Green Tafāyā

Andalusi lamb stew with meatballs and split almonds, cooked gently with coriander and pepper and turned green with the juice of pounded fresh coriander

Origin: Seville & Al-Andalus, Spain

From the journey of Coriander.

Tafāyā was one of the foundation dishes of the medieval kitchen of al-Andalus: lamb cooked slowly in a pot with salt, pepper, coriander seed, onion juice, and oil, finished with meatballs and split almonds, and served either white or green. This is the green one, and it comes from the anonymous thirteenth-century cookbook of the Maghrib and al-Andalus, compiled in the Almohad period, edited by Ambrosio Huici Miranda in 1965, and translated into English by Charles Perry. The recipe for simple white tafāyā ends with a single instruction that makes it green: "He who wants this tafaya green can give it this color with cilantro juice alone or with a little mint juice." The cookbook leaves no doubt about where coriander stood. Its chapter on spices states that "Coriander enters into all dishes and is the specialty of tafâyâ and mahshi", and it is precise about what the dish excludes: tafāyā takes neither cumin nor caraway, "but rather cilantro and pepper". The book gives a whole family of them: the white; the green; a covered tafāyā in which eggs are broken over the meat and sealed with their whites and more coriander juice; and a tharda of tafāyā, for which the cook is told to pound a big handful of cilantro, squeeze out its juice, and stir it into the pot. The word tharda is the Andalusi form of tharīd, bread soaked in broth, and it survives in Portuguese as açorda. This is a historical dish rather than a living one. Fresh coriander largely left the Spanish kitchen after the Christian conquest, and nobody in Seville cooks tafāyā today; its descendants, if it has any, are in the herb-green stews of the Maghrib and in the coriander of southern Portugal. The medieval text gives ingredients and method but no quantities, so the amounts below are an adaptation, and the recipe follows the translation in reading its coriander as the dried seed and its cilantro as the fresh herb.

Ingredients

Stew

  • 800 g boneless lamb shoulder or leg, cut into small pieces
  • 1 tsp salt
  • 1 tsp freshly ground black pepper
  • 2 tsp ground coriander seed
  • 1 large onion, grated and squeezed for its juice (about 4 tbsp)
  • 2 tbsp olive oil
  • 750 ml water

Meatballs

  • 300 g minced lamb
  • 0.5 tsp salt
  • 0.5 tsp freshly ground black pepper
  • 1 tsp ground coriander seed

Finish

  • 60 g blanched almonds, split in half

Green Juice

  • 2 large bunches fresh coriander (about 150 g), leaves and stems
  • 6 leaves fresh mint (optional)

Method

  1. Put the lamb pieces into a heavy pot with the salt, pepper, ground coriander, onion juice, olive oil, and water. Set it over a gentle heat and bring slowly to a bare simmer, stirring from time to time.
  2. Cover and simmer very gently for about one hour.
  3. Meanwhile mix the minced lamb with its salt, pepper, and ground coriander, knead well, and roll into small meatballs the size of a hazelnut.
  4. Add the meatballs and the split almonds to the pot and cook for a further 30 to 40 minutes, until the lamb is completely tender.
  5. While the stew finishes, pound the fresh coriander, with the mint if using, in a mortar to a wet paste. Tip it into a piece of muslin or a fine sieve and squeeze or press out as much green juice as you can.
  6. Take the pot off the heat, stir in the coriander juice, and warm it through gently for a minute or two without letting it boil.
  7. Leave the pot to rest off the heat for 10 minutes before serving, as the original sets it on the ashes to settle, and serve with flatbread.

Notes

For the white tafāyā, simply leave out the coriander juice; it is the same stew. The covered version breaks four or five eggs over the meat towards the end, spoons coriander juice over the whites, and leaves the pot on a very low heat until the eggs have set. The onion juice can be made by grating an onion on the fine side of a box grater and squeezing the pulp in a cloth. The medieval cook used its juice rather than the flesh to flavour the broth without clouding it.

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