By Layla Al-Samarrai ~
In Kirkuk’s hot kitchen, a monstrous pot simmers on the stove, the kitchen heavy with rice, garlic, and onion-spiced sautéed vegetables. Three generations of Al-Dabbagh women seated at the table move in tandem—peeling onions, rolling grape leaves, cutting eggplant. They laugh at the hissing stove. It’s Dolma Day, and Iraqi dinner is not cooking. It’s laughter, reunions, and memories.
Dolma, that symbolic Middle Eastern dish, is no place more tenderly prepared and ritually consumed so in Iraq. In Baghdad apartment living or village deep in southern Iraq’s marshes, dolma is not just stuffed vegetables—it’s symbolic.
A Culinary Mosaic of Iraq
Iraqi dolma is tasty, unconventional in preparation, and consistently of high quality. Regional differences occur since Iraqi dolma is “upside-down” cooked, or mahshi maqloob, piled into a pot and served upside down as a platter-sized version of a moist cake.
Center vegetables like eggplants, bell peppers, tomatoes, onions, zucchini, and grape leaves are washed and drained and filled with a hot-broken rice mixture of ground meat, pomegranate molasses, tomato paste, and spices like allspice, cinnamon, and black pepper. It is delectable, greatly acceptable food with taste variation from house to house.
“It’s not just food—it’s a narrative,” says Dr. Ranya Ahmed, a culinary anthropologist at the University of Baghdad. “Each family has their own method, a different stuffing, a different way of layering. You’re eating centuries of culture with every bite.”
A Tradition That Transcends Time
Dolma is a most venerable dish with felicitous native roots in the Ottoman Empire but also one to which Iraq has historically made a contribution in the form of its own dolma. It inherits the Turkish dolmak, “to be stuffed,” but one that has been locally modified and adopted by Iraq as a sign of honor and host sign.
Dolma remains to this day at the forefront of Iraqi life. It is nearest and dearest to human beings during social occasions with family and friends, Eid, Ramadan, and death, when food is solace and togetherness.
“Mornings in Basra, my grandmother would start making dolma,” says chef and writer Lina Hassani, living today in Amman. “By mid-afternoon, there’d be a queue of neighbors with trays to deliver. It wasn’t food—it was diplomacy.”
A column in Al Jazeera a month ago illustrates how dolma has united Iraq’s ethnic minorities, scattered across Arabs, Kurds, Turkmen, Assyrians, and dozens more. Amid war, as simple as dolma is a language shared.
Home-Grown Revival in the Diaspora
Millions of diasporas consume dolma as domestic food abroad outside Iraq. Second-generation Iraqis in Dearborn, London, and Berlin are adopting dolma as a marker of identity and home.
Social media introduced Iraqi kids to the latest vintage dish as they learned how to make the meal based on TikTok videos or social media and online cooking classes. YouTube channels like “Iraqi Kitchen with Umm Ameer” are acquiring thousands of new subscribers who long to go back to their childhood.
Even Iraqi cooks try to wrap dolma, but deconstructed dolma is served by Chef Tara Jalal in her upscale Erbil restaurant with indigenous organic vegetables. “It’s dolma, just differently, and still has that home flavor,” she says.
The Labor of Love—and Unity
Why dolma of every single person is dolma’s favorite is why dolma is work. It’s never ever a dolma alone. It’s team sport and it’s two hours, sometimes days. But it is that exact reason for which it is lovable.
It is an art of collaboration, patience, and respect,” UNESCO continues, noting recently Iraqi dolma as one of its highlight preservation of revered foodways at risk. Dolma increasingly is an intangible food culture that fosters social relations in wholesome manner and continues identity through their wider effort to record intangible cultural heritage.
While global fare is kept to its standard by Iraqi fare, dolma is center stage—and humble, comfort food, and solidly so of Iraq’s lovely, green culture.
A Future Dinner
In an age of faster-and-faster-and-faster-when-dinner-is-more-frequent-burgers-and-fries-than-sit-down-with-the-clan, dolma is a rebellion: laziness, focus, camaraderie. It’s a reminding that dinner mends and a reminding.
Al-Dabbagh clan rests in Kirkuk, steaming dishes before them, gilt grape leaf plate rim shining with kitchen light. Bite is rice and tomato flavor and memory—of holiday and home, grandmothers and gardens.
References
- University of Baghdad – Culinary Anthropology Studies
- Al Jazeera – Dolma: Dish of Peace in the Middle East
- UNESCO – Iraqi Intangible Cultural Heritage
- Iraqi Kitchen with Umm Ameer – YouTube Channel
- Middle East Eye – Iraqi Chefs Modernizing Tradition
Layla Al-Samarrai is a Baghdad-born journalist who covers food heritage, cultural revival, and the human stories behind the headlines in Iraq and the Middle East.
