Open Sesame!

From my spice shelves: sesame seeds.
These are white, but unbleached, seeds.

CORRECTED CAPTION: Cookies made last year with two types of seeds.
The black seeds, called Nigella, were one of the spices I brought back from Israel.
I thought they were black sesame seeds, but they are from a different plant.

Cooking is a pleasure and a challenge in these days of social isolation and difficulty with shopping. We are doing well at the moment. I'm making every effort for our meals to be interesting and varied in flavor. For example, sesame flavors with a middle-eastern theme were my selection for dinner last night. I chose a recipe from Ottolenghi’s cookbook Jerusalem.

Tahini -- the middle eastern sesame paste -- is a key ingredient in the sauce for Ottolenghi's meatballs.
Here are the ingredients staged for making the meatballs and the tahini sauce with lemon and garlic.
I've made them a few times before -- this time, I don't have pine nuts, but do have the other recommended seasonings.

Dinner: meatballs with tahini sauce, vine leaves stuffed with rice,
and broccoli.

Dessert: halvah or halawa, made from ground sesame seeds,
sugar, and a variety of other flavorings.

I liked halvah a lot when I was a child, despite its rather rough and unusual texture. My father would buy just a small slice of it from the delicatessen. I've eaten it in Israel, and have had it from middle-eastern markets and mainstream markets here and now. This tub of "halawa" from Lebanon came from a smallish market near our house. According to the free online dictionary (link), the English word halvah comes from the Yiddish word halva, which came from Romanian, which came from Turkish helve, which came from Arabic halwā.

Sesame flavor is also popular in the cuisines of China and Japan. Recently, I bought some 100% sesame oil at an Asian grocery store. (That was before I stopped going out!) It has a powerful flavor, and only a few drops of it create a nice balance in salad dressings and in some other dishes I've made.

Sesame has been cultivated for thousands of years -- it was the first oilseed crop that was domesticated in the history of agriculture. Among the many species of sesame plants, some are native to Africa, some to India. In The Cooking Gene by Michael Twitty, he points out that the African word for sesame, benne, continues to be used in some parts of the American south, where traditional African sesame dishes are still made. Sesame was cultivated by the Romans and throughout European history.

Besides all the ethnic dishes with sesame seeds, which may in some cases be exotic or unfamiliar, American cuisine features, of course, sesame seeds on hamburger buns at McDonalds and many other hamburger chains. Sesame bagels, sesame crackers, and other breads with sesame seeds are also now a part of mainstream American food.

According to Wikipedia: "The earliest recorded use of a spice - sesame seed - comes from an Assyrian myth which claims that the gods drank sesame wine the night before they created the earth." (link)

So many wonderful foods have sesame seeds! I'm thinking of the tales of the Arabian Nights where "Open Sesame" was the magic word. Though the tale of Ali Baba and his magic cave wasn't in the Arabic original, it seems to have been invented entirely by Antoine Galland, a French writer who translated, adapted, and augmented the 1001 Nights.

Loaves of bread with sesame seeds, from Vermeer's painting
"The Milkmaid," painted around 1660.

Image of sesame plant and seed pods
by Franz Eugen Köhler, Köhler's Medizinal-Pflanzen
Published 1895. Source: Wikipedia.

Writing blog posts is a good activity for the time of plague! I’m also hoping to read posts from my blogger friends and see what they are doing while shut-in, working from home, or being at their workplace in very stressful circumstances. Besides blogging and taking a walk, I watched two movies today: “Guess who’s coming to dinner” from 1967 and “Bladerunner” from 1982.

This blog post copyright © 2020 by mae sander for mae food dot blog spot dot com.