Syrian Cuisine, 1870s
In speaking of the customs of the Arabs that pertain to their meals, it is hardly proper to use a term familiar in Western speech, and speak of “the table,”…
From: Unknown To: 1876 C.E.
Location: Syria
Note: This article has been excerpted from a larger work in the public domain and shared here due to its historical value. It may contain outdated ideas and language that do not reflect TOTA’s opinions and beliefs.
“The Food” from Syrian Home Life by Henry Harris Jessup, compiled by Isaac Riley, 1876.
In speaking of the customs of the Arabs that pertain to their meals, it is hardly proper to use a term familiar in Western speech, and speak of “the table,” for in Syria the company who are to eat together do not sit at a table, but squat cross-legged around a little, insignificant piece of furniture about a foot high, merely a large stool or tall kind of tray. This is placed on a mat in the middle of the room.
Here is the bill of- fare of a supper to which a traveller might be welcomed in a Syrian home: First of all are the world-wide essentials, bread and water. The bread is in four piles on the edge of the tray. The water is in one cup, from which all are to drink. The salutation of the host is Tefudduloo, which means in general, “As you choose,” and in this particular case, “Help yourselves.”
On the table there is kibby, and camel stew, and Esau's pottage, and olives, and rice, and figs cooked in dibbs, and chicken boiled to pieces, and white fresh cheese, and curdled milk, and fried eggs.
Kibby is the Arab plum-pudding and mince-pie and roast-beef, all in one. It is made by pounding meat in a mortar with wheat, until both are mixed into a soft pulp, and then dressed with nuts and onions and butter, and baked or roasted in cakes over the fire.
The pottage, or mejeddara, is made of oddis. It is like thick pea-soup, but with a peculiar flavor. This is what Jacob made the pottage of, when he tempted Esau, and bought his birthright. The little Arab children revel in it.
The bread is in large thin wafers, as broad as the rim of a hat, and is served freshly baked, hot from the sides of the oven, a hole in the ground lined with plaster.
At a dinner of some pretensions there will be, of course, the great dish kibby, and meat cooked with beans, and squashes stuffed with rice and meat, the two sides (the ribs) of a lamb tied together and filled with rice, minced meat, and spice; and for dessert, dried apricots, stewed oranges, and fresh apricots, and cucumbers, which the natives eat just as they would apples or any other fruit.
The Arabs use no knives or forks at their meals, nor have they plates for each person; but each one doubles a piece of the markûk bread into a kind of three-cornered spoon, and with it, or with a wooden spoon, or his fingers, dips from the dish which he may happen to prefer. Besides ordinary food, the Syrians have some most peculiar kinds of appetizers; for example, in the market-places of some of the cities, old women may be found having for sale strings of mud balls for the especial use of persons with unnatural appetites. They are brought from Aleppo, and form in some places a very fashionable, and therefore very necessary article of diet.
The Arabs use copper cooking-vessels; and as many of them are slovenly in all household matters, the green rust gathers on their utensils, and sometimes people are poisoned by it. Some years ago, at the village of Deir Mimas, several families bought goat’s-meat, not knowing that the goat had died from the bite of a serpent, and they were all taken sick, and made sudden and frequent calls for the missionary’s store of tartar emetic and ipecac, while the natives treated them with sugar and pomegranate-juice.
And it is no uncommon thing for poison to be mingled with food, for the purpose of putting some hated person out of the way.
In Beirut, a few years since, a member of the church was taken very ill, and it was found that his mother, at the instigation of the Papal Maronite priests, had put corrosive sublimate in his food. He was ill for weeks, and has never fully recovered from the effects of the poison.
A Moslem, in Damascus, at the time of the dreadful massacre of the Christians, attempted to poison a number of Christians in the castle, whither they had fled for refuge, in order to get rid of the widow of one of his Christian creditors who was killed in the massacre. He sent her poisoned sweetmeats, and she ate and died, as did seven others. And the poisoner’s art has no insignificant place in the political and ecclesiastical intrigues of the East. Sheikhs, beys, and even emirs, priests, and high dignitaries of the sects, have thus been put out of the way.
Sometimes the flour of which the bread is made has tares ground in it. And often people refuse to eat bread bought in the market, for fear it is mizwin, or has tares in it. When it is made of such mixed flour, it has a narcotic effect, and puts persons to sleep. The people are generally very careful to pick out the tares from the wheat before grinding it. Another common and simple article of food among the Syrians are roasted peas. For evidence of which here are two of their songs:
"Hady, Mady, baby sweet.
You come and go upon my feet.
I found a pigeon eating peas,
I said, Now feed me, if you please.
It said, I will with greatest joy.
In honor of your baby boy.”
“Come home with your pockets full.
Papa, if you please,
Pistachios and filberts.
And for mother roasted peas!”
The Syrian markets abound, too, in a great variety of delicious fruits. At one season there will be an abundance of grapes, figs, watermelons and pomegranates, peaches, pears, lemons, and bananas. At others, there are oranges, sweet lemons, plums, apricots, and mulberries. There is fresh fruit of some kind on the trees every week in the year. In the cities of the coast, iced lemonade is sold for a cent a glass, cooled with snow from the summit of Mount Lebanon, 9,000 feet high.
