Mulukhiyah

Mulukhiyah is a leaf, Corchorus olitorius, also known in English as Jew’s mallow. Boiled, it thickens the broth into something slippery and mucilaginous, close to cooked okra. The taste is faintly bitter. On a Damascus table that texture is not a flaw to be worked around; it is the dish. The leaf is sold fresh and dried, and the two do not taste the same.

The Levantine version and the Egyptian one

They share a name but not a plate. In Damascus, and in the Levant generally, the leaves are chopped and sautéed in oil with garlic and coriander; in Egypt the same leaf becomes something closer to a soup. The Levantine method boils meat or chicken in a separate pot and keeps the stock aside. The leaves and the coriander are then cooked in that stock. It arrives with white rice and fresh lemon, and vinegared onions and toasted bread may be set down beside it.

A short historical note

The dish appears in medieval Arabic cookbooks, among them the recipe collection of Ibn al-Adim of Aleppo. The Egyptian historian al-Maqrizi records it as the favourite dish of the Umayyad caliph Muawiya. The Fatimid ruler al-Hakim banned mulukhiyah in 1005 and his successor al-Zahir lifted the ban, but the Druze, who hold al-Hakim in a particular regard, still observe it and do not eat mulukhiyah. That is why the dish is absent from tables in the Druze areas of Syria.

Where to eat it

On the lunch menu of the pot restaurants that cook home food, when it is in season. It is not written up every day, so ask what the day’s pot holds. The dried leaf is sold in packets by spice merchants and is light enough to take home; the fresh leaf turns up in bunches at greengrocers in season.