United Arab Emirates

Emirati cuisine reflects desert and sea, spiced rice with meat or fish (machboos), slow-cooked harees, and dates. Bedouin traditions and Indian Ocean trade meet over cardamom, saffron, and dried lime.

Harees is on Abu Dhabi's intangible heritage register and its method is the whole point: wheat and meat cooked together for hours, then beaten with a wooden medrab until the grains break down and the meat disappears into them, finished with local ghee. It is Ramadan and celebration food, made in quantity and shared out.

Balaleet is the traditional first meal after Ramadan across the Gulf: sweet vermicelli with cardamom, saffron and rosewater, served under a thin savoury omelette, the sweet and the savoury on one plate. The pearl-diving economy that preceded oil is what put dried limes, rice and Indian spice into an otherwise sparse desert pantry.

Sweet saffron-and-cardamom vermicelli topped with a thin savory omelette, the Gulf’s sweet-and-savory breakfast.