We are currently at my parents’ place for a couple of days with the children. It’s in their garden I grow most of my plants, So I can relax, and just try some experimental food stuff and do some works that need to be done in the garden … Currently it’s a bit quiet here in terms of vegetables: pumpkins have been harvested, and a few things like the last beetroots (eh, some huge beets actually) are still there ready to be harvested. But not much exciting stuff going on at the moment…
The nocturnal frosts of last week killed off a number of plants for this year, including the garden Nasturtiums, and the foliage of my oca’s, and I also noticed that the cold weather had done some damage to my Malva verticillata ‘ crispa ‘. I’ve noticed that this plant was totally gone last winter after a full week of temperatures below zero Celsius, and it had to come back from seed. So I tried to do something with the leaves before they were gone, but used them in for an afternoon soup. It was a recipe for a soup of Egyptian origin, that I encountered as a child in ‘wild food’ by Roger Phillips, a fantastic book that I unfortunately do not have in my possession, but I did come across the recipe against when I was looking for recipes for Mallow on a Dutch site.
The original recipe is meant for Molokhia or Mulukhiyah, the leaves of the same plant of which jute is made (Corchorus ssp.), from the same family as our mallow species. It is apparently popular as a vegetable in (sub)tropical areas. This recipe can also be done with other plants of the family malvaceae, Roger Phillips used the common allow, and I have now tried with Malva ”crispa’. That curly mallow species (see photo) is a cultivar of an East Asian species, and also an old and not always that well-knoywn vegetable that grows quite well, and of which I still don’t know what what to do with. Except for letting it grown really big there’s not that much that I’ve ever done with it, except for some leaves in mixed salad or other leafy vegetable mixes then …
This mallow soup is very simple, but quite tasty. Mallow has a slightly slimy feel, but is otherwise a very tasty spinach-like leaf vegetable. I do not know whether an Egyptian would recognize his soup the way I made it, but I found it very tasty, and my family members who tasted it too last evening were also enthusiastic…
(My version was also somewhat ‘wilder’ than what I write down here, because due to a lack of garlic I did use some crow garlic (Allium vineale) bulbs.)
The recipe is simple, but fun to make:
Mallow Soup
Ingredients:
A large bowl of mallow leaves, very finely chopped
Bouillon (water with broth cube for example)
garlic cloves
coriander and pepper
olive oil
Preparation:
Make a soup base with water and a broth cube. When it’s boiling add the very finely chopped leaves and boil through briefly. Turn the fire off then.
Crush the garlic with a garlic press and heat it with pepper and coriander powder in a small pan with a little olive oil until the color changes, and then add to the rest of the soup. Let the tastes mingle for a few minutes.
Serve for example with brown bread and mature cheese (like this traditional ‘oud Brugge’ cheese). (Probably not specifically Egyptian, but 
a very good combination…)
Tasty!
Bram
Hortus Brambonii 