I’d never heard of biryani before moving to the UAE. In fact, I don’t think I’d ever tried Arabic food.
To be honest, I didn’t know what I was getting into. I had a PhD in American Studies and I’d been a professor for several years, teaching in St. Louis, Washington DC, Korea, Okinawa, Tokyo, even exotic Northwest Ohio. But I didn’t know a thing. I was completely ignorant about the Middle East, its customs and cuisine.
But what did I need to know? I was offered a good job at a new university for Emirati girls in Dubai. My salary was tax-free. They gave me a free place to live. I was young and looking for adventure. Dubai was a bustling city with thousands of great restaurants and bars. The nightlife was becoming legendary. Beautiful beaches were just minutes from downtown. It was one of the safest and most luxurious places on earth.
So I packed up a few belongings, dumped the rest, and got on an airplane for the Gulf. It was September, 2001.
A few weeks later, the planes hit the towers. I learned that something had happened after work, on the elevator going up to my apartment on the 13th floor. We watched the news in horror and didn’t have the right verbs to describe what had happened. I saw the second plan hit the towers in real time. Once the phone lines could get through, I learned that an old friend had died, and then another.
My new colleagues and I had emigrated from all over the world. A few of them went back home the next day, September 12. They left furniture behind, appliances, and electronics. They had no jobs waiting back home, but they didn’t want to be in the Middle East. One of the terrorists was from Dubai, we heard. Local banks had laundered the money. The UAE, we were beginning to understand, wasn’t the perfect society as described in colorful, trifold brochures.
I stayed. If you’d asked me why, I’m not sure I could have told you the answer. I’d moved away from my home and left nothing behind. No house, no job, no personal belongings in a storage unit. Terrorism, politics, danger—I wasn’t thinking about any of this. Dubai might not be safe, I learned, but neither was America. There were no safe places. Everyone said the world had changed, but it hadn’t. We just learned to see how it had always been. Maybe the reason for staying was simple. I was looking for something new and I’d found it.
There were emails from the State Department every morning, warning us to avoid crowds, tourist attractions, and places of interest. Don’t tell anyone you’re American. Don’t wear red-white-and-blue or draw attention to yourself. There were armed guards outside my apartment for several weeks. A colleague from Texas wore an American flag shirt. He walked around with a cowboy hat and USA coffee mug. I avoided standing within his blast radius.
After a few weeks, things went back to normal. More or less. One of the first things I did was go to the khor, the creek that splits the city in two. Bur Dubai on one side, Deira on the other. I saw a sign for Heritage Village, an authentic recreation of a traditional Bedouin camp.
Perfect. I wanted to see what Dubai was like before they discovered oil and became wealthy overnight. Before glitz and glamor. Before they hired foreigners, like myself, to do all the jobs they didn’t want to do, or couldn’t. Before indoor ski resorts and man-made islands, before new skyscrapers started going up every week.
At Heritage Village I rode a camel, stepped inside a Bedouin tent, ate medjool dates, drank boiling tea with fresh mint leaves. They claim that hot tea cools you down. They’re wrong. It was early fall and the midday temperature was 115˚. After drinking the tea my sweat grew and I started chugging Gatorade.
Wooden dhows sailed by carrying goods to the port, as they did 500 years ago. This is one thing that hadn’t changed. Smaller abras carried men across the creek. I looked at traditional barasti huts, made from wooden uprights covered in woven palm fronds. I ate kofta, a sort of hot dog shaped meatloaf, heavily spiced.
I was underwhelmed. The food was terrible and the experience didn’t seem very real. Dubai, in its haste to expand, has a way of erasing its own history and forgetting who it was. The country’s historical sights and museums are sometimes questionable.
Enough. I started walking back toward the crooked streets of the city to get a taxi back to my apartment. Just outside the entrance to Heritage Village, squatting in a field of sand, was an old Bedu woman. Cooking over an open flame, she spoke to me in Arabic. I didn’t understand, but she lifted the lid off a cast-iron pot and steam rushed out. “Biryani,” she said.
