how to boil a camel

The sleep of reason brings forth monsters
Capricho

The next morning, after drowning myself in another glass of milky tea, I asked the bedu about their meal. First of all, a young camel is preferred for its tender meat, and it is taken away to be killed so that the mother doesn’t get too frantic (she kept us up the whole night anyway). The most treasured parts, usually reserved for the guests (that means me) are the hump or sanam, the heart or kalb and the back or mattan. And there are three ways to cook a camel. The most basic style is the way we had it, called mathbu bil mayy, but there is also madhbi where it is cooked over stones and gishda where it is fried in its melting fat. The people from Salalah call the last method makali or kasabiyah. Camel meat is best described as an acquired taste,but the bedu relish it with a fervour that points more to a longing for the past than a culinary preference.We ate eight to a plate, sitting down on plastic mats, elbows on cushions for the lucky ones. You could drown this in either tea or coffee, or camel milk, which was kept in large bowls with as much froth above as there was milk below.

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