Kleicha, the feast cookie of the Jazira

Kleicha is the feast cookie of the Jazira, the northeast of Syria. Flour dough is rolled thin, date paste or walnut goes inside, and cardamom and nigella go into the dough itself. It has two classic shapes: a wheel cut from a filled roll, and a sealed half-moon. Hasakah and Deir ez-Zor each keep a more heavily spiced version, and the tray leaves the house on the morning of the feast.

What goes inside

Three fillings are common: crushed dates, pounded walnut, grated coconut. With dates the dough is rolled up and sliced, which is why the cut face shows a spiral. Walnut and coconut are closed into half-moons instead. The scent comes from the dough, not the filling. Cardamom, nigella and in some houses fennel are worked straight into it.

Three names, one tray

The same cookie carries three names in the region. Kleicha in Arabic, kleča in Syriac, kade in Kurdish. In the Jazira all three are heard on one street. Usually they describe one tray. The name changes; the dough and the cardamom do not.

How it differs from maamoul

It gets confused with the maamoul on this site, but they are two different cookies. Maamoul is made from semolina dough and shaped by pressing it into a carved wooden mould. Kleicha is made from flour dough and rolled or folded by hand. The real difference is in the smell: maamoul carries no cardamom or nigella, and in kleicha those are part of the definition.

Which feast it belongs to

To two calendars at once. In the Syriac and Assyrian households of the Jazira it is an Easter and Christmas cookie; in Muslim households it is the cookie of Eid al-Fitr. In both cases the tray does not stay at home, it goes to the neighbours. One cookie doing the rounds twice a year, through two different doors, is the ordinary state of the region.