Chorba

Chorba
	Bulgarian bean chorba with tomatoes and red peppers.
Alternative names	Ciorbă, shurbah, shorwa, čorba, çorba
Type	Soup or stew
Region or state	Algeria, Balkans, Central Europe, Eastern Europe, Southeast Europe, Central Asia, North Africa, Arabia
Main ingredients	Water, meat, beans، vegetables and legumes
	Media: Chorba;

Chorba, (/ˈtʃɔːrbə/ CHOR-bə; Turkish: [tʃɔɾˈba])^[a] shorwa, shurba, shurpa, shurbah or shorba (/ˈʃɔːrbə/ SHOR-bə)^[b] is a broad class of stews or rich soups found in national cuisines across North Africa, The Middle East, Iran, Turkey, Southeast Europe, Central Asia, East Africa and South Asia. It is often prepared with added ingredients but is also served alone^[1] as a broth or with bread.^[2]

Etymology

The word chorba in English and in many Balkan languages is a loan from the Ottoman Turkish چوربا çorba, which itself is a loan from Persian شوربا šōrbā. The spelling shorba could be a direct loan into English from Persian or through a Central or South Asian intermediary.

The word is ultimately a compound of شور šōr meaning 'salty, brackish' and با bā meaning 'stew, gruel, spoon-meat'.^[3] The former is from Parthian 𐫢𐫇𐫡 šōr meaning 'salty', and the latter from Middle Persian *-bāg meaning 'gruel, spoon-meat'.

The etymology can be definitively tied to Persian through the cognate شورباج šōrabāj; in modern Persian, while شوربا šōrbā evolved to mean 'broth, stew', شورباج šōrabāj simply means 'soup'.^[4] It is typical for Middle Persian word-final 𐭪 g to either change to ج j or to be dropped altogether in Modern Persian.

The dialectal Arabic word شوربة šūrba also a loan from Persian while شربة šurba is a phono-semantic matching that occurred during the loaning of the word into Arabic and is etymologically tied to شرب šariba meaning 'to drink'.

Chorba is also called shorba (Amharic: ሾርባ), sho'rva (Uzbek: шўрва), shorwa (Pashto: شوروا), chorba (Bulgarian: чорба), čorba (Serbo-Croatian Cyrillic: чорба), shurbad (Somali), ciorbă (Romanian), shurpa (Russian: шурпа), shorpa (Uyghur: شورپا / шорпа), çorba (Turkish), shorpo (Kyrgyz: шорпо), sorpa (Kazakh: сорпа)^{[citation needed]} and shorba in (Hindustani: شوربہ / शोरबा). In the Indian subcontinent, the term shirwā is commonly used to mean gravy. It is a Mughlai dish and it also has vegetarian forms.

Types

Shorwa is a traditional Afghan dish which is a simple dish which is usually mixed with bread on the dastarkhān.^[5] It is a long process and a pressure-cooker is usually used, as it reduces the process to 2 hours. The main ingredients for shorwa are potatoes, beans and meat.^[6] It is commonly served with Afghan bread.^[7]

Ciorbă in Moldova and Romania, is a generic term for a soup.