Kofta Period BOrigin theory BVerified

The heart of kofta is lamb. Sheep were long-established animals on Middle Eastern land, and their meat, like the spices worked into it, was a material the region had always had. The meat is beaten, ground smooth, shaped into balls or logs, then grilled or simmered; it is this handwork of mincing that gives kofta its form. The Persian word kūfta, from which the dish takes its name, describes exactly that act of pounding.

Traces of kofta can be followed through the written record. The Kitāb al-Ṭabīkh that al-Baghdādī compiled in 1226 records related preparations, among them nāranjīya: minced red meat formed into balls the size of oranges and finished by dipping them three times in egg yolk beaten with saffron. An older cookbook of the same name, compiled by Ibn Sayyār al-Warrāq in tenth-century Baghdad, is said to contain meatballs as well. The idea of beating meat into shape is older still. The Roman cookbook of Apicius gives minced-meat patties wrapped in caul fat and roasted, and similar dishes are said to have existed in Byzantium. It is handwork that turns up in records from the Mediterranean to western Asia.

Under the Abbasids, Persian cooking blended into the Arab table, and kofta travelled with the expanding Islamic world: to the Indian subcontinent, Central Asia, the Middle East, the Balkans and North Africa. Turkish köfte belongs to this line, born when the Persian kūfta passed into the Ottoman language. The Levant's kibbeh is a sibling of kofta, going back to the same idea of pounding and kneading meat.

Ask where kofta came from, and the road its name has travelled and the history of the dish itself give two different pictures.

The source of the name is clear. Kofta comes from the Persian kōfta, from kōftan, 'to pound, to grind'. Turkish köfte and Urdu kofta both came by way of this word. The etymology, at least, does lead back to Persia.

The dish itself is less certain ground. The meatballs in the cookbooks of al-Warrāq in the tenth century and al-Baghdādī in the thirteenth are often cited as the oldest evidence for kofta. Yet in A. J. Arberry's 1939 English translation of al-Baghdādī, read from beginning to end, the meatballs are never once called 'kufta'. They are rendered as 'cabobs', and the dishes carry transliterated names such as Mudaqqaqat Hamida. A word missing from the translation is not proof that it is missing from the Arabic original, and what al-Warrāq's tenth-century cookbook calls its meatballs is a separate question that remains open. It was modern translators and food historians who attached the name 'kofta' to the meatballs in these cookbooks. What the cookbooks do show is that such meatballs were being made by the thirteenth century at the latest; they do not say when or where the dish was born.

Shaping minced meat and cooking it, as noted above, appears in an ancient Roman cookbook and is said to have existed in Byzantium as well: handwork found across regions, with no particular birthplace that can be pinned down. As for the name, a 1665 work by Mulla Nusrati is cited as an early example of the word kofta in Urdu. In English print, an early example is the appendix to Herklots's translation of Qanoon-e-Islam, published in London in 1832, which lists dishes such as 'Kofta Polaoo'. The name leads back to Persian. But whether the medieval meatballs descend from the handwork of the ancient Mediterranean has not been established, and the dish cannot be said to have been born at any single point. It is more honest to leave the question of kofta's origins open.