Maqluba (Upside-Down Rice, Aubergine and Chicken)

Variations

• With lamb: lamb shoulder instead of chicken gives a much deeper broth. Give it an hour and a half.
• Fish maqluba: the coastal cities use fish instead of meat. Fish will not stand a long cook, so the layers are kept shallow.
• Cauliflower only: a common version leaves the aubergine out and fries cauliflower alone. Using both is the most usual.
• Vegetarian: no meat, vegetable stock instead. The oil that comes back out of the fried aubergine is already half the flavour, so it is less bare than it sounds.
• Alongside: plain yoghurt and a tomato-cucumber salad — acid and something cold against a rich rice.

Tips

• The pot is packed in the reverse of the order it is served in. Kabsa and biryani are both served out of the pot the way they went into it. Here the chicken that goes in first is the top of the dome, and the face that sat against the hot metal is the face you look at. Put in first whatever you want to see last is the whole assembly instruction.
• Nobody here tells you why the aubergine is fried first. Ratatouille, moussaka and yuxiang eggplant all say to salt aubergine so it takes up less oil, and none of them says what that does. Aubergine flesh is a sponge of large gas-filled cells. Salting collapses part of that structure by osmosis and frying collapses the rest, and past that point the slices stop absorbing oil and start releasing it. That is why they are taken up the sides of the pot: for the whole cook that oil runs down into the rice.
• So fry it until it collapses, not until it softens. Half-fried aubergine goes on drinking — it takes water out of the rice — and it is too firm to form the skin that holds the dome together when you turn it out.
• Do not stir. The rice cooks by absorption under the weight of everything above it. It is the same rule kabsa states — "don't stir once the rice is in; stirring releases starch and the grains clump" — and the same reason paella is never stirred. The difference is that here the caught base becomes the top of the platter.
• Broth at 1.5 times the volume of the rice. Kabsa uses the same ratio. Eyeballed, you get mush or crunch, and in this dish wet rice is fatal: it cannot hold a shape and the whole thing slumps as the pot comes off.
• The fifteen minutes before you invert it is the most important wait in the recipe. Straight off the heat there is still steam moving in the pot and the surface of every grain is wet. In that quarter of an hour the moisture redistributes and the starch firms as it cools, and only then will the column stand. Tarte Tatin describes the same kind of window from the other side — "turning it out is the only dangerous moment", with five minutes to do it in. Too early and it flows; too late and it has set into the pan.
• Invert in one movement, and do not lift the pot straight away. Tray over the pot, both held together, one turn. Then let it stand five minutes and raise the pot slowly. Hesitating halfway is what breaks it.