The rice in muhammar is sweet. The fish eaten with it is salty. The pairing is not a coincidence or a matter of taste, but a practical solution to a problem every Kuwaiti household faced before oil: how do you eat fish you have dried in salt all summer?
The problem before refrigeration
Fishing drops off in winter. And because there were no refrigerators, people stored the warm-weather catch the only way available: salting it heavily and spreading it in the sun. The type named in this context is “khabbat”.
The result is fish that is edible, but salty to a degree that makes it hard to swallow on its own. So sweetened rice came in to balance the salt in the mouth, not to be a dessert at the end of the meal. That is the origin of the dish, and it explains why muhammar is served with fish specifically and with almost nothing else.
Four stages, four sweeteners
This account was recorded by Saleh Al-Ojairi in an article published in the Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Anba and republished by Al-Arabiya in February 2016. He orders the sweetening of muhammar in four stages that follow the country’s own history:
- Dates — before oil. Added straight to the rice.
- Date syrup — which replaced dates afterwards.
- Refined sugar — with the arrival of oil, when the dish was called “muhammar shakar”.
- Sugar caramelised over the flame — the present method. The sugar is burnt a little before being added to the rice, an attempt to return to the old depth of colour and flavour.
The name itself comes from the colour: muhammar, “reddened”.
What it is eaten with
The custom is to eat muhammar with fish broth, and sometimes with grilled fish. There is one very rare use Al-Ojairi mentions: the second day of Eid al-Adha, with grilled meat.
The recipe published today
The recipe Al-Anba published on its kitchen page represents the fourth stage, not the first:
- Two cups of rice · three cups of sugar · six cups of water
- A spoon of saffron · a spoon of ground cardamom
Wash the rice and soak it for an hour. Put the sugar in the pot and let it colour over a medium flame, then add the water and bring it to the boil. Add the rice, saffron and cardamom, cook on a high flame until the water evaporates, then on a low flame for a full hour. Serve hot alongside fish broth.
Note what has disappeared from that list: no dates, no date syrup, and no salted fish. The dish survived, and the problem it was invented to solve is gone.
Photo: grilled Kuwaiti fish, by Aya Saeed Al-Bitar, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0. The photo is not of muhammar itself.
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