Welcome to the Molokhia Archives!
What is Molokhia?
Molokhia, or corchorus olitorius, is a dark leafy green in the same botanical family as okra – they are both mallows. According to acclaimed food writer Claudia Roden, molokhia’s lineage can be traced to the pharaohs of Ancient Egypt.
The name, molokhia, is also used to refer to a stew prepared with the leaves of the molokhia plant. Like okra, it can be notoriously slimy. When I lived in Aleppo, my aunt taught me three tricks to keep the slime at bay: keep the molokhia leaves whole, squeeze a lemon over them as soon as you add them to the pot, and do not overcook them!
“This is how we cook molokhia,” she said.
“Egyptians—they make it the slimy way,” she said raising a skeptical eyebrow.
This led me to wonder: is there such a thing as a “Syrian molokhia” distinct from an “Egyptian molokhia”? When did people begin to think about slime as a characteristic that ought to be mitigated? In what ways does this dish unite, but also cut through, imagined national categories, in the Arab world and beyond?
The Archive
This website is a digital, collaborative archive that explores the geographic and culinary contours of molokhia, the plant and the dish. One of the goals of the archive is to free molokhia from the bounds of the modern nationstate and situate it in a more fluid, rich global culinary tradition. The site is divided into four sections: the molokhia map, the report, historical sources, and published recipes.
The Molokhia Map
The molokhia map is a visual representation of the various ways people prepare molokhia around the world in the 21st century. The responses are based on a twenty-question molokhia survey that was part of my master’s research project. The survey asks a series of quantitative and qualitative questions about each person’s preferred molokhia preparation. The final question asks what molokhia means to them and serves as a snapshot of people’s relationship to this dish, an affective sensibility I hope to reconstruct for the past through primary source materials.
The Molokhia Report
The molokhia report is a visual synthesis of the data that came out of the molokhia survey.
Historical Sources
The historical sources section of the archive aggregates all the historical references of molokhia, whether the plant or the dish. Each entry is structured as a blog post and will contain my analysis of the given text.
Published Recipes
The recipes section of the archive aggregates any published recipe of molokhia. In order to keep it feasible, I am limiting the entries in this section to recipes that have been published in cookbooks. If there is an online recipe that is particularly interesting, I will be sure to include it here as well.
Contribute!
If you would like to contribute a source or would like to get in touch, please send an email to molokhia [at] antoniotahhan [dot] com!
Acknowledgements
This project started as a research paper for a class on Food, Labor, and Agriculture taught by Dr. Graham Pitts at Georgetown University. Graham has been an invaluable mentor and collaborator on this project from the beginning.
I continued to develop the project in a class on Media, Conflict & Displacement taught by Dr. Katty Alhayek also at Georgetown University. Katty’s class was where I developed the virtual map that visualizes the results from the molokhia survey. Katty helped me think through how I would represent the data visually. I received a great deal of technical guidance from Dr. Ivan Cheung from Georgetown in learning how to use ArcGIS, which is the software I used to design the map.
Lastly, I owe a great deal of gratitude to Dr. Anny Gaul for her mentorship, friendship, and most recently for allowing me to sift through her vast collection of culinary manuscripts from the Arab world. A bulk of the sources in this archive come from Anny’s personal collection. I benefited immensely from our endless conversations and from reading her own contributions to the field of Arab foodways. Thank you.