Biryani is the national dish of the Emirates, but it came from Southern India over 500 years ago. Arab traders introduced a rice pilaf meal to the Subcontinent, which the locals developed, over time, into biryani, a spicy mix of rice, meat, vegetables and sometimes nuts or eggs. The dish then came back to the Middle East via merchants, seafarers and adventurers. Today, expatriates make up over 85 percent of the UAE’s population. More than 30 percent come India. In Dubai, the figure is closer to 50 percent. Most of these immigrants are laborers, waiters, housemaids and domestic cooks, so the complex relationship between India, the Arabian Gulf and food continues. An Indian woman often prepares biryani for the Emirati family that employs her to cook and clean. It’s a meal from her culture and theirs, everyone’s and no one’s.
Some don’t believe this version of events. Some say the dish came from Persia or India before the rise of the Mughal Empire. Others claim it was an Arab meal made by soldiers, who only possessed a single pot. They simply threw everything that was available inside, which is why biryani’s still a one-pot meal today. Biryani is an Urdu term that originated in Farsi, the language spoken throughout the Persian Empire, which in centuries past included parts of India and Arabia. Some say the word is derived from birenj, Farsi for “rice,” but others say it comes from biryan, which means “fried” or “roasted.” The precise etymology of the word, like the origin of dish itself, is unknown.
The woman wore a loose black abaya, the traditional robe of Emirati women, and a black shailah covered her hair. She wore jewelry of bright 24-karat yellow gold around her fingers, wrists and neck. She also wore a burqa, which in the Emirates refers to a face mask adopted by the women of more conservative families. The burqa covers the nose and half the face with a prominent hooked bill that resembles the beak of a falcon, the national bird.
“As salaam alaikum,” I said.
“Wa alaikum salaam,” she answered.
Peace be with you.
And also with you.
The woman touched the ground by her side, so I sat down. She reached behind her where a large steel coffee pot—a dallah—rested on a metal grill. The dallah was 18 inches tall. Bulbous at the bottom, pinched in the middle, slightly bigger again at the top. An hourglass figure. The handle, curved and billowing like a sail, was as long as the pot was tall. Dallahs work much like Italian moka pots, but the spout is much longer, at least eight inches, and crooked. As with the woman’s burqa, it looked like a falcon’s beak, though maybe it was supposed to evoke the crescent moon or even a khanjar, the traditional curved daggers found throughout the Gulf.
“Qahwa,” she said, pouring me a hot cup of coffee.
“Shukran.” Thank you. I’d now exhausted my Arabic vocabulary.
She handed me a tiny ornate cup and I took a sip. I expected something like Turkish coffee. Thick, black, sludgy, strong. A direct kick to the solar plexus. But this was entirely different. Pale, thin, brownish-yellow. The taste was floral and nuanced, lightly seasoned with ginger, cardamom and rosewater.
I learned, a few years later, that for Bedouins a cup of coffee was a symbol of friendship, community, socializing, and unity. Out in the desert, if you heard someone in the next tent crushing coffee beans and cardamom seeds with a mortar and pestle, you knew this was an invitation to come over.
When I finished the drink, she took my cup and handed me a plate of biryani.
It was simple, rustic and delicious. Biryani usually includes meat—chicken, mutton, beef, seafood—but rice is always the main ingredient. The recipe varies according to geography and personal preference, and the dish is popular throughout the Middle East and Subcontinent. In the Emirates, chicken is the most popular protein to use, and that’s how I first tried it. A bed of steamed basmati rice, which is a little burned and crunchy on the bottom. Several pieces of chicken on the bone. Fried onions. A few sultanas. A little oil or ghee and a dash of hot pepper sauce. Cardamom seeds, shelled and quartered. Salt, ginger, garlic, saffron. Fresh parsley on top. Biryani is similar to koshari, a staple of Egyptian street food, and comes from the same idea—take all the leftover food, throw it in a pot, and enjoy.
Over the next few years I would become a food writer and restaurant critic. I’d try biryani all over the UAE, the Middle East, Africa and the United States. But it all started that day on the khor, and it was never better. I’ve learned quite a lot about Emirati cuisine, but one thing I could never figure out was if the Bedouin woman was really a part of Heritage Village. Probably not. Her food and coffee were too authentic and too impeccable to be an Authentic Recreation of culture. It had to be the real thing. Maybe she was just stopping by the city for a few days to visit family or stock up on supplies. She was hungry so she sat down in the sand to make lunch. That’s how the Bedu have always lived.
I think about her whenever I eat biryani. I wonder what her name is and if she’s still alive. My Arabic vocabulary is much better now, but I when I think about this day I still utter the first word I learned. Shukran.
