Recipe of the week: Molokhia: The stew of Egyptian kings

This stew takes its name from the leafy green plant that colors it.

Back when my grandmother first made me molokhia in her kitchen in Lebanon, “I wanted no part of it,” said Salma Abdelnour in Food & Wine. It was “an adult-looking dish,” to put my assessment of it politely, and it took me years to acquire a taste for this soupy, dark-green Egyptian stew. Since then, I have fallen “madly in love with it.”

The stew takes its name, which means “of the kings,” from the leafy green plant that colors it. The plant, which today grows throughout the Middle East, was apparently once a green favored by Egypt’s pharaohs. If you can’t find frozen molokhia in the U.S., spinach is an acceptable substitute in the stew, which Egyptians make with rabbit. But made the way my grandmother made it—with “layers of cinnamon-scented chicken and buttery rice surrounded by a wonderful sauce of dark, bittersweet greens”—molokhia is best when its namesake ingredient provides the color.

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