It’s All Fenugreek

This is no country for catching up on your sleep. The muezzins start calling to prayer around 3:30 a.m., and it’s not the dreamy, yearning muezzin call of other Muslim countries. It’s a virtual order to get out of bed, blared out on over-amped minaret loudspeakers. And the local time is 12 hours away from ours to begin with.

How perfect. Yemen, the country that gave the world coffee, is the land of insomnia.

Yemen was closed to visitors until just a few decades ago. It may not have a lot of tourist amenities and it may rank 99th among the world’s nations as a tourist destination (just between those holiday hot spots Myanmar and Burkina Faso), but it’s a fascinating place, notable for spectacular mountain landscapes and distinctive architecture.

It’s also one of the poorest countries in the world, and about a quarter of its potential work force leaves the country to find jobs. There are thousands of Yemenis in California, mostly working in the San Joaquin Valley as farm laborers. Here in Sana, a guy was introduced to me as somebody who had lived in Stockton for a while.

“Really?” I asked him in English. “In the valley?”

“Yep,” he said dryly, with a perfect Okie twang. “In the Slot. In the Big Hole.”

Yemen does have one thing notably scarce in the rest of the Arab world--rain. Located on the edge of the Indian Ocean, it gets monsoon rains in the summer. The steep Yemeni highlands, heavily terraced for agriculture, are able to support an amazing 13.5 million people, if just barely.

As a remote population center, Yemen has a distinctive cuisine, though one limited by the country’s poverty. There’s a unique Yemeni grain, white sorghum (dhura baida), which also provides farmers with cooking fuel and fodder for their animals. The hillside terraces are full of white sorghum plants, which look a lot like cornstalks with popcorn balls in place of corncobs.

The peasants basically live on a tasty sorghum porridge called ‘asida, which they may dress up with melted butter or a yogurt-and-herb sauce. From white sorghum you can also make lahu^h, a crepe-like sourdough bread much like the Ethiopian injera, only with a different flavor and a subtly crunchy texture.

For company, particularly in Sana, a meal will begin with bint al-sahn, a layered wheat bread topped with butter and honey. To honor the guest, the honey will preferably be rich-flavored Yemeni honey, considered to have medicinal powers. (There are boutiques in Sana specializing in surprisingly expensive domestic honey.)

This may be followed by shfut, an appetizing mixture of lahuh bread, yogurt and herbs. There may be rice too, but since rice is an expensive import, it is often served as a dish by itself, rather than on the side.

The main course is a spicy stew of meat with various vegetables, topped with a pale greenish froth of ground leeks and fenugreek. The fenugreek has been soaked in water for four hours, which removes much (though not all) of its bitterness, and it ends up a little sweet. The resulting flavor combination seems bizarre to us, because the stew it’s served on is often spiced with cumin and red pepper. Think of chili con carne topped with a frothy, bitterish apple sauce.

In much of the country, this sort of stew is called hilba, which is also the word for fenugreek. In Sana, it’s called salta, from a verb meaning “to dip,” because you eat it by dipping pieces of bread into a shallow communal pot blackened from long use. The pot is always carved out of soapstone and looks at first glance more like an ashtray than a cooking utensil.

This is the classic cookery of the western highlands. In eastern Yemen, a huge, largely barren region known as the Hadramaut, people make different dishes, a spicy stew called mandi, for instance, which is also known in Saudi Arabia.

There are influences from India and Indonesia in the Hadramaut, reflecting long trading and political contacts. The Kathiri Sultans of the Hadramaut traditionally provided personal guards to the Nizams of Hyderabad, who used to rule much of central India. In photos, these Hadrami Guards are wiry, tough-looking little guys in wrap-around plaid skirts with big daggers at their waists.

European and Indian influences are seeping north from relatively cosmopolitan Aden, the former South Yemen. Oddly, an Indian word for bread, roti, is used for a chewy French-style sandwich bread (pain de mie) that comes in long, skinny loaves. Meanwhile, on the Red Sea coast, which has one of the most unpleasant climates in the world--fierce heat and stifling humidity in summer, howling winds in winter--people understandably eat a lot of fish.

Unlike a lot of Middle Eastern countries, Yemen has a flourishing restaurant tradition. But the restaurants don’t serve elegant food. Far from it; they’re fast-food restaurants with a vengeance. If you go into one at lunch time, you’ll see a surging chaos of people shouting orders to harried waiters, mobbing the sink to wash their hands and wolfing their food as soon as it arrives.

They’re in a hurry to get something in their stomachs because a high proportion of Yemenis spend their afternoons chewing a mildly stimulating narcotic called qat as they socialize. At a qat “chew,” little is served but a spiced tea (gishr) made from coffee husks.

