Honey and syrup sweets of the Middle East and North Africa

A shared technique with local versions

Across a wide region there is a recurring construction: a thin or fried dough, a nut filling, and a syrup poured over after baking or frying. Baklava is the best-known member of the family; there are dozens of others, and the arguments about whose version came first are frequently political rather than culinary.

What the syrup is made of varies by place, by period and by cost. Honey, sugar syrup, date syrup and grape molasses all appear, and many pastries now made with sugar syrup were made with honey when sugar was expensive or unavailable. A page asserting that any one of these sweets is traditionally a honey sweet is usually asserting more than the record supports.

Where honey is genuinely central

• Fried dough sweets soaked in honey syrup, recorded across the Maghreb and the Levant in forms that predate cheap sugar.
• Honey and nut confections of the halva and nougat families, in which honey provides both sweetness and structure.
• Semolina and pastry sweets served at religious festivals, where honey often carries an explicit association with sweetness in the year ahead.
• Honey served plainly with bread, curd or clotted cream at breakfast, which is much more widespread than any pastry and much less written about.

In the Arabian peninsula and Yemen a further factor operates: sidr honey and comparable regional honeys are expensive prestige goods, which puts them into hospitality and gift contexts rather than into everyday baking.

The claim to avoid