“Grilling is by far the world’s most common live-fire cooking method, practiced on six continents by rich and poor alike. Grilling is essentialy the same whether it’s done over a campfire-size pit in Argentina or on a shoebox-size sate grill in Bali” [or over a gum arabic wood fire in the Sahara Desert by four Sudanese camel drovers en route to Egypt who are dead tired of eating nothing but millet porridge.]
-The Barbecue Bible
In Egypt I learned the word for grilled meat, mashwee. It was always a cause of celebration, and it always meant lamb, and you ordered it by weight- a quarter kilogram if you were feeling dainty, a half kilo if you were feeling hungry, and a full kilo if you were famished- in grill restaurants. The word comes from shawaa, a doubly weak verb, meaning that two of the three consonants in its tri-literal root are waw and ya. After eating a kilo of mashwee, you always felt doubly strong, not weak.
The camel drovers call grilled meat sheeya, not mashwee, which is just another arrangement of vowels inserted between that same tri-literal root’s consonants, which sometimes go silent but never disappear. They rarely eat it on the trail because it’s hard to come by in the desert. Millet flour is easier to carry. We once bought a goat and once butchered a camel. Then we ate sheeya and the fatty meat tasted really good in that dry place.
When we arrived in Cairo I invited the men into downtown to eat and shop. They bought wool shawls outside al-Azhar and window-shopped in the Muski. The highlight was sitting down in a grill restaurant to eat sheeya, or mashwee as we called it there. My old dictionary has the word shawwaa, meaning grill man and is a noun in the occupational form of its doubly weak tri-literal root.
Sawwaaq, meaning driver (or drover), is another example of a noun in the occupational form, which always doubles its medial consonant and elongates its following vowel a. Saaqa is its verbal form and because its medial consonant is wa, a weak consonant, it is called a hollow verb. You could say that the drovers that day really were hollow. Their stomachs were empty and they were famished. A kilo of sheeya per person kind of hunger.
I did the ordering, saying to the waiter, talata kilo, then kamaan itnayn kilo, then wahid kilo kamaan, then kilo taani. The kilograms added up. I think we got to eight for the eight of us at the table. The bill came to about half of their pay for their forty day job. They could not believe how much money I handed over. Fulous kitiir, sheeya galeel. A lot of money for a little grilled meat.