Whenever I was asked, what should I get you, I would immediately and without giving it a thought say, barazeq cookies. It is likely that most of the neighborhood’s children shared our obsession with them. When my father would return from the market carrying a box of barazeq cookies, we would experience the greatest joy of our lives. Fortunately for us, it was the custom for people to bring sweets during family visits, especially barazeq cookies. This was perhaps because of their modest price in comparison with other sweets and the round plastic box that they came in that made it possible to tie a red ribbon around and offer it as a present. We would then hop around the box like bunnies, pulling out the sesame-covered small discs one at a time. Sometimes we would ask the neighbors’ children over to the great feast and whisper to them, «Would you like to come over? We have barazeq.» Though we used to call them «baraze’» and only found out their real name when we saw it written on a shelf in a sweets shop. This was a turning point in our love story with them. It was then that they became a formal food item with the solemn Arabic letter qaf at the end of it, despite being colloquially replaced with a glottal stop. We would sometimes sneak during the night to steal two discs from the awe-inspiring box and go back to sleep.
However, unlike Zorba, we never threw them up, even though we ate enormous quantities. I sometimes think that if we were to arrange all the barazeq cookies that we had eaten on the ground, they would form a route from our village in the mountains to Beirut. Every memory of every feast and every family gathering is marked with the boxes of these cookies exchanged between households and placed neatly on the tables. There was also the plate that my aunt constantly refilled every time a visitor dropped by or left. Perhaps, one of the symbols that is most shared by our relatives in Syria and those in Beirut were these fragrant friable and brittle cookies with pistachios in the dough. As soon as I mention their name, their aroma and scenes of their presence in homes at all occasions come flooding back.
There’s so much to say about the aroma of barazeq. It was surely much stronger during those olden days than it is today. When a box came into a house, its aroma wafted towards the bedrooms. Since visitors would often come over at night, we would wake up in the mornings tracking their scent, to find the box placed on the long wooden cabinet between display decorative items and porcelain.
In old and new neighborhoods, there were bakeries spreading the aroma of pastries baked with ghee or butter mixed with spices. But the aroma of the barazeq cookies always had its own character and effect. As soon as you get to the corner of the street, the aroma of them being baked would waft towards you from every direction. You would find at least three young men in each bakery taking turns at mixing semolina with flour, butter, vanilla and yeast, then rolling out the dough in the form of small disks, dipping them in roasted sesame with sugar syrup and pistachios.
Any pastry maker knows that the thinner the dough, the crispier, more friable and more delicious the cookies will be. There’s a certain nimbleness required to make barazeq cookies, to handle these small disks and make sure that the whole surface is covered with sesame seeds. I remember how my mother, like many other women, tried to make them at home once. But they didn’t hold a candle to those available on the market. And her attempt was met with annoyance from her children: «Mom, don’t make them again; we can buy them.» Even my grandmother, who was of rural Lebanese origin and who insisted on baking everything with her own hands, did not mind my uncle buying them for her. She was happy to arrange them proudly next to all the milk cookies and ma’amoul cookies she would make herself for holidays.
«Won’t you get us barazeq when you come over» was for long the closing sentence for all our telephone conversations with our relatives in Lebanon. Even today, I still hear in Lebanon the sarcastic quip to those who frequently go to Syria, «He’s surely going to get barazeq,» as it is the most precious gift not available in Lebanon. It was an industry in which the people of Damascus stood out among all the rest, even surpassing the other Syrian governorates. There were no barazeq cookies like those of ash-Sham, as Damascus is known colloquially, perhaps that was why the Damascus discs were made slightly larger in size so they would last longer. As time went by, the barazeq cookies crossed the border between the two countries after the war, and the secret to making them was carried by many of those who moved between Syria and Lebanon during that period. They appeared in Beirut and from there moved to Tripoli and the coastal countryside. Later, they were available in abundance, with every pastry shop or bakery carrying them.
It is not surprising in our country for a type of sweets to have such a close relationship with people. Maybe we’re a warm and emotional people who are very attached to memories. Or maybe it’s the large number of wars and crises driving people to finding an outlet in reminiscing about the days of prosperity, family gatherings and holidays, those affectionate days when we were children running between pottery and straw in attics redolent of wheat and spices, standing at a loss before all the types of sweets. It is no surprise that one of us would pick up a barazeq cookie today and recount for an hour, memories and impressions, taking a walk down memory lane.
Today, sweets shops are everywhere, the craft is passed on to children by parents and grandparents, and the making of barazeq is no secret to anyone. The recipes are all over the internet, from ass-Sham and Aleppo barazeqs to Jerusalem barazeq cookies that look like flatbread and are part of the heritage and memory of the people of that city. But the magic lies in the nimbleness of the hands that make them, their care in handling the dough, the minutes it takes to bake them, how golden they are, the color of the blond sesame seeds, as well as how sweet and friable they are.
Syria and Lebanon share a lot of common intimate details, with the barazeq cookies coming at the top of the list, with those plastic boxes that crossed the border and never came back, and were widely present at every occasion, gathering, dessert course and congratulations visits. In my mind, that wooden table with the thin sheet of glass under which my grandmother would arrange different bills as decoration, with plates of sweets on top, the plate with the barazeq was always the quickest to be wiped out.