Among the more common dishes are the following:--lamb or mutton, cut into small pieces, and stewed with various vegetables, and sometimes with peaches, apricots, or jujubes, and sugar; cucumbers or small gourds, or the fruit of the black or white egg-plant, stuffed with rice and minced meat, vine-leaves or pieces of lettuce-leaf or cabbage-leaf, enclosing a similar composition; small morsels of lamb or mutton, roasted on skewers, and called kebáb; fowls simply roasted or boiled, or boned and stuffed with raisins, pistachio-nuts, crumbled bread, and parsley; and various kinds of pastry and other sweets. The repast is frequently opened with soup; and is generally ended with boiled rice, mixed with a little butter and seasoned with salt and pepper; or after this is served, a water-melon or other fruit, or a bowl of a sweet drink composed of water with raisins and sometimes other kinds of fruit boiled in it, and then sugar, with a little rose-water added to it when cool. The meat, having generally little fat, is cooked with clarified butter, and is so thoroughly done that it is easily divided with the fingers.
A whole lamb, stuffed in the same manner as the fowls above mentioned, is not a very uncommon dish; but one more extraordinary, of which ´Abd-El-Laṭeef gives an account[151] as one of the most remarkable that he had seen in Egypt, I am tempted to describe. It was an enormous pie, composed in the following manner:--Thirty pounds of fine flour being kneaded with five pounds and a half of oil of sesame, and divided into two equal portions, one of these was spread upon a round tray of copper about four spans in diameter. Upon this were placed three lambs, stuffed with pounded meat fried with oil of sesame and ground pistachio-nuts, and various hot aromatics, such as pepper, ginger, cinnamon, mastic, coriander-seed, cumin-seed, cardamom, nut [or nutmeg?], etc. These were then sprinkled with rose-water infused with musk; and upon the lambs, and in the remaining spaces, were placed twenty fowls, twenty chickens, and fifty smaller birds; some of which were baked, and stuffed with eggs; some, stuffed with meat; and some, fried with the juice of sour grapes, or that of limes, or some similar acid. To the above were added a number of small pies; some filled with meat and others with sugar and sweetmeats; and sometimes the meat of another lamb, cut into small pieces, and some fried cheese. The whole being piled up in the form of a dome, some rose-water infused with musk and aloes-wood was sprinkled upon it; and the other half of the paste first mentioned was spread over, so as to close the whole: it was then baked, wiped with a sponge, and again sprinkled with rose-water infused with musk.