In Astoria, cooking the way the ancients did
Sylvia Carter
Goose For Maherpri
This method and the pomegranate-honey glaze can be used with duck or
squab instead of goose, with adjustments in timing. This adaptation of
El Sayed's recipe incorporates many of the seasonings that eliminate 36
hours of marinating.
1 (12-pound) goose
1 lemon, cut in half
Sea salt
1 medium onion, peeled and cut in half
1 bay leaf
2 cinnamon sticks
For glaze:
1 quart goose, duck or chicken broth
1 cup pomegranate juice
Pinch saffron softened in 1 tablespoon warm water
3 tablespoons honey
1 onion, cut up
3 cloves garlic, peeled
1 stick cinnamon
1 bay leaf
1/2 cup chopped coriander
1/2 cup chopped parsley
Salt and pepper, to taste
- Preheat oven to 425 degrees. Rinse goose and rub all over,
inside
and out, with juice from the 2 lemon halves and salt. Place in the
cavity lemon halves, onion, bay leaf and cinnamon sticks. Pour water to
about 2 inches high in roasting pan and place goose on a rack in the
roasting pan. Roast goose for 1 hour, then reduce heat to 400 degrees
and roast for about another hour and a half, or until tender.
- Meanwhile, combine ingredients for glaze and bring to a boil.
Reduce
to a simmer and cook until reduced by half. Strain glaze.
- During about the last half hour of cooking, baste goose with
glaze. When goose is done, remove to platter.
Note: Serve with bulgar or other grain cooked in broth, with dried
fruits such as raisins, cranberries, dates and figs. Toasted walnuts
may be scattered over the bulgar at the last minute.
Copyright © 2004, Newsday, Inc.
March 10, 2004
Museums and books tell the story of how Egyptians lived 5,000 years
ago, but Ali El Sayed has another way of telling those stories.
He cooks.
A while back, El Sayed, chef- owner of tiny Kabab Cafe on Steinway
Street in Astoria, adopted a "victual mummy" of a goose. That's not
virtual, but victual, as in something to eat in the afterlife.
The mummy, found in the tomb of the fan bearer Maherpri in Thebes, is
in the Cairo Museum. El Sayed first saw Maherpri's goose in Cairo. But
here, he proudly displays a photograph of it on the wall of his cozy
cafe, which is filled to overflowing with beautiful objects and
treasured things that reflect the owner's eclectic interests. One such
is a handcrafted wall hanging - there is no room on the wall, so it
covers a bench - of three geese, copied from a papyrus.
Maherpri, who lived in the 18th Dynasty, was someone El Sayed can
relate to.
"King Tutankhamun was interested in gold," said El Sayed. "I wanted a
guy like me, who would eat. For me, this was the man. This guy was
better than King Tut, because he told me how people lived. This was my
King Tut." Maherpri with his geese (there were others in his tomb)
seemed to value victuals more than gold or money, El Sayed said.
When El Sayed sees a museum exhibit about ancient people, he said he
thinks, "What kind of spice, what kind of vegetable did he have?" He
believes "it is easier to bring food to life than language."
El Sayed wanted to do more than simply give money to help preserve the
mummified goose. He wanted to prepare a goose that might have been
eaten by Maherpri in life.
Was ever there such a goose as El Sayed's?
The one I sampled was crisp-skinned, glazed in pomegranate and honey,
and served with vegetables and dried fruits that might have been known
to the ancient Egyptians - turnips, zucchini, daikon cooked in
hibiscus, dates, apricots, bamboo shoots, eggplant, yam, carrots,
leeks. The goose had been marinated for 36 hours in a heady mixture of
cinnamon sticks, nutmeg, lemon juice, cilantro, allspice, cinnamon, bay
leaves, parsley, sea salt and cumin.
El Sayed deep-fried a taro leaf because he could not find lotus leaves,
which would have been more traditional, and presented a serving of meat
atop it.
The goose fat was used to prepare succulent confits of quail and duck.
El Sayed also concocted a delicate soup of goose broth and dried fruit
with slices of goose liver in it.
That was just one version of goose in the ancient style. Moustafa
Rahman, El Sayed's brother, owns Mombar, a restaurant that contains
seven years' worth of Moustafa's art, a few doors up the street from
Kabab Cafe. The two men have served goose three times there, never
exactly the same way twice.
All have this in common: "No modern stuff," El Sayed said firmly. "No
potato, tomato, chocolate, nothing from the New World. ... You can
never understand a culture without understanding their food."
For ideas on how to prepare a goose in the style of the 18th Dynasty,
the time of Maherpri, El Sayed consulted several books, including "The
Egyptian Book of Death," a transliteration of The Papyrus of Ani. This
papyrus, from the 18th Dynasty, is the largest and best-preserved to
have survived from ancient Egypt; the original is in the British Museum.
In that book, he showed me a mention of goose, in hieroglyphics,
transliterated as "smen," and a passage in which the dead man, Ani,
asks for "milk, cake, loaves, cups of drink and meat of flesh." Another
passage mentions "cakes of saffron." Saffron became a flavor-note in
the broth El Sayed used to cook bulgar and barley to accompany the
goose.
Catharine Roehrig, a curator of Egyptian art at the Metropolitan Museum
of Art in Manhattan, said that Maherpri's position of fan-bearer to the
king was similar to that of a lady- in-waiting to a queen in later
times, and physical proximity to the king would have given him "close
access." Maherpri was not himself royalty, but as a "child of the
nursery" probably grew up alongside the king, she said.
Much is known, Roehrig said, about foods the ancient Egyptians had:
many spices, great quantities of fresh fruits and vegetables, dried and
salted meat. "We are fairly certain they domesticated ducks, geese and
pigeons," Roehrig said. "Those were very common in the 18th Dynasty."
Maherpri was buried with 20 to 30 birds, including geese, ducks and
pigeons, as well as a haunch of beef, Roehrig said. (The Maherpri
collection is all in Cairo, but other similar food-mummies, as well as
models of a slaughterhouse, a bakery and brewery and a "picnic boat,"
can be seen in the Egyptian collection at the Metropolitan. The
collection includes artifacts from the same period.)
Carvings, drawings and models depict geese, as well as ancient
Egyptians force-feeding geese. This might indicate that "Egyptians had
a taste for pate de foie gras," writes Hilary Wilson in "Egyptian Food
and Drink," a book that is part of a British Egyptology series. "A
roast goose was a very desirable dish for special occasions, such as
religious festivals, and was the equivalent of the modern Christmas
turkey," adds Wilson.
Nowadays, we do not bury food with the deceased. Maybe it is more
important to feast while we are here.
"He is not a king, he is not a man, he is a god," El Sayed said of
Maherpri. "I cook for God - the God inside you."
Kabab Cafe is at 25-12 Steinway St., Astoria, 718-728-9858.
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