Syria’s inimitable cuisine
By Mary Taylor Simeti

FT
November 28 2009 00:32

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 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.

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.

………………..

Details

Mary Taylor Simeti was a guest of Anissa’s Travels (,
tel: +44 (0)20 7739 0600) and Beroia Travel (,
tel: +963 11 232 0042). In Damascus she stayed at Beit Zaman Hotel
() and in Aleppo at Jdayde Hotel
()