Dania Roumieh loves maamoul so much she wrote a short story about it. Antoinette Nader wants to display the moulds used to make it in her home. And Elias Jahshan’s mother sends him a home-baked care package every year.
Maamoul is a semolina-based biscuit stuffed with a variety of fillings – usually dates, pistachios or walnuts – often dusted with icing sugar. It’s served in many Levantine cultures around the festive seasons – including Easter or Eid al-Fitr, which fall just two weeks apart this year.
Nader says maamoul takes her back to her mother’s kitchen, the smell of rosewater and icing sugar. She has saved all of her late mother’s moulds, knowing that good ones are now hard to come by. (I found my own after a years-long search, prompting a deluge of messages from people asking where they can get some too.)
“I remember teaching my [religion] classes about the reason that maamoul is the Easter biscuit,” Nader says. “The shape is the tomb of Christ and the sweetness of the resurrection is hidden until Christ broke through death.”
Maamoul is so beloved by the communities who make it, its mere mention can be transportive – a portal back in time.
Jahshan, who says he’s “not that religious”, appreciates the biscuits that arrive to his London home, even knowing the contents will be “crumbled or crusty” from their journey.
For mother and daughter Sivine Tabbouch and Karima Chloe Hazim, maamoul runs through their blood.
These days they run Lebanese cooking school Sunday Kitchen together. But when Hazim was little, they made kilos of biscuits to give to relatives, friends and neighbours at Eid al-Fitr – the celebration which ends the month-long Ramadan fast.
“When you make it at home it’s a very sensory experience,” Hazim says. “You’re using your hands, you’re tapping on a wooden mould … and then there’s the aroma, [the] sight of them piled high on the table after they’ve come out of the oven.”
Serena Tajjour, who runs her mother’s bakery Smëëd Al Maamoul on Instagram, says they have been “flat out” due to the close proximity of festivities this year. Now at capacity, they’ve had to add a disclaimer to notify customers that if any “spare boxes” of maamoul become available, this information will be posted on Instagram.
“We are nervous, I’m not going to lie,” Tajjour says. “We were booked out early for Easter and Eid early last year. This year we [planned to be] more prepared, but we are a little overwhelmed. Maamoul is a labour of love.”
The bakery experiments with twists on the traditional maamoul, much like Lebanese pastry chef Phil Khoury, who offers a plant-based alternative to the recipe in his forthcoming book, A New Way to Bake. Maamoul, he says, is a commonality in a region often divided over faith, ideology and politics.
“In my immediate family, maamoul were served around Easter,” he says. “Then I went to Lebanon and saw them served for Ramadan. Now I live in London and have also seen Jews share these at Purim. Every religious group in the Middle East celebrates something, around roughly the same time, with these filled biscuits.”
Great maamoul, according to Tabbouch, comes down to high-quality ingredients – the best ghee you can find, the freshest nuts and no shortcuts. “The semolina drinks the butter while it rests,” she says. Hazim suggests it is best made in groups, so everyone has a distinct role: kneading, moulding, baking.
“I think there is something in how [maamoul] bridges a huge geographical divide via family and cultural tradition,” Jahshan says. “It invokes a sense of home and nostalgia with the love language of food.”
When Roumieh published her short story on the sweets, “I wanted to write about something special to me,” she says, but also “something that everyone can appreciate”.
Sunday Kitchen’s maamoul recipe
Traditionally, maamoul is made in generous quantities as they are shared with friends and family. This recipe produces a large quantity of pistachio-filled and walnut-filled maamoul, as the dough is the same.
For the dough
1 cup milk
1½ sachets instant yeast
1kg fine semolina
1kg coarse semolina
1¼ cup white sugar
875g of good-quality unsalted butter, cubed and softened slightly in the microwave
1 sachet mahlab (a fragrant spice made from pulverised cherry pits, available from Lebanese grocery stores)
¼ cup rosewater
¾ cup orange blossom water
Icing sugar, for dusting
For the pistachio filling: use an oval wooden mould
½kg raw pistachios, shelled
1 cup sugar
½ cup orange blossom water
For the walnut filling: use a round wooden mould
½ kg raw walnuts
1 cup sugar
½ cup orange blossom water
To make the dough, you will need a very large mixing bowl (large enough to fit your arms in) as you will need to mix and knead the dough by hand.
In a small saucepan, warm the milk over low heat until just warmer than skin temperature. Remove from the heat and add the yeast, then allow the pan to stand for a few minutes.
In the large mixing bowl, add both the semolinas, sugar and softened butter, followed by the rosewater, orange blossom water and mahlab, then the milk and yeast mixture. Using your hands, rub the butter into the semolina while thoroughly combining and kneading all the ingredients together, to form a soft, well-incorporated dough.
Cover the bowl with a clean tea towel and set aside to rest in a cool, dry place for four hours.
Meanwhile, make the fillings. For the pistachio filling, place the pistachios, sugar and orange blossom water in a food processor and crush for a few seconds, or until you have broken down the nuts and incorporated them with the water. It should be a textured crumb, rather than a finely ground mixture.
For the walnut filling, repeat the process with the walnuts, sugar and orange blossom water.
Once your dough has rested for four hours, preheat your oven to 180C fan or 200C conventional. Line a few baking trays with baking paper.
As you shape and fill the maamoul, you will need to knead the dough in the bowl to loosen the mixture so it fits well into your moulds.
To make a maamoul, roll a small handful of dough (roughly 40g) into a ball and place it in the palm of your hand. Place your index finger in the ball and work the sides of the dough against the palm of your hand, rotating it as you go, to form a hollow pocket. Add a teaspoon of your chosen nut filling, then seal the edges of the dough to completely enclose the filling. The aim is to form a soft round ball, with no leaking filling, to place in your mould.
Press the ball into the patterned side of the mould, flatten the top with your hand, then gently bang the mould on your chopping board to release your maamoul. Don’t be discouraged if your first is not perfect – you will get better with each attempt.
Repeat until you have used all of your filling and dough. (There might be a little bit of one filling or the other left over.)
Place your maamoul on the lined baking trays and bake for 10 to 15 minutes until golden brown.
Remove from the oven and allow to them to cool on the baking trays. Do not handle the maamoul immediately, as they will be very delicate while hot and will firm up after they’ve cooled.
When the maamoul have cooled, use a spatula or pastry scraper to gently remove them from the baking paper.
If eating immediately, generously dust with icing sugar and serve. If you wish to store and keep some maamoul for later, do not dust these with icing sugar until you wish to serve them. Undusted maamoul will keep for up to three months in an airtight container, stored in a cool, dry place or in the fridge.
