Mamounieh

Three ingredients: semolina, clarified butter, sugar. The semolina is toasted in the pan until it turns pink. Hot sugar syrup is then poured in slowly, the stirring never stopping. Once the liquid is taken up the heat drops, and orange blossom water goes in at the end. It is served hot, under cinnamon and crushed Aleppo pistachio.

Salt beside the sweet

Mamounieh is not a pudding eaten on its own but the middle of a breakfast. It comes with clotted cream or with salty cheese; putting salty string cheese on a sweet dish is an Aleppo habit, and in Deir ez-Zor the cheese replaces the cream outright. Sugar and salt meeting in the same spoon is the whole idea of the plate.

Where the name comes from

The common account ties the name to the Abbasid caliph al-Ma’mun. The Aleppine scholar Khayr al-Din al-Asadi opened that up in his encyclopaedia of the city. The caliph’s life is documented in detail and carries no such record. The maker was more probably an Aleppine named Ma’mun in the Saqatiyya market, and the name stayed with him.

Where to eat it

At sweet shops and at restaurants that serve breakfast, in the morning hours. Households cook it on winter mornings and on Fridays, and sending a bowl to the neighbours on a happy occasion such as a birth is a settled custom. Looking for it in the afternoon is wasted effort; the pot ends with the morning.