BAGHDAD

OUR dinner  a six-plus-pound common carp  came out of a murky pool and landed with a wet slap on a bare concrete floor, exposed to the dusty night air except for a crude awning of corrugated metal.

The sous chef, if you will, lifted a wooden club and delivered a crushing blow to the head that clearly came nowhere near killing the creature, since it continued to writhe as the knife was plunged through its gills and then along its spine, not through the gut, the only way I’ve ever known to clean a fish.

Iraqis are particular about selecting their fish  preferring males over females, for example  and then seeing it to its mortal end for a simple reason: it should be as fresh as possible and, even while still twitching, roasted over an open fire in the style called masquf, which has been associated with Baghdad for centuries at least.

“They want it exactly in the traditional way,” said Munir Khadim, the owner of Al-Baghdadi, a restaurant on a stretch of the Tigris River in Baghdad where fish have probably been roasted in more or less the same way since the earliest days of civilization. “It’s part of Iraqi folklore.”