Middle Eastern desserts

Middle Eastern sweets — across the Arab world from the Levant to the Gulf to the Maghreb — share a common grammar developed under the Abbasid caliphate in tenth-century Baghdad and refined in courts and homes ever since. The defining ingredients are sugar syrup (often perfumed with rosewater or orange-blossom water), nuts (walnuts, pistachios, almonds), semolina, dates, filo and shredded pastry (kataifi), and fresh white cheese.

The signature sweets are flavour-of-place. Kunafa in Nablus, baklava in Damascus and Gaziantep, basbousa across Egypt and the Levant, ma'amoul at Easter and Eid, malabi as a chilled summer pudding, luqaimat at Ramadan iftar. The technique is often slow and visually generous: layered pastry brushed with butter, syrup pulled at the moment of serving, cheese baked into hot crackling pastry.

Many of the sweets are inseparable from Ramadan, Eid, weddings, and guest-greeting. To enter a Levantine or Gulf home is to be offered something sweet before any other thing.