molokhiya

Corchorus olitorius, jute mallow, is used in one recipe here, Palestinian molokhiya with chicken: 800 grams of frozen leaves go straight into 2.25 litres of reserved chicken broth, stirred until thawed, then simmered for 5 to 8 minutes until the leaves are silky and the pot smells green. The finish is the taqliya, garlic, green chili, cilantro and ground coriander fried in olive oil and poured in at the end, and the dish is served over rice with roasted chicken and lemon wedges. The recipe calls its green note cis-3-hexenol, the cut-grass thread that says jute mallow.

The slip is a polysaccharide, and the Journal's note on the texture measured it. The mucilage is about a tenth of the leaf's dry weight, a third of it uronic acid, which puts it in the pectin family, a cousin of the pectin that sets jam. Heat draws it out: solubility rose from 46 per cent at 25 degrees to 59 at 45 and 79 at 65. Calcium thins it, in a laboratory solution at least. As for lemon, the one rheology study that touched pH never varied it, so the note calls the claim that lemon cuts the slime unmeasured rather than wrong.

The note on the ban gives the plant's history. The Fatimid caliph al-Hakim forbade mulukhiyya in the Islamic year 395, which ran from October 1004 to October 1005, and the chronicles give his reason: the first Umayyad caliph had loved it. The Greek word behind the name, malache, comes from malasso, to soften, so the oldest surviving name for the vegetable is about the slime. The leaves are food; the seeds carry cardiac glycosides, and nobody cooks the seed.