona form alone back into the nomadic age.
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