Kibbeh: The Quicksilver of Traditional Middle Eastern Food (2024)

It is a hot Thursday afternoon and I am walking along the sidewalk outside my school, waiting for my mother’s car to appear among the crowd of parked cars. To keep my mind off the heat, I start to think about all guesses for the game of Guess the Food; a game my mother, my brother and I always play on our way home from school.

“I really hope its something I like” I would say to myself. I get into the car and I go for my usual first guess: “Is it Kibbeh?” and my mom says “Yes! Good guess” and I just could not wait to have dinner that day.

I immediately recognize the smell as I walk into the kitchen, the salty but also sweet smell of fried Kibbeh. I would steal some of the hot egg-shaped pieces that were just made and immediately leave the kitchen as to not be noticed. The crunch of the outer layer of the Kibbeh makes eating it so addicting. The perfect crunchy shell, which is the Kibbeh itself, is made from bulgur, ground meat and onions mixed with multiple spices: cumin, cinnamon, clove, marjoram, dried mint leaves and petals. The inner stuffing of the Kibbeh is a combination of minced meat, onions and walnuts with salt, pepper, and cinnamon all fried with butter first before stuffing the Kibbeh. A bite into one of the fried pieces brings in all the flavors from the meat, the spices, and the walnut, which is a perfect balance of sweet, salty, and buttery. Fried Kibbeh offers to me the best combination of meat and spices and that is why it is on the top of the list of my favorite dishes.

The process of making the Kibbeh into its shape and stuffing it is usually long and tiring. I remember my mother and aunts would sit around the living room table for hours shaping each piece and stuffing it, making a lot of pieces to cook and freeze for later. They carve out a shell with the Kibbeh mix and then stuff it with the right amount of meat to have the good balance of stuffing and shell and then close the shell and round it up into an egg-shape or ball-shape. It is truly an art that takes time to master and I think that is what makes me appreciate it more. First time I tried to make a piece of Kibbeh, I tried many times to get one to look decent.

Like any artwork, there is an element of creativity when preparing the stuffing of the Kibbeh. I asked my mother about the ingredients she adds to the stuffing and among them were walnuts. “I add walnuts to it just like my mother did, but not all people do that” my mother said. To me that was the original Kibbeh and walnuts added a good crunch to the stuffing, but it turns out that not all Kibbehs are made the same way.

Kibbeh has many variations and ways to cook it and each country has its own style. An article posted on CNN Arabic website mentions that there are about 70 variations of Kibbeh. It originated from the Levant region of the Middle East, and there are several stories about its exact origins, but some stories mention that it originated from the city of Aleppo in Syria and then spread to Lebanon and Iraq. Others argue that it came from both Iraq and Syria only with different ways of making it. A testament of that is mentioned by Um Abdullah in an Arabic article on Al Jazeera website titled “Why Iraqis love Aleppo’s Kibbeh?” where she said: “I lived in Damascus for many years and I learned that Syrians don’t know about this Kibbeh except that it’s an Iraqi dish with a Syrian name…”. The Kibbeh she is referring to is the one described in the article as the Kibbeh of Aleppo, which was made differently from the one I know of. According to Um Abdullah it is made from well mashed rice and potatoes and stuffed with minced meat, onions, celery, and raisins. The shape of the Kibbeh is still the same however even though the stuffing is a little different.

In the South of Lebanon where I come from, Kibbeh is served fried or raw or cooked with yogurt. The raw Kibbeh is made without the stuffing and served flat in a dish, while the fried and yogurt cooked ones are shaped up in balls and stuffed. Regardless of its true origins, Kibbeh will remain an integral part of Iraqi, Lebanese, and Syrian culture in its many ways. For me, the true Kibbeh will always be the one my mother makes, a small crispy pocket filled with tiny pieces of savory memories.