Nut

A delicacy which should be attempted whenever green walnuts are available.

This popular Lebanese pickle is served as a mezze. Make sure the walnuts have a fresh taste.

In North Africa the almond stuffing is colored green to give the semblance of pistachios, which are considered grander. You can of course use real pistachios.

Use a natural, tart variety of dried apricots, not the sweetened or honeyed ones; they must also be soft. These keep well for weeks and are good to serve with coffee.

When I was a girl I could die for this. I hardly ever make it now, but I was very happy to find it again in Istanbul. This is a sweet of Turkish origin which was very popular in Egypt. Some bakeries and cafés always had a large tray full of the rich, translucent, golden-ocher bread soaked in honey and syrup. Numerous recipes exist, and of course the texture and taste depend on the bread and the honey used. Use a fragrant honey like Hymettus or acacia.

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.

Called knafe by Syrians and Lebanese and kadaif by Greeks and Turks, the dough for this pastry that looks like soft white uncooked shredded wheat or vermicelli can be bought in Middle Eastern stores. There are several traditional fillings. The one with nuts is what you find in Arab pastry shops. The one with cream is my favorite. The one with the cheese is the easiest. The last two are meant to be served hot. They make a marvelous after-dinner dessert and teatime pastry. The quantities given below for the syrup are the usual large amount. You can pour only half over the pastry and serve the rest separately for those who want more.

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.

The finest-quality sheets of fillo are best to use for baklawa.

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.

The brilliant white milk ice cream with a chewy texture of my childhood was made with sahlab (also known as salep; see page 46), the ground root tuber of a member of the orchid family, and mastic, a hard resin exuded from the lentisk tree. It has become something of a mythical ice cream, as it can no longer be found in Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, and Egypt, countries that used to make it. Sahlab is very expensive, and what you buy is often adulterated. Be careful not to use too much mastic, as the taste would become unpleasant.

This is not an old, traditional ice cream but one developed by Egyptian expatriates in Europe with traditional ingredients and flavorings. It is very rich. Some Indian and Middle Eastern stores sell blanched and slivered or ground pistachios. If they are not available, you will have to buy shelled pistachios and blanch them for a few moments in boiling water to detach their skins, then peel them (a time-consuming labor), and grind them. Use 1 cup shelled pistachios to obtain 1 cup ground ones.

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.

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.