Here's a surefire bar bet: What pasta is shaped like a coin?

Salma. Pay up, sucka.

There you have it, a guaranteed win. Nobody will ever guess because, well, salma hasn't been made for a couple of hundred years.

I can't figure why it's not made any more, except that it's a little laborious. But that shouldn't stop people making something that's really luscious, should it?

OK, if you answered yes, let me just point out that the sauce that comes with it is very easy and very good -- meaty, aromatic and teasingly exotic. It would go very well with fettucini or even egg noodles, though neither has the special lusciousness of salma. And the technique of making the pasta might come in handy someday when you don't have a pasta machine or even a rolling pin.

Actually, a sort of salma is still made in Kazakhstan, but there they make it in big squares, like chunks of lasagna, and serve roast meat on it. Yet Kazakh cuisine is excessively plain (and unphotogenic). The tastier, better-looking coin-shaped salma is recorded in a 14th-century cookbook called "Kitab al-Tibakha."

You may think of this pasta as disk-shaped, but the recipe explicitly compares it to coins, which weren't smooth disks in the Middle Ages. People tried their best back then, but the only coin-making equipment they had consisted of a hammer and an iron stamp to put the official heads and tails designs on blanks of gold or silver. So it was typical for some of the metal to smoosh up around the stamp.

Salma's unique shape also has that quality. You make it by squeezing little lumps of paste hard between your thumb and forefinger, and there's likely to be a little ridge around the edge of the disk. That adds a pleasant chewiness to this pasta, which is otherwise more tender than durum pasta or egg pasta.

Salma

Serves 3

Ingredients

For the pasta:

For the sauce:

Directions

1. Mix flour with 1 teaspoon salt and enough water to make a stiff but smooth dough. Knead hard 10 minutes, cover and let rest ½ hour.
2. Pinch off pieces the size of a chickpea and roll into balls. Roll the balls in flour, one at a time, and pinch between thumb and forefinger or flatten on a floured work surface with your thumb.
3. Put the oil in a pan, add the onion and fry until softened. Add the meat and fry, stirring and mashing to break it up as much as possible, until done and quite brown, about 10 minutes. Drain fat and season meat to taste with salt, cinnamon and coriander.
4. Bring about 4 quarts of water to a boil, add a teaspoon or two of salt, and throw in the salma. Boil, stirring often in the beginning to keep the salma from sticking together, until done, about 8 minutes. If the water threatens to bubble over, skim. Drain the salma.
5. Mix the yogurt with the garlic and 2 teaspoons minced mint and toss with the hot pasta. The meat may be mixed in or served on top of it. Warm up in a pan or microwave if needed. Garnish with whole mint leaves if wished.

Zester Daily contributor Charles Perry is a former rock 'n' roll journalist turned food historian who worked for the Los Angeles Times' award-winning Food section, where he twice was a finalist for the James Beard award.

Photo: Salma. Credit: Charles Perry

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Well, the "coins" are always a little irregular, but in my experience they have a better texture when they end up relatively small, about the size of a nickel. As for the meat, I actually minced the beef by hand for the photo because it's more medieval, but ground works just about as well. The original recipe, of course, was for lamb.
Salma is Central Asian in origin -- the Kazakhs, Tatars and Bashkirs still make it out there -- but this particular recipe is from Kitab al-Tibakha, a book written in Syria (in Arabic). It presumably represents the cooking of the Central Asian Turks who were serving as mercenaries in the Arab world in the 14th century.
Dan Perlman is right, salma are a lot like orecchiette. In fact, Tatar salma are not coin-shaped and actually are orecchiette. They consist of short pieces cut from strips of ordinary (egg noodle-width) pasta, rolled/twisted with the fingertip on a work surface to make the shell-like orecchiette shape.
As he points out, the Arabic text says to "twist" the dough, then cut it into small pieces and then "strike" them like coins. I'm not quite sure what "twist" meant here. If it meant to roll the dough into a cylinder ("twist" is not the verb I would expect, though), it would indeed make sense to cut off little disks from it and then flatten them, rather than to pinch off pieces (make sure you have a good sharp knife that won't distort the dough too much in cooking).

a guest , October 11, 2011

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i tried it and it turned out yummy, but not very coin shaped unless the coins back then were super irregular and ranged in size from a dime to a half dollar! i have some ideas for making it a little more regular next time. also is ground beef the same as minced beef?

a guest , October 08, 2011

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what region is salma from?

a guest , October 08, 2011

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Your description here of how to make salma comes across more like the manner in which orecchiette are made, without the little twist. Interestingly, your original article in the LA Times was a bit more on the money, if I may throw in a bit of a pun. The tradition, if I understand my medieval recipe descriptions well enough is to break off a piece as you describe, though not so much rolling it into a ball as just sort of vaguely rounding it, setting it on a flat surface and striking it with your finger like that proverbial coin die rather than a smushing motion. It results in something much rougher in shape and texture, more uneven in thickness, and a bit more like those ancient coins.

"Take dough, twist it, cut it in small pieces, and strike it like a coin with the finger, and cook it in water until done." (translation from Persian)

danperlman , October 08, 2011