Batt bel Marta: Port Said Ramadan Duck

As a key port city on the major trade routes a cosmopolitan population has settled in Port Said. Port Said was built from the ground up, at the time of the Suez canal. A monumental moment that allowed ships to cut across Egypt, on their trade routes between Europe, Africa, Arab gulf, India and Eastern Asia. Port Said became a magnet for all types of traders, businessmen and investors, and increased from a near zero population to 10,000 inhabitants within a couple of years.  

The new Port city thriving trade activities in the late 1800s attracted Jews, Greeks, Italians, Maltese, French, British, Scottish, Swiss working across diverse sectors. Port Said inhabitant opened specialised shops, markets and services creating a rapidly expanding melting pot of cultures. 

Many small scale entrepreneurs sold their products directly to trade ships as they passed through on their journey. 

The melting pot grew more into a large patchwork of cultures, whereby cultural, religious or language barriers, made it so that Europeans exchanged more time with each other. Local Egyptians and Arab traders, similarly expanded more time. Port Said over time, evolved into two main neighborhoods: the Arabic quarters and the Foreigners quarters. 

Decades later, even after the original inhabitants of the city departed due to war and the forced immigration. The Port Said cuisine food still bears the influences of these past cross-cultural experiences. 

As turkey is not part of the traditional Egyptian cuisine, foreign residents went through great effort to source turkey meat for their holiday feast. 

The Egyptian with their own religious celebrations looked for a local bird to mark their own religious calendar and they found their answer in the duck. So a new tradition took root to celebrate the beginning of Ramadan by breaking the fast of the first day of the holy month eating duck.

The duck is carved like a turkey served alongside its onion stuffing. It would not be uncommon to wait until next Ramadan to celebrate the start of the holy month with Batt bel Marta.