Toum, the garlic sauce

Order grilled chicken in Syria and a thick white paste arrives at the edge of the plate, unasked for. It is called toumiya, or simply toum. The word means garlic. The sauce is common to the Levant and resembles the aioli of Provence, except that there is no egg in it.

What goes into it

In its plainest form it is three things: fresh garlic, table salt and a neutral oil. The garlic is ground to a paste, the oil is streamed in slowly, and the mixture is beaten until it emulsifies; lemon juice usually goes in to help that emulsion hold. The traditional method is a wooden mortar and pestle, though most kitchens now use a machine. It is also made with olive oil.

Other names for it

Arabic carries several names for the sauce: salsat toum, toumiya and muthawwama. The orientalist Reinhart Dozy, in his 1881 supplement to the Arabic dictionaries, described muthawwamah as a white sauce made from garlic and cheese. In Lebanon there is a version with mint added, called zeit wa toum.

What it is eaten with

Chicken above all. Grilled chicken, shish tawook and chicken sandwiches. It also comes with chips and with artichoke, and in practice it sits beside almost any meat. Because it contains no egg it works on a table without eggs in it too.

A warning

The sauce is stronger than it looks. Take it from the tip of the spoon rather than by the spoonful; the garlic is raw and the taste stays for hours. If there are pickles and bread beside it, those are what hold the balance.