Mixed Stuffed Vine Leaves & Courgettes

Stuffed grape leaves and zucchini on one platter, as the Syrian table serves them: whole courgettes and slender vine leaf rolls, both filled with rice, both vegetarian. The courgette is hollowed and filled with rice we have folded through a tomato sauce seasoned with ground cumin and coriander, salt, white and red pepper and a trace of black, then brightened with fresh coriander, parsley and dill; it reaches you tender, lying in a tomato sauce sharpened with cumin, and gives to the side of a spoon. The vine leaves, warak enab, are rolled finger-thin around rice cooked first with onion and then with tomato, parsley, olive oil and pomegranate molasses, so each roll is sharp with a faint sweetness, picked up with the fingers and finished in two bites. Eaten together, the sourness of the leaf comes first and the warm spice of the courgette follows, and most people alternate between them. The platter goes in the middle of the table for everyone to reach; it is the order for a table that wants both mahashi without ordering twice.