🕌 Islamic Golden Age · al-Warraq's version 10th century; al-Baghdadi's expanded version 1226

Mujaddara: The First Written Recipe for Rice and Lentils

Mujaddara is a rice and lentil dish with the first known written recipe in Kitab al-Tabikh, described for centuries as the everyday food of the poor.

Mujaddara — rice and lentils, often with fried onion — has its first known written recipe in Kitab al-Tabikh ("The Book of Dishes"), compiled by Ibn Sayyar al-Warraq in 10th-century Baghdad and later expanded by al-Baghdadi in 1226. With meat added, it appears in the text as celebration food; without it, historical accounts describe it for centuries afterward as the everyday food of the poor, stretching a small amount of rice and lentils to genuinely feed a family. It's arguably the single clearest resourcefulness story of any dish from this era: not a technique for using up scraps, but a whole dish built from the start around getting the most nutrition out of the least expensive ingredients, well-documented enough that its reputation as "poor people's food" survived in written sources long after the original recipe was set down.

Primary source: Kitab al-Tabikh ("The Book of Dishes")