Syria’s inimitable cuisine

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Nov 28, 2009

Syria’s inimitable cuisine

A colourful display of pickles in Damascus

Thank God I hadn’t bought a carpet, like some of my fellow travellers had. Even without one I found it difficult enough to rein in the slithering silk shawls from the souk of Aleppo, and the olivewood spoons from the street stalls in Damascus, whose hand-carved handles stuck out every which way from under the lid of my gaping suitcase. My tote bag had become a carry-on cornucopia, overflowing with a barely manageable accumulation of elegant sacks and beribboned boxes from fancy pastry shops, with a half-kilo of Aleppo pepper paste as ballast. My head, replete with a week of Syrian sights, smells and flavours, was in the same state of disarray.

I had long yearned to join Anissa Helou, the FT’s Middle Eastern food contributor, on her tour of the “Culinary Delights of Damascus and Aleppo”. These Syrian cities seemed daunting on my own, but Anissa, half-Lebanese and half-Syrian herself and passionate about the Middle Eastern cuisines, promised to be the perfect guide. It would be a pilgrimage to the roots: the haute cuisine of 9th-century Damascus had travelled west along the North African coast to invade my island home of Sicily, where its influence still lingers today.

We were to spend two nights in Damascus, visiting souks and sweet shops, then a night in the desert oasis of Palmyra, the city of the palms, once a strategic stopover for the spice trade, where colonnaded ruins of impressive proportions march across the desert floor (not Roman ruins but indigenous ruins from the Roman period, according to our guide). The last three nights were in Aleppo: more pastry shops, more delicious meals, more wandering the 40km of passageways, both wide and narrow, that make up Aleppo’s great stone-vaulted souk, or exploring the streets of the Jdayde, the old and picturesque Jewish and Armenian quarter that housed our hotel.

A man sits in front of a shop in Syria selling culinary equipment

A shop selling culinary equipment

If respect for early 18th-century architecture in the boutique hotels opening everywhere has its drawbacks, the impression of walking into another century and another culture more than compensates for steep or unexpected steps. The Jdayde Hotel where we stayed in Aleppo was undergoing renovations, and was, I thought, asking too much of a small space. But we had a lovely dinner in the airy courtyard of its newly opened sister hotel just down the street, the Yasmeen d’Alep, not to mention a peek at the brand new and super-luxurious Mansouriya Palace . In Syria nothing is over the top because there is no top.

There are limits, however: one would hope that the Syrian government will extend its firm control of the country to its tourist expansion as well. The lovely old Zenobia Palace Hotel at Palmyra has been flanked by horrendous prefab bungalows that smell of plastic and glue. They look as if they might blow away in the next sandstorm. Let’s hope.

My only reservation in joining the tour had been the fear that it would be culinary to the exclusion of all else – the original itinerary made no mention of a visit to the Great Umayyad Mosque, a Roman temple converted to a Christian church and then, early in the 8th century, rebuilt as a mosque. Glorious and colourful mosaics decorate its courtyard to show the faithful what Paradise would look like.

I need not have worried: we had a visit planned with an excellent guide to show us around, and many impromptu treats as well, tucked into what was a flexible schedule: the 12th-century but remarkably modern mental hospital of Bimaristan Al-Nuri, now a museum of Arabic science; the joyfully naive mosaics in the little museum at M’arat Ne’man; the laughing black lions from Tell Halaf that decorate the entrance to the Aleppo archaeological museum.

We also ate, of course, magnificently and uninterruptedly. Specific dishes come to mind: among the many mezze or starters, a salad of green olives dressed with pomegranate molasses served at the Club d’Alep; the brain fritters and the perfectly cooked Swiss chard at Smeroud in Aleppo; the spicy lamb in a sour cherry sauce made for us by the chef Marie Gaspard Samra, who gave us a cooking lesson and dinner at her house; the lamb with burghul and chickpeas at Naranj in Damascus; or the candied apricots stuffed with pistachios and dipped in chocolate that I bought from the elegant Damascus chocolate shop, Ghaouri.

Diners at Aleppo's Club d'Alep in Syria

Dinner at Aleppo’s Club d’Alep

Yet, at the end of the trip, what remains most precious to me is the sense of having been the guest of a gastronomic tradition of great integrity, cultivated through many centuries and with great passion. According to my guidebook, Syria is nearly self-sufficient in terms of food production. Everything we ate was fresh, local, rigorously seasonal and rich in flavour, whether it was served at the upscale and excellent Smeroud, or at the unexpectedly good roadside “Tourist Restaurant” on the way from Palmyra to Aleppo, or at the tiny ful shop where we joined the local clientele in breakfasting on a dried fava bean soup spiked with olive oil, lemon juice and marvellously aromatic Aleppo red pepper.

Such laudable self-reliance in a globalised world does limit variety – lamb was about the only meat we had (although camel hump was on sale in the Aleppo souk) and the list of vegetables that we were served was not long – but the Syrians find many ways to compensate, combining what they have in unusual and imaginative ways, and then adding spices with a liberal hand. Both Damascus and Aleppo were major terminals for the caravans bringing spices west along the Silk Road, and in the souks the spice stalls are still a treat for the eye as well as the nose with their colourful sacks of red pepper, yellow turmeric, pink rose petals and a grey-green variety of dried herbs. Some serve as apothecaries as well, and advertise their remedies by festooning their doorways with starfish, desiccated lizards and baby crocodiles.

One of the highlights of the trip was a visit to the kitchens of the Pistache d’Alep, an elegant pastry shop displaying tray after tray of bite-sized pastries – pistachios, walnuts and pinenuts rolled in layers of filo dough, or wrapped in threads of pastry or sugar floss – so even and so perfect that it seemed only a machine could have created them. But the kitchens were alive with men, aged 15 to 50, whose hands danced as they rolled, twisted and chopped with an amazing economy of motion. Their concentration and their easy dignity bore witness to a profound respect for the manual labour required to create food, fundamental to a gastronomic culture that appears to embrace all levels of Syrian society. A week of immersion in such a culture was indeed a privilege.

By Mary Taylor Simeti

Financial Times