The Menu Evolves for a Muslim Holiday Built Around Food

It was still pitch black when Nadia Hamila, then a young schoolgirl, would roll out of her warm bed at 3 a.m. to accompany her father to the abattoir in northern London on the first morning of Eid al-Adha.

Ms. Hamila, who at 40 is an entrepreneur and the owner of a Moroccan packaged food business in London, still remembers feeling the excitement surrounding the holiday. She and her father would bring an entire sheep back to the apartment, where all the women would gather to clean the innards and trotters in the bathtub.

“We even had a specific order for the way we ate the meat,” she said. The first day of Eid al-Adha was for the organs. On the second day, they ate the head and trotters, and only on the third day, once the fresh meat had rested, would they make kebabs, tagines or grills.

Eid al-Adha, or Festival of Sacrifice, is the second of the year’s two major Islamic holidays, and coincides with the Hajj pilgrimage. It commemorates the prophet Ibrahim’s willingness to sacrifice his son Ismail at Allah’s request. According to the Quran, God ultimately offered Ibrahim a ram to kill in the son’s place. So people across the Islamic world have traditionally sacrificed a lamb — or goat, cow or camel, depending on the region — at home and divided it into thirds among the needy, friends and relatives and their immediate family.

Home butchering of animals is now banned in many countries, including large swaths of the Arab world, where a fifth of the globe’s Muslim population live.