Masquf : Fish Roast Baghdad Style

A nice story and one that shows how much true change has come to the people of Iraq:

The sous chef, if you will, lifted a wooden club and delivered a crushing blow to the head that clearly came nowhere near killing the creature, since it continued to writhe as the knife was plunged through its gills and then along its spine, not through the gut, the only way I’ve ever known to clean a fish.

Iraqis are particular about selecting their fish — preferring males over females, for example — and then seeing it to its mortal end for a simple reason: it should be as fresh as possible and, even while still twitching, roasted over an open fire in the style called masquf, which has been associated with Baghdad for centuries at least.

“They want it exactly in the traditional way,” said Munir Khadim, the owner of Al-Baghdadi, a restaurant on a stretch of the Tigris River in Baghdad where fish have probably been roasted in more or less the same way since the earliest days of civilization. “It’s part of Iraqi folklore.”

Masquf has survived decades of war and sanctions, dictatorship, deprivation, drought, overfishing and pollution. (It would be wise to eat nothing from the Tigris; a fatwa, or religious edict, actually forbade doing so a couple of years ago because the victims of Iraq’s heinous sectarian fighting often ended up in the river.)

By the way the United States had a role in reviltaizing the market for this, but its the Iraqi's who clearly deserve the most credit:

Faisal Habib, a government worker dining at Al-Balaam, remembered eating on Abu Nuwas for the first time in 1980. “It was different back then,” he said, adding that the best masquf chefs had fled abroad during the war. “The flavor was much better.”

The aquaculture industry, which began during Saddam’s rule, was badly disrupted by the war and international sanctions before it. Its revitalization has become a “teach a man to fish” mission of the American government, which has poured millions of dollars into repairing Iraq’s two biggest hatcheries, in the Babil province, and introducing modern scientific methods of irrigation and feeding across central Iraq.

In May, the Inma Agribusiness Program, a project financed by United States Agency for International Development, even flew 12,400 carp fingerlings from Hungary in the hope of cross-breeding a hardier, fleshier fish. If all goes well, the new cross-breed will be on the market in 2011.

Mr. Khadim raises his own carp near Karbala. The others in Baghdad buy theirs at one of two fish markets that open in a riotous bustle on Abu Nuwas just after dawn each morning. The carp is delivered to the market in pickup trucks outfitted with tarps and pumps and filled with water that sloshes over the sides and pours onto the street.

The owner of one, Haidar Jassim, sold three tons of carp the other day, batch by batch poured onto the floor for a flapping, water-soaked auction that was nearly impossible to follow. When I asked how to pick the best fish, Mr. Jassim said simply “the biggest one,” adding that the taste depended on the “depth of my pockets.”

Good work.