Grapes are about a cent a pound, and figs the same; and in March, five oranges or ten sweet lemons cost a cent. Huge watermelons are about eight or ten cents a piece. A cluster of fifty bananas can be bought in the season for twenty-five cents, or even less. Almost everything is sold by weight. In marketing, one buys so many pounds of milk and oil and potatoes and charcoal. The prickly pear, or subire, is a delicious fruit, although covered with sharp barbed spines and thorns. It is full of hard large woody seeds, but the people are very fond of the fruit.
The fruits that are most important to the people are olives and grapes. Olives are eaten either raw or dressed in various ways. A very common lunch for a laboring man is simply bread and olives. But they are chiefly valuable for the oil extracted from them. At some seasons of the year a great part of the food of the people along the range of Lebanon consists of vegetables cooked in this oil, eaten sometimes with and sometimes without bread. This oil was until recently almost the only substance burned for light, though in the later years petroleum is coming into use. Olive-trees are abundantly cultivated throughout the country
The fruit of the vine forms another substantial part of the food of the people. Grapes come into season in August, and continue plentiful about four months. During this period they are used constantly, not as an agreeable dessert to stimulate and gratify the appetite after it has been satisfied by a substantial meal, but as a substantial part of the meal itself; so much so, that from August to December, grapes and bread are the main food of the people.
Very thin cakes of bread made of flour, or of barley-meal and flour mixed, and eaten with plenty of grapes, form the meals of the inhabitants of Lebanon, morning, noon, and night. Grapes are also dried in large quantities to preserve them as raisins; and in this form they supply an article of food to be used after the grape season. By pickling and beating, a substance called dibbs is made out of grapes. It is purified by means of lime, and is about the consistency of honey, and resembles it in appearance. Bread and dibbs is a very common meal in winter and spring. There are two kinds, one made from grapes, and the other from raisins.
The Arabs do not eat meat as freely as people of colder climates. Sometimes, though not frequently, mutton or camel’s or goat’s flesh will be served. The Arabs have a curious way of preparing sheep to be killed and eaten. In the month of June, when pasturage is scarce and sheep are cheap, they buy them from the shepherds: the animal is tied to a stake, then a woman sits down by it with a quantity of prepared balls of leaves and grass, and takes the sheep’s head beneath her arm and proceeds to stuff it. Leaves from the vine are used, but especially from the mulberry, after the silkworms have begun to spin, for they are the most fattening.
The sheep often becomes so fat that it can scarcely stand. Sometimes the tails alone of these fatted sheep weigh from forty to forty-five pounds, or as much as a fifth of the whole animal. Indeed, Herodotus and later writers have said that these heavy tails are, for the comfort of the sheep, carried on small boards which run on two wheels. This kind of mutton culture is in the care of the women and girls. Many an Arab girl’s time is wholly taken up in leading .the sheep to the fountain to wash them, and in gathering the leaves with which the sheep are stuffed. The washing is part of the. fattening process. It is applied to the sheep; but never to the girls themselves, if it can be by any means avoided. At the end of four months the sheep bought for eighty piastres will bring a hundred and forty or fifty. The sheep is killed and skinned; the fat is then removed, the flesh cut from the bones and hung in the sun. The fat is boiled: ten parts of lean are added to every four of fat. It is simmered for an hour, and then put into jars for the family use during the year.
Among the Arab dainties, one of the most familiar is a dish that is made for the relatives when a boy is born; it is called mughly. It is made of pounded rice, flavored with rich spices and sugar, and put into little bowls, and almonds and other nuts sprinkled over the top. One of these little bowls is sent to each of the friends.
Syrian etiquette demands the giving and taking of something to eat or drink on the occasion of any visit; and when one enters the house even for a call, sherbet or sweetened fruit syrups, and sweetmeats and coffee are given to the visitors. The Moslems are extravagantly fond of coffee, and drink it morning, noon and night. In making it, the browned grains are beaten in a mortar at the time of using it, hot water is poured over it, then it is boiled for a moment, and served without milk or sugar, in little porcelain cups the size of half an egg-shell, that are set in an ornamented metal holder like an egg-cup. Coffee and Damascus sweets and nuts are scrupulously served at all weddings.
The Koran forbids the use of wine or liquors. The good rule made by Mohammed was kept for ages, but now the Moslems are beginning to break it. The faithful still drink only coffee; and all the people frequent the houses kept by the kahwajees or coffee-men, to drink coffee gossip and listen to the tales of professional story-tellers and the songs of the minstrels. They are great places of resort, even though not very attractive to those who have not learned the Arab disregard for dirt. An American visiting one of these places a while ago, was served with a cup of coffee in a dirty cup. He asked the attendant to wipe it out. With true Oriental obsequiousness he protested, “On my head, on my head, Bismillah ” and then took out his handkerchief and wiped it dry. The coffee was not drunk.
In these houses the people gather, not only to drink coffee, but to smoke, for the Syrians are inveterate smokers. They look on tobacco as being as necessary as water. Men, women, and even little children smoke. They smoke everywhere. They even measure time by their pipes so that if you ask the distance to a point in a journey, the answer very likely will be, it is two, or three, or five pipes distant.
Jessup, Henry Harris, and Isaac Riley. Syrian Home Life. Dodd & Mead, 1876.
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