If you don’t know the name Noor Murad, but you have made an Ottolenghi recipe in recent years, and especially if it included black limes, then you will most certainly have made her food.
Bahraini-born Noor, who has lived in London for eight years, used to work for the Ottolenghi Test Kitchen. She wrote the Ottolenghi Test Kitchen books Shelf Love and Extra Good Things and worked as a recipe developer for the Chef’s Guardian and New York Times columns, as well as for a number of other cookbooks.
Now Noor Murad is stepping into her own with her new cookbook Lugma, bringing her own food philosophy to readers and keen cooks. It’s a glorious cookbook — filled with beautiful photography — that not only contains recipes from Bahrain but is also interspersed with stories from Noor’s cooking history.
“It’s always been a kind of dream of mine to write a cookbook, but how, and the shape it would take was always just like it didn’t come until it came,” Noor tells The New Arab.
“I wanted to give a very real voice to Bahrain as someone who’s actually grown up there… I didn’t want to glamorise it. I didn’t want to make Lugma some kind of travel experience book. I wanted to make it real”
It might be easy to think you know Bahraini food, assuming it to be like most of the Middle Eastern food found across the UK’s restaurant scene. But in the West, our experience of Middle Eastern food only encompasses a sliver of the region’s cuisine.
“Middle Eastern food is extremely popular,” Noor continues. “It is very much the rage. Everyone puts tahini and za’atar on things. But I don’t think there are enough Arab voices in food that represent the region, and the region is so diverse. It’s limiting to just say Arabic food is shawarma and falafel. No shade against those things, they’re amazing and delicious, but there’s so much more.
“In the MENA region you have North Africa, you have the Persian Gulf countries, you have the region of the Levant, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, and every single place has its own identity and its own quirks.”
Noor wanted to represent Bahrain in her cookbook, a tiny island nation likely familiar to people because of its Formula 1 track.
“I wanted to give a very real voice to it as someone who’s actually grown up there,” she says. “I didn’t want to glamorise it. I didn’t want to make Lugma some kind of travel experience book. I wanted to make it real.”
And real Lugma is filled with comforting, hearty recipes and ingredients from Noor’s life as the daughter of a Bahraini father and an English mother (the latter is a keen cook but never made Bahraini food while Noor grew up).
For Noor, Bahraini food is a mishmash of all the cultural influences on the country. “I think Bahrain is such a unique little island… It’s small, but it’s been mighty through history,” she explains.
“It used to be a very important centre of trade and an important seaport. And because of that, Bahrain pulls on a lot of different influences. I’d say the predominant three that show up in the food are Arabic, Persian and Indian flavours.
“So I think when you think of foods from Lebanon and Palestine, they’re not super spice heavy the way food from the Gulf is, but especially food from Bahrain. The rice dishes always have a masala base. There’s a masala for a chicken and there’s one for fish, the ingredient list is ridiculously long. I’ve definitely tried to make it a bit smaller for Lugma,” Noor adds.
“But then Bahraini food is also super heavy on herbs, especially coriander, dill, and parsley. And then it has those sour flavours from the black limes, and those are dried limes that are kind of bitter and sour and thrown into everything. These influences, like the sour flavours come from the Iranian influence. But then there are also the typical Arabic foods, so just big rice platters, huge cuts of meat. I think all of these influences have combined to create one very unique cuisine that is very full on with flavour.”
While Noor is keen to showcase Bahraini cuisine, she’s also not afraid to play with traditional dishes – sometimes.
“I think there is a time for tradition, definitely,” says Noor. “But there’s also a time where you can kind of tweak. I think recipes naturally do change depending on the household. The reason why there are not many Bahraini cookbooks out there is because every household does it differently.
“I’ve tried to stay true to tradition, but also explain why I’ve changed the dish or how the flavours have evolved because that is my way of cooking and I’ve always had a foot in both worlds. So that is going to translate into the way I cook too.”
Lugma is notable for its absences: there are no recipes for hummus, or other Middle Eastern dishes commonly known in the West.
“I’ve created many hummus recipes in my career, but I really purposely kept the hard hitters out of Lugma,” Noor says, adding, “just because there are so many amazing chefs already pushing these foods. My goal is to push different ones, to give them a bit more marketing.”
What makes Lugma such a great addition to the cookbook market is not just its recipes, but its stories. Noor shares tales of learning to cook from family friends, of moving countries, and of an evolving career.
“Every food has a story behind it,” she says. “Every food has some kind of memory or nostalgia. Even if it’s just a cheese toastie, there’s a reason why you’re craving that at that moment.
“I think that for people to connect more with food that might be different for them, if they can read a story behind it, if they can really learn about this experience or this memory, it will make them want to maybe make the dish a bit more, and it will make them kind connect with the food and the culture,” Noor continues.
“The importance of the stories for me is to show the different voices in the Middle East and also in Bahrain. It’s such a metropolitan island, there are so many different cultures there, and they’re not necessarily Bahraini. Take my mum, she’s English. My best friend is Iranian, my other friend is Syrian, and this is how I grew up.
“I just grew up with so many people from all over the world who called Bahrain home, and what I really wanted to do with this story is kind of push that connection between the reader and the person who is going through the book and the food itself.”
If there’s one dish Noor Murad wants everyone to try from Lugma, it’s fega’ata; an upside-down chicken and rice that is often seen at celebrations.
“This is a very exclusively Bahrain dish,” she says. “It’s a lot of ingredients, but really it’s like once you’ve assembled it, you let it do its thing. The whole kitchen smells amazing. And then when you flip it out, it just looks so rustic and beautiful.”
Overall, Noor aims to make people more aware of Bahraini food and to embrace the island’s cookery.
“I’d really love for people to understand the Middle East a bit more,” says Noor. “It is a very complicated part of the world, but there is also a lot to celebrate, especially its food and culture.
“And if there’s one thing I want someone to take away from Lugma it’s that it is such a diverse region.”
Sarah Shaffi is a freelance literary journalist and editor. She writes about books for Stylist Magazine online and is the Books Editor at Phoenix Magazine
Follow her here: @sarahshaffi