At these deafening lunch counters, you can get salta, of course. You also may be able get a few other dishes, such as marag (braised lamb shanks), shurba (chicken in soup) and mshakkila (cold stewed vegetables), all seasoned with the “yellow spices” cumin and turmeric. On the side, you have a condiment called s’hug or saha^wig, which in Sana is like a Mexican salsa of tomatoes, onions and peppers. You also can order a range of very good breads, such as malu^j (a long tandoori bread) and mlawwah (a flaky multilayered bread cooked on a griddle).

Yemenis also eat a variety of street foods. The Yemeni version of fu^l (boiled dried fava beans) is tastier than the original Egyptian version, because it adds saha^wig toward the end of cooking--and quite a bit of melted butter, up to a third as much as the quantity of beans.

Some street food stands specialize in mtabbagiyya, a fried flaky pastry with a thin filling of green onions and eggs. And finally, there’s the Yemeni version of pizza, which is the same as pizza anywhere else--except that Yemenis like to break a couple of eggs onto it before sticking it in the oven. It may not be the most luxurious pizza topping anybody’s ever come up with, but it’s Yemeni.

HADRAMAUT-STYLE STEW (Mandi)

1/4 cup oil

2 pounds beef or lamb stew meat

1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

1/2 teaspoon cumin

1/2 teaspoon cardamom

1/2 teaspoon pepper

1 clove garlic

2 (14 1/2-ounce) cans diced tomatoes

1 teaspoon salt

Heat oil in skillet until hot. Add meat, cinnamon, cumin, cardamom and pepper and fry until meat is browned on all sides, 5 to 7 minutes. Add garlic and cook 1 minute. Add tomatoes and salt and simmer, covered, 1 hour. Remove cover and simmer until meat is tender and sauce fairly thick, 1 1/2 to 1 3/4 hours. Serve with pita bread or boiled rice.

4 to 6 servings. Each of 6 servings:

282 calories; 668 mg sodium; 65 mg cholesterol; 17 grams fat; 6 grams carbohydrates; 27 grams protein; 0.65 gram fiber.

OKRA STEW (Marag al-Bamya)

STEW

1/4 cup oil

2 pounds beef or lamb stew meat

2 large onions, chopped

3 cloves garlic, minced

1 (14 1/2-ounce) can diced tomatoes

1/2 cup water

Salt

1 teaspoon pepper

1/2 teaspoon cardamom

1/2 teaspoon cumin

2 teaspoons sugar

OKRA

2 tablespoons tamarind concentrate

Water

Salt

2 pounds okra

STEW

Heat oil in skillet over high heat. Add meat and fry until browned on all sides, 5 to 7 minutes. Remove meat.

Reduce heat to medium high. Add onions and cook until softened and golden, 3 to 5 minutes. Add garlic and cook 30 seconds. Add tomatoes, water, salt, pepper, cardamom, cumin and sugar. Bring to boil, then reduce heat to simmer. Return meat to skillet, cover and cook until meat is nearly done, about 1 1/2 to 2 hours.

OKRA

Dissolve tamarind concentrate in 1/2 cup water.

Bring 4 quarts salted water to boil. Add okra and boil until tender-crisp, 5 to 7 minutes. Drain.

Arrange okra carefully on meat in skillet. Pour tamarind water evenly over meat and okra and simmer 30 minutes without stirring. Serve with boiled rice.

6 servings. Each serving without rice:

332 calories; 275 mg sodium; 65 mg cholesterol; 17 grams fat; 17 grams carbohydrates; 29 grams protein; 1.61 grams fiber.

BINT AL-SAHN

Bint al-sahn, “the daughter of the pan,” is a famous dish of the Yemeni capital, Sana. We might serve it as an exotic dessert, but in Sana, it’s the first course of a fancy meal.

2 (1/4-ounce) packages dry yeast

Water

7 1/2 cups whole wheat flour

1 teaspoon salt

3 eggs, beaten

3/4 cup clarified butter

1/2 cup honey

Stir yeast into 3/4 cup lukewarm water. Let stand until dissolved and foamy, about 5 minutes.

Combine flour, salt, eggs and up to 1 1/4 cups water to make easy-to-handle dough. Knead until smooth, about 10 minutes.

Divide into 20 equal balls. Let rest 30 minutes. Roll out each ball on lightly floured surface to paper-thin, 13-inch rounds and brush top of each round with clarified butter. Layer buttered sheets of dough in buttered 13-inch-round cake pan and leave in warm place to rise 1 hour.

Bake at 375 degrees 40 minutes. Serve with honey and remaining clarified butter.

20 servings. Each serving:

252 calories; 201 mg sodium; 50 mg cholesterol; 8 grams fat; 40 grams carbohydrates; 7 grams protein; 0.94 gram fiber.

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CHEF’S TIP

To clarify butter, heat it in small saucepan over low heat until it melts and separates. Spoon off any foam on top. Spoon off clear, clarified butter, leaving milky residue in pan.