Hashweh

Levantine rice with minced lamb and toasted nuts, seasoned with allspice and cinnamon in equal seriousness

Origin: Beirut & the Greater Levant

From the journey of Allspice.

Hashweh means stuffing, and it is the single most useful preparation in the Levantine kitchen because it is almost never used only as one. It goes inside the chicken, inside the lamb, inside the marrow, inside the vine leaf, and inside the kibbeh shell. It also, and most often, goes straight onto a platter and is eaten as it is, with yoghurt beside it. A Levantine cook makes it without a recipe, and the proportions shift by household and by what is in the cupboard. What does not shift is the spicing, and the spicing is the point. Allspice and cinnamon go into minced lamb in a savoury dish, in quantities a northern European cook would find alarming, and that pairing is the single clearest marker of Levantine and Ottoman meat cookery. It is why a Lebanese rice dish tastes nothing like an Italian one built from the same rice, onion, and lamb. Arabic often simply calls allspice bharat, which means spice, and in a great many households the general word has come to mean this particular berry. That is a fair measure of its standing: when a Levantine recipe says bharat without qualification, allspice is usually what is meant. The nuts are not decoration. Pine nuts and almonds are fried in ghee until deep gold and scattered over at the end, and the contrast between the soft spiced rice and the crisp fat-fried nut is the texture the dish is built around.

Ingredients

Rice

  • 400 g long-grain or basmati rice, rinsed and soaked 20 minutes

Meat

  • 500 g minced lamb, not too lean

Base

  • 1 whole onion, finely chopped
  • 3 tbsp ghee or olive oil

Spices

  • 2 tsp ground allspice
  • 1 tsp ground cinnamon
  • 0.5 tsp ground black pepper
  • 0.25 tsp freshly grated nutmeg
  • 0.25 tsp ground cloves
  • 1.5 tsp salt, or to taste

Liquid

  • 700 ml hot chicken or lamb stock

Nuts

  • 60 g pine nuts
  • 60 g blanched almonds, halved
  • 3 tbsp ghee, for frying the nuts

To Finish

  • 3 tbsp flat-leaf parsley, chopped

To Serve

  • 300 g plain yoghurt, to serve

Method

  1. Fry the pine nuts and almonds separately in the 3 tbsp of ghee over a medium heat until each is deep gold, then lift out onto paper and set aside.
  2. In the same pan, soften the onion in the remaining ghee over a medium heat for six to eight minutes until translucent.
  3. Turn the heat up, add the lamb, and fry hard, breaking it up, until it has released its water and begun to brown properly.
  4. Add the allspice, cinnamon, pepper, nutmeg, cloves, and salt, and fry for a further two minutes.
  5. Drain the soaked rice and stir it through the meat until every grain is coated in the spiced fat.
  6. Pour in the hot stock, bring to a simmer, taste for salt, then cover tightly and cook on the lowest heat for 15 to 18 minutes.
  7. Take off the heat and leave covered, undisturbed, for a further ten minutes.
  8. Fluff gently with a fork, turn onto a warm platter, and scatter with the fried nuts and parsley.
  9. Serve with plain yoghurt alongside.

Notes

Allspice and cinnamon together in savoury minced lamb is the Levantine signature and the thing most often reduced by non-Levantine cooks. Do not reduce it. Minced beef works, and a mixture of lamb and beef is common. Very lean mince gives a dry result. To use as a stuffing, make the meat and nut mixture and cook the rice only halfway before filling a chicken or a marrow and finishing it in the oven. It reheats well and is often better the next day. Serve with yoghurt or laban, a tomato and cucumber salad, and flatbread. Toasted nuts are added at the table if it has been reheated, so they stay crisp.

The Gastrographer

The Gastrographer

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