Good intentions part of Amman chef’s recipe
Jordanian pastry chef Suha Abdulkarim is crushing gold-coloured dates to make a filling for her finely decorated Levantine biscuits, called maamoul.
Maamoul is one of the few foods in Jordan that can hold its own against offerings from Syria and Lebanon, the heavyweights of Arab cuisine.
At her home in Amman, Ms Abdulkarim mixes the crushed dates with fennel, anise, ghee, mastic, nutmeg and fenugreek.
The filling is then shaped into rings and engulfed with dough made from semolina.
Before the biscuits are finished, delicate patterns are etched on them. Unlike much of the maamoul on the market across the region, Ms Abdulkarim does not use premade date paste. Nor does she use moulds for the decorations because they are engraved by hand, a technique called tanqeesh.
Her dates of choice are Khalas, a variety imported from the UAE.
“Khalas is soft and gives such a nice colour inside the maamoul,” Ms Abdulkarim says. When she started her business from home a decade ago, her maamoul quickly became popular with neighbours. The market is dominated by mass-produced goods, but clients in Amman wanted high-quality food.
But a shrinking economy made worse by the coronavirus pandemic has hit demand.
Last year, Ms Abdulkarim closed her workshop. It employed a dozen people from impoverished neighbourhoods in east Amman. She switched to working from home but kept premises near the Four Seasons Hotel in the western part of the capital. She sells a kilogram of maamoul for $14, similar to the price mass-produced varieties command in Jordan.
“We were affected because so many people since the coronavirus have started businesses from home,” she says.
Ms Abdulkarim subscribes to an age-old Levantine cooking mantra: the eye also eats. “It is a labour of love,” she says.
Her three sons and her sisterin-law are her team. When she has big orders, she hires temporary help.
Haitham, her eldest, is in the 10th Grade and is “really good at tanqeesh”, she says.
When she was growing up, her parents pressured her to study hard, but her focus was on cooking.
“I have been loving cuisine since I was young.” she says. “I used to skip studying to go into the kitchen and cook.”
Maamoul is thought to have originated in Pharaonic Egypt, although some say that, like many Arabic sweets, it is Ottoman.
But it has been known for generations among the Bedouin of the Levant and in the Gulf.
City dwellers eat it on religious feasts, Muslim and Christian, but for unknown reasons, not at Christmas.
Urban Levantines modernised maamoul by making it into individual biscuits and adding more spices, instead of producing one big, flat piece known as the maamoul madd.
Maamoul can also made with pistachio filling and walnuts, instead of dates.
Ms Abdulkarim buys pistachios imported from northern Syria because of the intensity of their green colour. The walnuts come from the US.
Many of her customers think she is of Palestinian origin, because her maamoul is made according to a Palestinian recipe she learnt from her mother.
Her father is from Madaba, south of Amman, and her mother is from Saudi Arabia.
“Customers think I am from Nablus,” Ms Abdulkarim says, referring to the Palestinian capital of sweets.
A good recipe and ingredients are not enough to make delicious maamoul, she says.
“The intention also needs to be good.”