Murri was a popular barley-based condiment in Arab cuisine during the Middle Ages, possibly originating from garum. It was made through a slow fermentation process and used as a sauce or stew. The less popular method involved boiling a salted barley dough with milk and other ingredients. Murri never caught on in Europe due to a mistranslation of the recipe.
Murri was a barley-based condiment most commonly associated with Arab cuisine during the Middle Ages. It was used as a kind of sauce or stew to complement a main course and was occasionally used as a salt substitute. Murri is no longer a manufactured food product. It is also known as al-murri or almori.
Byzantium, or the Byzantine Empire, is credited as the site of origin murri. Some historians and cooking experts theorize that the stew probably originated from garum. It was a fermented fish-based condiment created by the ancient Greeks, but was passed on to the Romans when they included Greece in their vast empire. It is possible that garum transformed into murri as the eastern part of the Roman empire transformed into a more distinctive political unit known in history as Byzantium, with the western half, or western Roman empire, ceasing to exist after 476.
Since Byzantium included much of the Arab world, murri became a popular condiment in that region from the 13th century. According to written records of the period, there were actually two recipes for the dressing, the most popular being the barley-based version. This involved wrapping fig leaves around raw barley dough and letting it rest in hot containers for 40 days. Then salt and water were added to the rotted and molded dough, and the mixture was left to rest for another 40 days, resulting in a dark brown paste. According to some writers, people generally started making pasta in late March.
The less popular method of making murri was much faster. With the alternative recipe, a salted barley dough was cooked to a considerable hardness, then reduced to crumbs and soaked in water for a day or two. Meanwhile, another concoction was prepared with boiled water and different ingredients which include pine seed milk, raisins and different kinds of herbs and flowering plants. This mixture was added to the first and boiled until it acquired a certain thickness. Murri made with milk was usually referred to as kamakh.
Spaniard Jambobinus of Cremona, who lived in the Italian city of Venice in the 13th century, translated the murri recipe into Latin in his book Liber de Ferculis et Condimentis, or The Book of Dishes and Condiments, for a European audience. Unfortunately, he muddled the translation, resulting in an omission of the rotting barley stage of sauce making. As a result, Europeans who tried the recipe got an inedible, salty substance instead of a thick tasty sauce. As a result, murri never caught on in Europe, and by the end of the 15th century, the condiment had even died out in the Arab world.
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