Xalwad Reer Xamar (Mogadishan Halva)

Xalwad Reer Xamar (Mogadishan Halva)

The phrase “Xalwad Reer Xamar” shows how tribal the Somali people really are, as it literally means “Halva of the Clan of Hamar.” The word “hamar” is the Arabic word for redden (حمرْ), but it’s also the name (unofficially) used by Somalis for Mogadishu. “Reer Xamar,” who by the way belong to the larger ethnic group known as the Benadiri people and whose skin color can range from very fair to blue black, are linked to the original history of Mogadishu, its recent background with the Middle East, and its continued connection to diverse cultures as far away as India. Further, the word “mogadishu” comes from the Arabic phrase “muqd el shah” (مُقدِ الشاه) or the introduction to the shah, which is still very close to the Somali way of pronouncing the name as in “Muqdisho”. 

Enough about the history of Mogadishu, lets get back to my favorite dish, the halva. There really isn’t any other dish that I would prefer to this one. If I was stuck on a Somali island somewhere, I would want to have that. There isn’t a time where I remember halva not being part of my life. There’s a joke in my family that once I was crying so much as a baby that my mother shut me up with halva.  I have always loved this dish. Always.

I may not remember how it came into my life, but there is a day that I clearly remember I decided to learn how to cook it. It was noon, at the wedding of one of my uncles, and I was already fidgeting. Everyone was happy, and they were all looking forward to the “alle barri” (sacrifice), which was preceding the wedding reception of that evening. They would enjoy a wonderful lunch of Persian rice with all of its flavors, accompanied by the most tender goat meats, freshest juices and lots of prayers for the young couple. For me, however, it was all about the halva, which would not be cooked for a few more hours and would not be served until later that evening. 

“There she is,” I whispered to my cousin. “Do you see her?”

She was as beautiful as ever, and sat so elegantly. She seemed so confident in herself, in her worth, and in her skills. One look at her, and you would wonder about who she was. Her name was Batuulo, and she was a Mogadishan lady in our neighborhood who was always invited to cook the halva for all of the celebratory occasions. 

That day, I stalked her after lunch, watched her cook this dish, and was truly amazed by the amount of sugar that goes into it. I was probably eight or so and hadn’t understood yet the negative effects of sugar on our health, and I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t have changed my mind even if I did. I was just so awe struck by her craft. It was like a dance. She was cooking it in a restaurant-sized pot, using a wooden spatula that was taller than she was. When it was time to stir it, she would hold onto the upper middle part of the spatula and literally fly over to the other side of the pot; leaving everyone gasping. They were all worried she would fall into the hot sugar, and be burned alive. They asked to help her, but she didn’t need any help. 

“You will only be in my way!” she would yell them off. 

She was like a soldier, and I was totally sold. 

“I want to do that,” I told my cousin.  

The following days, I visited Batuulo often and I would charm her with my wit and she would find me irresistible. She would laugh, and wonder why such a young boy was so interested in her world. She wouldn’t understand my deep desires, because for her this was just what she did for a living, but I would continue to poke at her until she finally let me learn how to do it.

“It all starts with the purest of starches,” she would say, as she tasted the started with her pinkie. “If the starch is not pure, your halva will be paunchy. These women are vultures, and they will not blink twice about lying to you.  So, don’t trust them. Trust your tongue.”

The ladies at the Bakaare Market probably wondered why she was talking to this skinny little boy about such things, but Batuulo would go on and take me to the sugar lanes and we would buy the whitest and brownest of sugars. When we ended up at the butter lanes, she would sit and nearly sink her nose into the subag. She would only buy the kind that made her feel dizzy, she said. 

She taught me to make the dish bit by bit. Each afternoon, for nearly a month, I would stop by at her house on my way from school. After shopping, she would sit me down and tell me stories about how she had learned it from her grandmother, a woman who was a maid for a rich family in the 1930s, and how she groomed the young Batuulo to one day work for the same family. After the family moved to Egypt in the late 1950s, when the Somalis were on the brink of independence, Batuulo began offering her expertise in different kinds of foods to the locals. The halva stuck.

Those afternoons slowly became much more than learning how to make the halva, they become a chance for a young boy to learn from a living history in a way that wasn’t really possible in our schools at the time. Her classroom became my favorite classroom because I realized it was changing the way I saw myself, my neighborhood, and Somali community at large.

Today, I think about those afternoons whenever I set out to make this dish. I’m still not at the point of flipping myself over the big pots, but I delight in my halvas. 

