Ten Year Anniversary

Last night for dinner I cooked a family favorite and we were contemplating how long ago I found this recipe. We realized it was the tenth anniversary of Harira. (tambourines and oboes playing...) Harira is a traditional North African soup that is served in the evenings to break the fast of Ramadan. I found the recipe in the Washington Post food section in November 1997 and it looked terrific. It was filled with all my favorite foods: onions, garlic, lentils, tomatoes and cilantro. It just begged to be cooked, and from the first time I served it to my family, it was a hit. It remains everyone's favorite after all these years. Just google it and you will find pages of recipes and commentary. It is a food somewhat like potato salad: there is a basic, agreed upon form, but everyone's mother has her own personal version and there isn't just one "Potato Salad". Harira seems to be this way, too.

The recipe I use calls for lamb chunks, but since lamb was uncommon where I lived when I got this recipe, I finally found blade cut lamb shoulder (a really inexpensive cut) and I brown it, but then I cook it with the bone in for the first part of the recipe, and take it out and cut it up into chunks later on. Also, many of the recipes I found call for celery. Mine doesn't have celery. Some of the recipes thicken the soup only with the egg/lemon juice mix; mine calls for flour/water paste plus lemon juice/egg. The basics are: tomato, chick peas, lentils, noodles and spices. My friend calls it "air soup" because it uses so little of each inexpensive ingredient and yet ends up being a delicious and filling hearty meal.

Our daughter who lived in Morocco serving in the Peace Corps is visiting, and as we ate last night's harira she told us about the soup she consumed there. It turns out my recipe is the Rich Lady version. Most of the people whose tables she shared made it meat-less just because they couldn't afford to put meat in an everyday dish. It is a more utilitarian food there--being served every day for a month. But it gave her bonus points with her families that her mother cooked harira, too.

Once I was teaching a cooking class in Relief Society and my theme was using "The Three Friends: Beans, Legumes and Grains". I was telling my audience about harira and one sister turned to my other daughter, just home from a mission in Spain, and asked her (with great skepticism) "Oh, come on--did you kids really eat this?" My daughter replied solemnly, "If mom had been willing to make it for three meals a day, every day, we'd have gobbled it up---it's that good." I rest my case. And the ladies sampled it and were converted.