***
I sit on the sink to stir the mixture of ground rice, sugar, cinnamon and caraway, which takes four full hours for the concoction to turn into something rare in the paradise of delicious tastes.
Four hours of boiling are what gave this dish its name: mughli—‘boiled concoction’—a woman’s companion when she comes of age and one of the intimate elements of her world.
It’s not just an hour and a half. Four hours is a substantial amount of one’s lifetime—one sixth of the day. And for the cook, it is exhausting work, second only to mfatta’a which takes six hours. My grandmother—who has never liked mfatta’a—says it got that name because it tfatti’ al-dulouh, “tears apart the ribs” from so much stirring, but I believed the reason was in the forming of the dish itself. The mfatta’a mixture i