INGREDIENTS:

1 cup of white sugar

1/2 cup of brown sugar

1/2 of corn starch

2 cups of water 

1/4 of stick butter

1/4 cup of veggie oil

1 teaspoon of nutmeg

1/2 teaspoon of cardamom

1/4 teaspoon of cloves

Dash of orange and red food colorings.

METHOD:

Put the butter, oil, and the spices in a pot and let them come to a nice mix over medium heat. Take it off the heat, and put that aside. Mix the starch, 1/2 a cup of the water, and the food colorings. Put that aside. Then put together the sugar (both types) and the rest of the water into another pot, and let that come to a boil over high heat. Then add the starch, and cover. The halva will start to get sticky quickly, but let that come together for at least thirty seconds. While still over high heat, stir the halva using a wooden spoon. Keep adding the butter mix as you stir until you have used up half of it, which will be about a full minute, and then turn the heat down to medium and cover the halva for another full minute.  Add slowly the rest of the butter pix and keep stirring the halva until it becomes almost one batch, lumping together as you stir, which should be about another six or seven minutes. Take a foil roaster pan and place the halva into it. Let the halva cool for at least thirty minutes or so before you begin to cut it up. Enjoy!

Aargoosato Sawaaxili (Lobster in Coconut Milk)

Aargoosato Sawaaxili (Lobster in Coconut Milk)

Literally, “Aargoosato Sawaaxili” means “Swahili Lobster.” This dish definitely goes back with the history of Mogadishu, which was part of the Swahili culture until 1907 when it was officially sold to the Italians by the Omani Kingdom. It’s no surprise that the city’s oldest neighborhood, Shangaani, is directly related to this culture. Imagine my surprise when I found out there was such a people in northern Mozambique that are actually called the Shangaan people! One wonders if these people had occupied this neighborhood in its hey day?

I was nine years old the first time I clearly remember eating this dish. It was March, when the city is the hottest and driest, and I remember how the spices broke a sweat out of me. I remember the relief I felt, the breeze.  On hot summer days, the Somalis flee to the ocean, especially in the late afternoon. As the sun sets, all sorts of vendors would do their seafood in and around the beaches. 

One early evening, right before it was getting dark, my friends and I were walking back on Corso Somalia, near Piazza 4 Novembre, and there we met a vendor who was making some fast meals. He was clearly Baajuun, which is a tribe that still speaks Swahili, and he made this dish for us. I remember being impressed. I couldn’t believe how fast he made that, not more than ten minutes. 

“Here,” he handed me my plate. “You will love this.”

His name was Hajji Abdallah, and he won me over that evening as a long time customer. It became a tradition to stop by his little restaurant on wheels, and it was delight to listen to the stories of a man whom I would grow to respect.  He had told me so many stories, and somehow they always revolved around the Hajj. He had gone to the pilgrimage in Mecca at age 22, accompanying his old father, and was proud to have gotten the “Hajji” title at a young age.

Before becoming a pilgrim, his mother had taught him how to make the majority of the dishes she knew-- in case he failed to find a wife. She had done this with all of her sons, Hajji Abdallah would tell me. Fortunately for his mother, the Hajji did find a young woman at age 20, and had made his mother a grandmother by the time he had returned from the pilgrimage.

“I cook these dishes with love,” he would say. “Love for my mother, for my people, and for my country.” 

Once, he told me how the woman he had married didn’t really know how to cook. He would say she knew how to make a great tea, but nothing beyond that. By the time they had their sons, he had taught her everything he had learned from his mother.

“A great husband teaches,” he would smile. “A great husband teaches.”

I was fascinated by all of that. I loved to cook, but the women in my family believed a man should not cook. I would have had to protest and make a scandal in order to be allowed to even mix things, or stir the pot. 

But Hajji Abdallah inspired me.

After months and months, having failed over and over with the right amounts to use because he never measured in his cooking, I finally was able to make this dish exactly like the Hajji made it. It was such a glorious afternoon, a moment I will never forget. Oh, I was so proud of myself. 

INGREDIENTS:

2 lobster tails

1/2 cup of coconut milk

1/2 medium onion

1 medium tomato

1/2 medium jalapeño pepper 

1 tablespoon of olive oil

1 teaspoon of cumin

1/2 teaspoon of paprika

1/2 teaspoon of salt

METHOD:

On a medium-high heat, place the oil and sliced onions in a sauce pan. Cover that and let the onion cook just a little. Then place the unshelled tails in the pan, and surround them with the sliced tomatoes. Then add the spices and salt, as well as the jalapeños and cover.  Let that cook for about five minutes. By now, the lobster tails are curling up. Then add the coconut milk. Turn off the heat, and let that continue cooking for another five minutes. That’s it.