Almond

Basbousa is a popular Egyptian pastry, also called helwa, which means “sweet.”

These are delightful meltingly soft cookies. You must also try the variation with ground hazelnuts.

These most famous of Moroccan pastries are best known abroad by their French name, cornes de gazelle or gazelle’s horns. Stuffed with ground-almond paste and curved into horn-shaped crescents, they are ubiquitous wedding-party fare. I have eaten some with a very thin hard crust, and some with a thicker, crumbly crust. This one, made with eggs rather than butter, is thin and crisp.

This Moroccan pastry is a very long coil (hence the name m’hencha, meaning “snake”) of fillo pastry filled with a ground-almond paste. It is stunning to look at and exquisite. I give very large quantities, because it is the thing to make for a grand occasion, but of course you can make it smaller and reduce the quantities. The flavor is better if you grind the blanched almonds yourself rather than use commercially ground ones.

These exquisite and delicate Arab pastries are family favorites. They are extremely easy to make, and delightfully light. They feature in medieval manuscripts as lauzinaj, which were fried and sprinkled with syrup, rose water, and chopped pistachios. In North Africa they are deep-fried, but we have always baked them.

This too is modern.

An Egyptian breakfast of boiled whole wheat, with hot milk poured over and sprinkled with sugar called belila, is turned into a celebratory dish on the 10th of Moharram (the first month of the Muslim calendar), when it is embellished with a flower fragrance and with nuts. Unless it is very young, wheat remains chewy even after lengthy cooking, so I use barley, which is less common but softens relatively quickly.

This is Syrian and beautiful, like white blossoms and brown leaves floating in a pure scented stream, but it is not to everybody’s taste.

It looks like white opaline encrusted with little stones. When it is served, it trembles like a jelly. It is customary for an admiring audience to compliment a belly dancer by comparing her tummy to a balouza.

The name means “Ali’s mother,” and it is the most popular sweet in Egypt. I had never heard of it when I lived there, but now it is everywhere. People in Cairo say it arrived in the city from the villages of Upper Egypt, but there it is said to be from Cairo. One joker explained that it was a bread pudding introduced by a Miss O’Malley, an Irish mistress of the Khedive Ismail. Go and believe him! People find all sorts of ways of making it—with pancakes, with thinly rolled-out puff pastry, with pieces of bread, and with fillo pastry. Fillo gives the most appealing texture, and it is good to bake the pastry initially rather than fry it in butter as is usual in Egypt.

Vermicelli broken into 1-inch pieces, or pasta which looks like large grains of rice, called lissan al assfour or “bird’s tongues,” and orzo in the U.S., is used. Both of these types of pasta were made at home by rolling the dough between two fingers, but now they are available commercially. In Egypt it is a breakfast dish, served sprinkled with nuts and raisins. Chopped bananas are sometimes also added. The pasta is usually fried until it is golden brown and then boiled. In North Africa, where they steam the pasta without first frying it, it is served as a dessert. The mastic must be pounded or ground to a powder with a pinch of sugar.

This Turkish cream with ground almonds is one of my favorite milk puddings.

This intriguing rice pudding made with water—not milk—called zerde in Turkey and sholezard in Iran, has a delicate flavor and pretty, jellylike appearance.

This is the most common and popular Arab dessert. It is a milky cream thickened by cornstarch or rice flour (in the old days the rice was pulverized with a pestle and mortar). In Lebanese restaurants it is usually made with cornstarch; at home rice flour is used, or a mixture of both. In Turkey they call the cream sutlage.

A mixed dried fruit salad with nuts is a favorite in Egypt during Ramadan, the month-long fast, when Muslims fast during the day and eat after sunset. All through the day, people, hungry and listless, are hardly able to work, and dream of what they would like to eat. At nightfall, when the sky is a cherry red, the cannons boom through the cities signaling the end of the fast, and the muezzins sing it out from all the minarets. The silent city suddenly comes alive with the clatter of spoons and plates, glasses and jugs, and with the sound of relieved hunger and laughter, of music and merry-making. The longed-for dishes wait on tables, trays, and the floor, piled high with ful medames, falafel, and bamia, meatballs and kebabs, khoshaf and apricot cream (following recipe). Every family has its favorite combinations of dried fruits.

Another Ramadan specialty in Egypt is a cream made of sheets of dried pressed apricots (amareldine) soaked, then boiled in water. I was in Cairo during the Ramadan month a few years ago and saw hundreds of bowls of this tart-tasting fruit cream offered free at street parties. The sheets of amareldine available these days do not have the pure taste they once had—perhaps due to preservatives. It is better to use natural dried apricots. Pistachios or almonds and thick cream are optional embellishments. Sometimes cornstarch is used to give the cream the texture of jelly. For this, see the variation.

The special appeal here is the contrast between the tartness of the apricots and the sweetness of the almond paste.

This delicately fragrant sweet is an old Syrian specialty of Ramadan, the Muslim month of fasting, when it is eaten to break the daily fast. It keeps very well for days, even weeks, covered with plastic wrap in the refrigerator.

There are many feast days in the Greek Orthodox calendar which are marked in the kitchen. Easter is the most important. The date is movable, fixed on the first Sunday following the full moon of the spring equinox, but generally falling within the first half of April. Houses are whitewashed and decorated with lilac, clothes are made, and new shoes are bought. There is much activity in the kitchen, for the feast also marks the breaking of forty days’ Lenten fast and a complete fast on Good Friday. Solemn candlelit processions are followed by national rejoicing to celebrate the Resurrection. Paschal Lambs are roasted on spits in gardens and open spaces, and the innards are used for mayeritsa soup, which is finished with the favorite egg-and-lemon mixture. Hard-boiled eggs are dyed red, a color supposed to have protective powers, and polished with olive oil, and a sweet braided bread is adorned with them.

In Morocco, they make this elegant couscous with small Mediterranean pigeons, but squabs and small poussins will also do.