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Making saltah--do not try this at home

Magnificent saltah, brought sizzling to the table

I’d no sooner arrived in Sana’a for a 4-week assignment, than 2 young suicide bombers ignited themselves on Yemeni roads. Already stiff security measures were re-doubled, and I knew I would not be able to explore this fascinating ancient culture in southern Arabia on foot. Period, end of story. So when I wasn’t working, I was curled up in a magnificent fortress with every book about Yemen I could get my hands on. Academic studies I found in the embassy library. Histories and travel guides in my boss ’s house, where I lived. Personal accounts that I’d brought by the likes of Freya Stark, Tim Mackintosh-Smith, Steven Caton, and Eric Hansen. I’d thought this would slake my thirst for the place, but in fact it made me yearn for it…and for the fabled soup, saltah.

Here’s what Tim Macintosh-Smith has to say about saltah in Ali’s Restaurant in Sana’a: “My lunch was the same as that described by Ibn al-Mujawir in the thirteenth century: wheat bread, hulbah–fenugreek flour whisked to a froth with water–and meat. Ali himself stands in a cloud of smoke on a platform high above the ground, ladling beef broth, eggs, rice and peppers into a row of stone bowls. In front of him is a rank of cauldrons, each one big enough to boil a missionary. Below him minions tend gas cylinders that send great blasts of flame shooting up. Conversations are impossible in the roar; explosions are not unknown. The bowl of saltah, as they call the mixture, is brought to you red-hot, carried with a pair of pliers and topped with a seething yellowish-green dollop of hulbah. Lumps of meat are flambeed in a wok-like vessel, and ten feet above this the ceiling is black from years of fireballs. Men squat on the floor, on benches, on tables (the ones in suits and ties are from the Foreign Ministry across the road). Those who have not yet been served wail and shriek for attention — ‘Ya Ali! Ya Alayyy — while Ali stands, erect and unhearing, his body immobile within a parabola of arms — all his own, like those of a Hindu idol. The lucky ones who have been served eat with the saltah spitting in their faces, sweat pouring from their brows. The walls are covered with a huge photographic mural of the gardens at Versailles: parterres, statues of nymphs, cooling fountains.

“Lunch at Ali’s is not merely a matter of eating. It is the first step on the way to kayf. The meaning of this the term has been discussed by Sir Richard Burton. One might call it, he wrote, ‘The savouring of animal existence…the result of a lively impressible, excitable nature, and exquisite sensibility of nerve; it argues a facility for voluptuousness unknown to northern regions…’; but in the end the translator of The Arabian Nights admitted defeat. Kayf is ‘a word untranslatable in our mother tongue.’ Lexicographers, who cannot be so realistic, have described it as a mood, humour or frame of mind. I, who chew the leaf of the qat tree, shall attempt a definition.

“Ali’s restaurant is all to do with the humours. Blood, phlegm, yellow and black bile must be in balance to ensure perfect health and to enable the qat chewer to attain his goal of kayf; since qat excites the cold and dry black bile, prophylaxis against its ill effects means that the blood, which is hot and wet, must be stimulated. Hence the heat, the sweat, the bubbling saltah.”

So, as you can imagine, as I sat in my stone tower, my yearning for saltah grew, and I did not keep this a secret from my colleagues. Perhaps I could pay an embassy driver to bring me a bowl straight from Ali’s Restaurant? Perhaps I could ask the cooks in the embassy cafeteria if they could make it for lunch? Perhaps I could try making it myself in my boss’s kitchen?

In the end, and perhaps with the thought of a fireball blackened ceiling in our kitchen, my heart’s desire was realized at the end of my assignment. Not only was I able to get a traditional saltah bowl to bring back to Paris, but we all took our chances and went out to Al Fakher Restaurant for the real thing, pictured above.

Please know that I achieved kayf without the qat. This soup is absolutely sensational. It’s thick and piquant, layered with flavors and textures of minced meat, onions, tomatoes, eggs, cilantro, rice or lentils or potatoes, all cooked in broth in a raging fire–but the hulbah topping takes it way beyond the “awfully good” category. Soaked fenugreek is whipped with garlic, onions, and spices and poured into the boiling hot soup, where it coagulates in a thick froth. As the soup spits at you, you carve chunks of the two layers with a spoon and suck it in–heaven! Will I try to make it here in the 16th arrondissement? Time will tell. I’m cautiously beginning to season my saltah bowl…