In a Kuwait News Agency report on Kuwaiti winters before oil, the heritage researcher Saleh Khaled Al-Musbah lists what went on the table in the cold months. The list runs to fourteen names, and roughly half of them are no longer cooked by anybody.
Breakfast as he listed it
Aseeda, khabeesa, batheeth, lentil soup, rice soup, regag bread, nakhi, bajella, shinyali, and balaleet with egg. With them, tea, coffee, and tea with milk.
And lunch
Mamoosh, margooga, mahrooq sabaa, and maltoota.
What stayed and what went
Read the list twice and you will see it has split in two. What stayed: nakhi and bajella are still sold from a cart and a small shop, regag bread is still baked, margoog is a well-known dish, and balaleet is known by the same name.
What went: shinyali, mamoosh, mahrooq sabaa, maltoota, batheeth, aseeda and khabeesa. Names you hear from one generation and find in no restaurant and on no delivery menu.
And nobody wrote the recipes down
And here is the observation worth recording: the sources list these names and do not describe them. The KUNA report mentions them in a single line within a discussion of winter, and does not explain what they are made of or how. And a feature published by Al-Qabas in 2019 on popular dishes named mamoosh, mahrooq, qabout and aash in its own headline, then talked about why they had disappeared rather than how they were made.
Which means a dish disappears in two stages: it leaves the market first, then it leaves the language. These names are at the first stage.
And why they left the market
Al-Qabas’s writers asked the owners of popular food shops and the answers matched: rising rents, the rising price of nakhi and bajella from importers, and the new generation’s turn toward fast food. One of them said he was thinking of leaving the trade because the return no longer justified it against the competition.
Sources: the Kuwait News Agency report “Kuwaitis of the past warded off a harsh winter with what their environment gave them”, 31 December 2015, citing the researcher Saleh Khaled Al-Musbah; and the Al-Qabas feature on popular dishes, 26 December 2019.
Photo: a Kuwaiti hamsa, January 2011. By Fadyatef, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
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