‘Good lady, are you absolutely sure you are not more hungered?’
Our waiter peered anxiously at us, before energetically slapping his belly in case we didn’t understand. Unfortunately, in Syrian culture, refusal of food is taken as a polite way of asking for more, and likewise, the concept of extreme fullness is often lost in translation. The Syrian stomach is insatiable, and with food as delicious as this, you can understand why. Waving aside our protestations, he bellowed into the kitchen and within moments we were presented with two lahamajene, a bowl of yoghurt, and a fatherly pat on the back. I defy any stomach to refuse a lahamajene. It is the Middle Eastern answer to the pizza, a flat round of Arabic bread thinly layered with delicately spiced lamb mince, the flavours warmed with cinnamon and chilli, and offset with the bitter-sweet astringency of tamarind.
As is often the way in the Middle East, it is the dingiest and most unassuming backstreet joints that offer up the best fare. Avoid the brash hotels with their mistranslated English menus (‘Welcome, you are invite to eat the Middle Eastern foods in a European ambulance’), and head instead to the grubby, cramped workman’s caff buzzing with life. Throngs of noisy male diners leisurely smoke cigarettes and gesticulate over dishes of mezze, as vast tureens of stew steam at the counter and greasy overhead fans wheeze in the heat of the kitchen.
To say food is everything in Syria is an understatement. The clientele of these downtown joints know what they like, and what they do not. Consequently, nowhere can staple Syrian dishes be found closer to perfection. There is no messing about in these kitchens; there are no menus, no presentation and no pleasantries. The whole place heaves with testosterone, a riot of male bantering and jangling Syrian pop music, as old men roar at backgammon boards, chai glasses clink and sweaty waiters slam down food. Workers come during the high heat of the day, lean over the counter and ask for ladles of fasoolya, Syria’s traditional bean stew. Usually eaten at lunch, fasoolya is a meaty tomato-based broth full of large white beans, rich with olive-oil, and fragrant with herbs. It comes with thin strips of sour pickled cucumber, branches of fresh mint and a small saucer of garlicy yoghurt, while remnants of the stew are soaked up by folded discs of Arabic flat bread. Whole baby chickens are spit roast on long skewers which revolve slowly in the window. They are things of almost indescribable beauty. The skin alone is enough to make any Nando’s fan weep with envy. Sticky with rich, caramelised fat, crisp and brittle on the bronzed outside, but moist and tacky underneath, the skin of an Aleppian chicken is a wonderful thing. Before pulling it all off in one, the trick of the dab-hand is to take a circle of flat bread and vigorously rub the carcass of the chicken, as if sanding a desk, in order to soak up all the intense flavour of the juice and meat fat. The bread is then either rolled up long and thin, sandwiched with fresh mint, or dipped into platters of hummus and smoky baba ganouj, which are liberally seasoned with za’tar (a pungent Middle Eastern blend of thyme, sesame seeds and sumac) and peppery olive oil.
The flavours of Syrian food are as rich and complex as the history of the land itself. An aggregate whole, built upon layers and layers of antiquity, Syria is the cradle of human civilisation. It is a dense sedimentation of ancient culture, stationed majestically at the end of the Silk Road. Inhabited in turn by the Phoenicians, Babylonians, Persians, Romans, to name but a few, Syria is an ancient melting pot of diverse peoples, and where today, the settled dust of these illustrious civilisations is stamped down by countless feet in the labyrinth of the souq. In Aleppo, the old collides with the new. It is a living, breathing relic of bygone time, where the frantic motion of the city and the coughing of engines is set, incongruously, against the imposing backdrop of the citadel, in use since the third millennium BC.
The taste of Syrian cuisine is intense, a palimpsest of flavour, blended and deepened over time. Bedouin cookery is a fine example. These nomadic tribe people live in the empty heart of Syria, in the Palmyrene desert, where flavours of food are simplest and most concentrated. My first taste of a Bedouin barbeque was unforgettable. Having, as a desperate last resort, hitched a lift with a convoy of Syrian soldiers on their way to the Iraqi border, the thought of a whole barbequed sheep at the other end was about the only thing that would keep anyone going. The ramshackle bus swayed along the desert tracks as night fell, while spotty army youths wrestled over control of an exploded microwave, apparently a television, which crackled out Syrian hits, as fifty rifles clinked unnervingly behind us.
Through the windows of the bus, the distant fires of Bedouin camps punctured the empty blackness of the desert and drew closer.
It is the first rule of Bedouin culture that strangers are welcomed in with opened arms to share the food of the community. The flames spat with fat as shadowy, stooping figures of Bedouin women slowly turned the lamb carcass, and men reclined in the fragrant haze of shisha smoke, dipping aniseedy ring-shaped biscuits into cups of pistachio coffee perfumed with rosewater and cardamom. As the meal came to a close, our guide, Emed, leant over, with more than a predatory twinkle in his eye, and said ‘Sweet for my sweet, sexyprincess?’ Regardless of his persistent oily advances, Emed’s sweet was worth it. He offered us a plate of fat Palmyra dates, rich with the sun-sweetened stickiness of palm sugar, and then, spreading out a headscarf on the sand, began stacking up a dozen baklava, like pieces of sugary Lego. These pastries are delicious. Flaky, light and dense at the same time, they look like jewels, crusted with bright green pistachio or glazed walnuts, and heavy with the stick of date syrup or honey. Probably best to visit a dentist when you get home though.
Syria is misunderstood by the West. It is pictured in the media as a hotbed of Islamic fundamentalism, shouldered by war zones, as its borders prickle with hostility and obstruction. This is absurd. The Syrian people are not a nation longing for Jihad, but some of the most hospitable people on the planet. Discarding paranoid images of Syria as the bogeyman of the region, and focusing instead on the texture of everyday living, it is food, and the love of your fellow diner, that life is all about. Around the Middle East, Syria is known as the ‘pearl of the Arabian kitchen’, and for good reason. Put simply, Syrians like eating. And if you like eating, you’ll like Syria.
