The legendary cuisine of the Uxbridge Road

My first post devoted to food (there will be more!). The title I have cheekily adapted from Margaret Shaida's excellent "The Legendary Cuisine of Persia", a book I intend to review here, once I've cooked a few more things from it. Cooking anything from such books relies on being able to get the ingredients, which even in London may take a bit of searching; and the wonderful thing about the Uxbridge Road in Shepherd's Bush (five minutes from my door) is that almost nothing is unobtainable...

I've just come back from shopping on the Uxbridge Road and made myself a spot of lunch. It consisted of: salad with frizzy lettuce, a wholemeal pitta, Iranian rice and split-pea dumplings, Lebanese foul moudammas and a stuffed aubergine. To drink, a glass of Turkish rose-hip syrup diluted with water and apple juice. If one shops frequently at the great Shepherd's Bush grocery emporium Al-Abbas, or any of the smaller Middle Eastern shops nearby, this sort of thing quickly becomes normal. I'm struggling to think of the last time I made myself a regular English ham sandwich or cheese-on-toast. In fact if I carry on living here, even the last time I cut a slice of bread off a loaf or put knife to butter will soon appear a distant memory. The crumpets of my childhood seem almost stale beside a tray of golden baklava, the toothsome filo pastry laden with nuts and filled to oozing point with its perfumed sap of honey and rosewater. What would a salad be without chunks of feta or olives? Why melt cheddar when you can fry halloumi? With such a bounty of spices to prepare lamb or chicken, one could even forget that there are no sausages. (Eating the Muslim beef substitute ones is possibly the only unqualified culinary error I've committed, although even there I might have just been unlucky.) My flatmates must have some responsibility for the change in my diet too, since I lived for six months with two Greeks and am now sharing with an Italian. I never realised olive oil could be this good - not to mention the home-made goat's cheese, fried calves' spleens and so on...

So here is what I've tried so far: this will take more than one post, so I've decided to devote this one to beverages. Starting with coffee: the Lebanese/Syrian variety with ground cardamom is my usual morning cup. The Hamwi brand comes mixed in about four different proportions of coffee to cardamom, up to one quarter cardamom - even with the weaker ones I find the cardamom a bit strong, so I mix it further with the regular stuff, and make it inauthentically with a filter. Sudanese coffee is made with ground ginger: I tried it for a while but couldn't get used to the heat of the spice. Somali coffee uses a milder blend of several spices, and tastes like Christmas. It's a bit like the "spiced chai" you get in some upmarket teashops - very pleasant and gives you a sort of glow, but probably a little rich to drink every day. My Greek ex-flatmate bequeathed me one of her brikis when she moved to Berlin, and taught me how to use it: I'm not sure if I remembered exactly, but I put a teaspoon of Bravo Greek coffee in, add water up to the line and dangle it over the gas until it froths up. The froth is called "kalmaki" [?], it's good to have a lot of it and if you let it froth several times that sometimes helps. (The other useful Greek word I learnt was "papara", which designates the action of soaking up the olive oil left on your plate with your pitta bread!) I make Greek coffee when I've run out of milk or when I want the stronger, earthier taste of it compared to filter coffee; now the briki has competition from the Gaggia espresso machine sitting in the corner.

Then there are the yoghurt drinks: Al-Abbas has several varieties of lassi (mango, cherry etc), which I used to love because of the thickness and sweetness, but thinner, saltier versions are appealing more to me these days. The Turkish equivalent is called "ayran", and has a little salt and I think a touch of cumin as well; it's delicious with almost any Middle-Eastern or Indian food. In Iran they have a sourer and surprisingly fizzy version, which I can only describe as yoghurt champagne - the taste really is almost identical! It's made by the excellent firm Mahan Foods, who supply Persian ingredients to a number of the shops on the Uxbridge Road. They just label it as "yoghurt drink", but according to Margaret Shaida it's called "doogh", and is (like most Persian comestibles) the origin of all the other versions to be found across India and the Middle East. In fact she quotes a travel writer of 1818 according to whom "the antiquity of this drink is so great that Plutarch mentions it as part of the ceremony at the consecration of the Persian kings"! The best mass-produced version is apparently made with aerated mineral water from a spring some 70 miles north-east of Tehran, and is known as "doogh Abali".

When it comes to juice the alternatives multiply to a point where one genuinely wonders if it's any longer possible to try every variety and combination that's available round here. There are some truly bizarre ones: cactus juice is, as you might expect, thick and green, and actually has quite a nice flavour; guanabana or soursop (made by Rubicon, who specialise in exotic fruit juices) was pleasant if not especially memorable; aloe vera, a plant better known for its dermatological value, can be bought as a drink in cans in Shepherd's Bush Market, but I really wouldn't recommend it - the texture is something like tapioca pudding! Tamarind juice also comes in cans; I wish someone would do a carton version, it's beautiful. (You can also get sweet tamarinds in boxes, they've got the same sweet-sour flavour - and are good for the digestion!)

Pomegranate juice is now widely available thanks to the cleverly-named brand "pomegreat": it's not much different from cranberry, perhaps slightly woodier but basically red, sour, and decidedly refreshing on a hot day. Sour cherry juice belongs in the same category: according to my Italian flatmate, whose mamma used to make it, it's produced by boiling the stones rather than pulping the flesh. You can also mix it with banana juice to make a very balanced and visually attractive mix - it looks a bit like raspberry ripple icecream - which in German cafes is called a "KiBa" (standing, according to the German system of abbreviation, for "Kirsch-Banane"). I'm trying to find another similar combination involving apricot juice. Rosehip juice provides another mysterious point of overlap between English and Middle Eastern/Persian ingredients (Margaret Shaida's book lists many more examples), as my mum remembers rosehip syrup, which the juice is presumably a dilution of, as being a common medicinal drink back in 50s Britain. Mango juice isn't quite as wonderful as fresh mangoes of course (fresh, sweet Pakistani honey mangoes and sharp Lebanese yoghurt make a terrific basis for a smoothie), but it can still be great, although guava I reckon beats it - "Enjoy" juices make a guava juice with such a delicate flavour it's hard to believe it comes out of a carton. They also make good carrot and orange, although the Uxbridge Road cafes (such as "Ramadan Juices") can make it fresh. The brilliant Syrian restaurant Abu Zaad on the corner of Lime Grove makes two juices that have to be tried: an addictive lemon and mint (which can be reproduced at home quite easily) and a mixed "special", where the glass is divided into pockets of different fruits.

As for tea, a bundle of fresh mint, about half a glass of sugar and a few spoonfuls of green tea thrown together in a pot gives you the most refreshing tea ever invented, Moroccan mint tea, best drunk with baklava, a bubbling shisha and a slow game of chess on a Saturday afternoon... Hibiscus flowers are cheap and make a delicate pink herbal tea. When I'm feeling up to it I occasionally make a ferociously bitter Caribbean brew called cerassie, which is supposed to cleanse the blood and give a "healthier, fitter and stronger body"! Anything to avoid sit-ups...

In the sequel to this post I'll talk about cheese, kebabs, vegetables (stuffed and non-stuffed), and other effortless lunchtime pickings of the legendary Uxbridge Road.