Refactoring cuisine: how an Iraqi stew sailed to Singapore | josh iza.ac

There is a specific, sharp mist that hangs in the air when you slice into a calamansi. The fruit is<br>small, usually no larger than a marble, with a thin green skin that yields an abrasive, floral<br>acidity — something halfway between a key lime and a sour mandarin1. Last week, standing in my kitchen,<br>I halved a handful of them and squeezed their juice into a Dutch oven full of simmering chicken and<br>okra2.

Calamansi limes for sale in Vancouver’s Granville market.

The dish was bamya asam. If you consult a standard cookbook, bamya is a<br>Middle Eastern staple, a slow-braised lamb and okra stew whose character relies on a deeply savory<br>tomato base heavily perfumed with garlic. In the middle east, its signature sourness comes from<br>lemon juice (typical in Iraq or Anatolia), tamarind (as found in southern Iran), or can even be<br>coaxed out of the dusty, fermented acidity of noomi basra — sun-dried black limes3.

My pot, however, smelled reminiscent of the Southeast Asian tropics.

I have written previously about the<br>internet’s neurotic policing of culinary borders. God help the poor soul<br>who posts a carbonara with a splash of<br>cream on Reddit; you will be digitally excommunicated before the pasta water boils. Strangely<br>enough, we tend to measure dishes we are less familiar with (or did not grow up with) with a level<br>of cartographic exactitude. Meanwhile, the dishes we grew up with are deeply authentic to us,<br>shaped by the subsitutions and tastes of our parents and grandparents.

The calamansi I have readily available to me in Toronto.

So why was I, an Australian in Toronto who grew up in Singapore, making a Middle Eastern stew with a<br>citrus from the Philippines4? To<br>trace the lineage of the stew bubbling on my stove requires engaging with a different metric<br>entirely. It requires Plutarch. (I mean, not really. But I enjoy being superfluous.)

In the late first century, the Greek philosopher Plutarch recorded a thought experiment concerning the<br>mythological King Theseus. If a wooden ship is preserved in a harbor, and over the decades its<br>decaying planks are replaced one by one with new timber, is it still the ship of Theseus? When<br>applied to diaspora cooking, the paradox is identical. If you cross an ocean and substitute a<br>recipe’s ingredients to accommodate a new geography, at what point have you cooked an entirely<br>different meal? Which one is the ‘authentic’ dish?

The Ship of Theseus paradox is so old it has become<br>almost a cliché5, and these days is applied so often it loses a lot of its original<br>wonder6. However, it’s a nice reminder<br>that food authenticity is not very well defined. Variations of a dish exist in both space and time,<br>turning a clear categorization into a messy (and beautiful) family tree.

And this is essentially the backstory of my Iraqi-Jewish-Singaporean stew. To understand why a<br>tropical lime has any business being squeezed over an Iraqi stew, you have to trace a maritime<br>route that spans centuries and oceans.

Beginning in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Baghdadi Jewish merchants began leaving the<br>Ottoman Empire. Following the trade winds of the opium and spice routes, they established thriving<br>commercial hubs in India — primarily in Bombay, Cochin, and Calcutta. They brought with them the<br>dietary laws of Kashrut and the culinary memory of the Tigris river valley.

Culinary memory does not easily survive migration unchanged. It doesn’t even survive stasis<br>unchanged. Even back in Baghdad, the Jewish community had already differentiated their bamya from<br>the standard Iraqi Muslim preparation. While standard bamya was very savory-sour, Iraqi Jews<br>heavily favored a more sweet-and-sour (‘hamedh-helu’) profile, balancing the tartness of the dish<br>with date syrup or sugar. The standard chunks of stewed lamb or beef were also often replaced with<br>kubbeh (or kibbeh or kubba, depending on your preferences), a semolina dumpling containing<br>minced beef.

When the diaspora reached India, Baghdadi Jewish households frequently employed local Indian cooks.<br>According to the Leviathan Jewish Journal, this cross-cultural kitchen dynamic fundamentally<br>altered the diaspora’s food. The cooks took that foundational sweet-and-sour instinct and matched it<br>with local sugar and spices. The traditional stew underwent its first major metamorphosis, evolving<br>into bamya khattah — a sweet-and-sour okra stew that mirrored the Baghdadi palate through an Indian lens (and could be when bone-in chicken pieces became much more common in the dish, as opposed<br>to simply kubbeh). This also seems to be the point where fresh mint — thrown into the stew at<br>the last minute — became a defining flavour profile, as opposed to an optional extra.

The ship, however, was not done sailing. As the British Empire’s trading network expanded, the<br>Baghdadi Jewish community moved further east, eventually dropping anchor in the swampy heat of<br>colonial Singapore7. It was a...