That Translator Can Cook: Lahm bi Ajeen/Sfiha
Open-faced meat pies or flatbread loaded with ground beef or lamb, onion, garlic, parsley, cilantro, tomatoes, pine nuts, and other various spices.
Image Source: YouTube
I’ve love lahm bi ajeen-so delicious! Just like manakish, you can’t just have one. Sometimes, I can’t eat them because people use tahini (sesame seed paste)-that’s how I learned to ask if something had sesame OR tahini rather than only ask about sesame.
Image Source: Hia Magazine
Lahm bi ajeen (lit. ‘meat with dough’) and sfiha seem to be almost the same recipe, except I see lahm bi ajeen is typically flat whereas sfiha’s corners tend to be pinched together. Like manakish, lahm bi ajeen originated in the Levent centuries ago. Nawal Nasrallah; an independent Iraqi scholar, researcher, and food writer; describes her findings on its history:
“The earliest recipe I could lay my hands on occurs in 13th-century Aleppan cookbook Al-Wusla ila ‘l-Habeeb (الوصلة الى الحبيب في وصف الطيبات والطيب) written by the well-known Syrian historian Ibn Al-'Adeem (d. 1262). The recipe is just one line long, but it certainly points to our dish, ‘Meat is cut, spread on flattened discs of dough, and then put in the brick oven furn.’ (p. 2:556)”
Image Source:
In the late 19th century, the people who immigrated to Brazil from the Middle East, particularly from Lebanon and Syria, brought sfiha with them, and it has become one of the most popular snack/fast food throughout Brazil. Brazilians call it “esfiha” or “esfirra” (but apparently those are pronounced the same way [es-fee-ha]?) and it is the signature food of Habib’s, a well-known Middle Eastern fast food chain in Brazil. (Does anyone else find the logo problematic?) Traditional sfiha remains popular, but Brazilians has put their own twist on them as well: “ground beef, ricotta, sausage, sausage and cream cheese, escarole with mozzarella, escarole with bacon, chicken, chicken with cheddar, tuna, provolone, four cheese, carne do sol, palm heart, and palm heart with mozzarella.”
This type of cultural adaptation is common all over the world, this fascinating article examines food in a global context, more specifically how cultures adapt not colonize food. According to the author, “it seems that the success of McDonald’s in China and Japan parallels the success of sushi in America and other industrialized Western nations. These nations are not engaging in a back-and-forth colonization as much as they are utilizing each other’s native food products for their own purposes.” They also suggest that health trends can influence a certain cuisine’s popularity: “Sakamoto and Allen attribute the beginnings of the sushi craze on the American West Coast to ‘the new emphasis on healthy eating based on vegetables and fish rather than meat, alternative lifestyle movements such as ecology and hippie movements.’”
Here is how to make this delicious and hearty snack (recipe belongs to Hala)!
Steps
Knead the dough ingredients together and let them rest for an hour and a half.
Mix the filling ingredients together, then roll out the dough with a rolling pin.
Cut out large or small circles, whichever you prefer; place the filling on top; and fold the edges up a bit.
Arrange the lahm bi ajeen on a baking pan that has been greased with a little bit of oil and put it into the oven until the meat is brown and cooked through.
Take the pan out of the oven and garnish the lahm bi ajeen with the lemon slices. Serve with aryan. Bon appetit!
Ingredients
Dough:
2 cups of flour
1 tablespoon of yeast
½ cup of oil
A dash of salt
Filling:
500g of ground meat
2 tomatoes
1 onion
A dash of red pepper flakes
1 teaspoon of salt
¼ teaspoon of black pepper
Lemon slices for garnish
Translators’ Discussion
Do you differentiate between lahm bi ajeen and sfiha, or is it a matter of dialect?
When I looked up شرائح الحامض, most of the sources indicated lemon slices, but when I took a look at the recipe photo, it has lime slices. What are the terminology differences between lemon and lime, besides the obvious terms that use “أخضر” for limes?