The dish I made is called Digaag Qumbe, credited to a Somali grandmother who is interviewed in the book. (If you want a look at the consequences of recipes not being copyrightable in the usual sense, search the recipe name—you’ll see one of the authors of In Bibi’s Kitchen cooking it under her own name, some people who’ve just taken the recipe and credited to her somewhere in the text, some people who don’t credit her at all but who make claims about knowing what the dish is and how it’s served traditionally with a banana, etc. It’s a good test case of how quickly our online culture disseminates new information and then erases its provenance, in that I am sure there were not a lot of recipes for digaag qumbe floating around the Internet before Hawa Hassan introduced people to the recipe.)
Anyway, I started by breaking down the whole chickens early yesterday.
I know I’ve said before in this column that I ought to always buy chickens whole, but every time I break one down, especially when it’s just barely thawed enough to work with, I remember why I sometimes buy chicken that’s been cut already. It’s not hard to break down fairly expertly compared to big pieces of larger animals but you end up with painfully frozen hands and a cutting area that needs to be cleaned very meticulously as soon as you’re done. (My old boss basically trained me to treat raw meat as if it were radioactive in terms of worrying about the danger of cross-contamination.)
But the upside is that I ended up with boneless breasts that still had skin on (for sandwiches tonight; you pretty much can’t buy boneless breasts that are still skin on), chicken wings, the backbone and drumsticks for stock, and the thigh meat for this dish. If I have the energy tonight I’d might fry some of the spare skin that came off the thighs and elsewhere and put some of the rendered fat aka schmaltz on some popcorn, which is something we do only once in a great while (because this is about the only way you get enough skin to do with while retaining the rest of the chicken for other purposes.)
The spice mixture that the book recipe calls for is marvelously aromatic—it’s pretty close to some common North African and Middle Eastern mixes, but I still found it pretty distinctive. I grated some fresh turmuric into the other herbs as they toasted and as usual that left me with hands that look like I’ve been plowing through a bag of Cheetos—there’s no way to quickly wash it off.
The final product was great. We served it as per the book’s recipe with a banana on the side, to be eaten in whole bites in between mouthfuls of the chicken and rice. Our bananas were very very ripe, so perhaps a bit too sweet, but I do see why it’s a great idea. I’ll definitely be digging into the book again for some other recipes.