Food in the Middle East, three: Sweets

This is the third post in a second series of blogposts based on the Middle East trip I completed mainly in May. The first post in this series was about breakfasts and the second was about lunches and dinners in Jordan. This post is about sweets, or more precisely confectionery and desserts. In the US they use the word “candy” to describe some of what is talked about here.

Despite the fact that I’m not usually a massive fan of sweets and desserts my travelling companion and I sometimes found ourselves, between meals, sitting down in a café to have something sweet to eat. I’ll start with Jordan because that’s where we began our trip apart from a one-night stopover in Abu Dhabi following the long-haul flight across the Indian Ocean. Unfortunately I don’t have that many photos of sweets in the Middle East but the first one below here shows items on sale in a bakery in Wadi Musa, the town that services the ruins of the ancient Nabataean city of Petra. Wadi Musa is almost entirely given over to providing tourists the things and services they need.

We were in the country during Ramadan so most of the locals were fasting during the daytime. At the end of the day they gather in shops like this one to secure supplies for the time when fasting ends, which happens at 7.30pm. It’s the same in Amman: the bakeries do a rapid trade from about 5pm during Ramadan as people stock up with things to eat. Meals are eaten at different times during the night.

At one shop on the main drag in Amman there were dozens of shoppers outside a bakery selling goods like the ones shown in the photo above. If you are a tourist you ask for what you want by pointing, then you hold up some fingers or say the English word (“four” or “six”), and then pay a couple of Jordanian dinars (about A$4) for the food. In Wadi Musa, the guy serving customers who took my friend’s order put the sweets on a Styrofoam tray and wrapped them in cling film so that she could take them away. In Amman the guy at the front of the shop who served my friend put her goods in a white plastic singlet bag. The cost was about the same in both places.

In Amman there are other types of sweet shop like this one (photo below) that sells what Americans call “candy”. On the last full day that we were in the country my friend bought a bagful of sweets at a shop like this that had candied fruit in them and it cost 7JD (A$14) for a kilo.

There was not so much of this kind of thing available in Jerusalem and anyway the meals in restaurants there are usually enormous so you mostly don’t feel the need to add sweets after finishing your main course. But on day two in that city we ate dinner in a restaurant on George Washington Street named Angelica and for dessert my friend ordered tapioca pearls with coconut cream and fresh fruit (see photo below). There was also some white dessert wine for me that was on the house. On the menu it was listed as “Ice Wine” and had been made at Hevon, a town located about 30 minutes’ drive south of the capital.

On day six in the city at 7.30pm it was still 33 degrees Celcius and we had had a late lunch so we didn't feel like dinner. But we stopped at a gelato bar at 8pm. A two-scoop tub of mint and strawberry, a single-scoop cone with pistachio, and a small bottle of water cost 41ILS (A$16). 

In Istanbul there are sweet shops and cafes all along Divan Yolu Street, the main drag near Ayasofya where the tram line runs. On day two in the city we sat down in a bakery after ordering a piece of "gileki dilim", which is a kind of strawberry cake with chocolate. The bakery was called Cigdem Patisserie. I had a Coke as well and the tab came to 23.5 Turkish lira (A$5.90). The photo above, which was taken one day during our visit to Istanbul in the evening after fasting had ended, shows the display window of a bakery on Divan Yolu Street near Sultanahmet Plaza. Same with the photos below.

On day two on the way back to the hotel we also stopped at a convenience store and bought half a watermelon, which the man behind the counter sliced up for us and put into plastic bags. The fruit cost 30TL (A$7.50) and when we got back to the hotel we asked the guy at the front desk if he could put some of the slices in the fridge in the kitchen as the guest rooms did not have this kind of appliance in them.

On day three in Istanbul in the mid-afternoon we went into a sweet shop with the obligatory front window display and asked about the goods on show. A guy behind the counter gave us each a small slice of alwar (sesame roll) to try and he also said they sold sujuk (Turkish delight). We went upstairs but the menu they had on the table there didn’t list the same sweets that were in the window, so we got up and left. We walked back up the hill a bit until we got to another sweet shop, looked at the window display and ordered a selection of sweets from a waiter standing there, then sat down outside it at a table that had been placed, with others like it, on the pavement. The selection we had chosen included Turkish delight, and there was also a cappuccino for me. The food came on a plate, with two knives and two forks, and there were nine pieces of confectionery on it. 

Some of them were quite tough so a knife and fork were necessary to cut them up. They were all very sweet indeed and was too much to eat so the pieces that remained after we had eaten our fill we got put into a container so that we could take them back to the hotel. The tab came to 38TL (A$9.50). On the same day at 9.30pm in the evening as we were walking on the same street I felt the call of nature so we ducked into a cafe and ordered a piece of cake so I could use the WC (the toilet; it’s an old English term that is used throughout the Middle East to refer to this amenity). The cake was called “velvet cake” and was made from a kind of solid cream with red layers of cake interspersed between them. It cost 18TL (A$4.50).

The next day at about 1.15pm after seeing Ayasofya, as we were on the way to the Istanbul Archaeology Museum, we sat down in a cafe on the main street the to have a plate of Turkish sweets, a Coke, and an orange juice. This came to 42TL (A$10.50). In the afternoon of day five we went into a café on Istiklal Street and ordered an iced latte, an Efes beer, and a brownie that arrived from the kitchen heated up with a bubbling chocolate sauce. I ordered another beer after a while and the tab came to 93.5TL (A$23.40). On the last full day in Istanbul at 4.25pm we sat down again at the Cigdem Patisserie to share a slice of “kardinal” cake. I also had a cappuccino. Together it cost 29TL (A$7.25). Later, at 5.45pm, after we visited the Grand Bazaar, my friend had an ice cream which cost 15TL (A$3.75). 

Turkish ice cream shops are all over the place in the shopping areas that people use when they have free time and where tourists congregate. The men who sell ice cream often wear traditional embroidered vests that remind passers-by of the Ottoman era. They use long metal rods that have a flat shape on the end, and to attract people to their shops they clatter the rods around in metal tubs of sticky ice cream, hoisting up the frozen masses of confection with the rods and thumping them back down into their containers. On one night soon after our arrival in the city an ice-cream vendor was teasing a woman who had come up to his shopfront (see photo below) to buy ice cream, putting the cone, that had a dab of ice cream attached to it, in front of her face, on top of her head, and in her hands, then snatching it away again so that she started laughing at his skilful display out of frustration mixed with delight. All the time the vendor was only holding onto the long metal rod with his hands. He kept up a supply of verbal patter to accompany his tricks, which went on for several minutes as people walked along the street going about their business.

On the same afternoon as my friend bought her ice cream, further down the hill toward the Sirkeci area near the cultural centre where we had booked tickets that would allow us see the whirling dervishes, at 5.55pm we stopped to share a bowl of rice pudding (16TL, equal to A$4).