Kousa Mahshi: Lebanese Stuffed Courgettes, Cored and Simmered

Stuffed vegetables are the part of Levantine cooking that most resists shortcuts. There is no way to speed up coring thirty courgettes, and every household that makes kousa mahshi regularly owns a specific narrow tool for doing it.

The dish itself is simple to describe and fussy to execute: courgettes hollowed out and filled with rice and minced meat, then simmered in a tomato broth until the shells give and the rice inside has swollen to fill every gap. The Matbakh's survey of traditional Lebanese dishes places it among the staples, described plainly as courgette stuffed with meat and rice.

It belongs to a much wider family of mahshi across the Levant, where the same principle is applied to aubergines, peppers, vine leaves and cabbage. A closely related dish, sheikh al-mahshi, takes the aubergine version and treats it with more ceremony, as the record on that dish describes. What unites them is a technique rather than an ingredient.

Ingredients

Serves 5 to 6. Total time: 1 hour 45 minutes, of which about 40 minutes is coring and stuffing.

• 1.4 kg small pale courgettes, roughly 12 cm long, as straight as possible
• 200 g short grain or Egyptian rice, rinsed and drained
• 350 g minced lamb
• 1 tsp ground allspice
• 0.5 tsp ground cinnamon
• 0.5 tsp ground black pepper
• 1.5 tsp salt, plus more for the broth
• 2 tbsp ghee or butter, softened
• 700 ml passata or chopped tomatoes
• 600 ml water or light stock
• 4 garlic cloves, crushed
• 2 tsp dried mint
• 1 tbsp tomato paste
• Juice of half a lemon

Method

1. Wash the courgettes and cut off the stem end flat, leaving the base intact. Do not peel them.
2. Core each one with a narrow corer, working in from the cut end and turning as you go. Leave a wall about 5 mm thick. Go slowly at the base: pushing too far punches through the bottom and the filling escapes during cooking.
3. Combine the rice, lamb, allspice, cinnamon, pepper, salt and softened ghee. Mix well with your hands.
4. Fill each courgette to about three quarters full, pressing gently with a finger. This is the step people get wrong. Rice expands, and a courgette packed tight will split along its length in the pot.
5. Whisk the passata, water, garlic, tomato paste and a good pinch of salt in a wide heavy pot. Bring to a simmer.
6. Lay the stuffed courgettes into the pot in a single layer if you can, or two loose layers if not. The liquid should just cover them; top up with water if needed.
7. Cover and simmer very gently for 45 to 55 minutes. A hard boil batters the shells until they break. The courgettes are done when a knife tip slides through the flesh without resistance and the rice inside is tender.
8. Stir the dried mint and lemon juice into the broth in the last 5 minutes, off the boil, so the mint keeps its aroma. Rest 10 minutes before serving, with plenty of broth spooned over.

Why the packing rule matters more than the recipe

Every failure of this dish traces back to the same mistake, which is filling the shells too tightly.