Tea and Cookies, Apples and Thyme

When T. and I got married last year my grandmother arranged to have almost an entire table of Moroccan cookies available for dessert. When the caterers laid out the table, she grabbed me to make sure that the wedding photographer took enough pictures of the cookie platters.

I mention this to give you, dear readers, some sense of where I get my own obsession with food and eating, and pictures thereof. It is an obsession that I share with my entire family.

This post is my entry for Apples and Thymes, which is a blogging event run by Vanielje, over at Vanielje's Kitchen. Apples and Thyme commemorates time spent in the kitchen with our mothers and grandmothers. Above you will see cookies, sent to me from Toronto by my mom and grandmother. These cookies were made by my grandmother, who is an amazing baker. My memories of eating in her apartment are some of my favorite memories from childhood. Cookies accompanied by mint tea or tea with sheba (wormwood) to help with digestion always came at the end of a meal, when my cousins and I would pull out the cards and play Rummy, or Othello, or Spit.

On the back of the plate are faduelos, essentially fried dough which is dipped in a sugar syrup mixed with lemon juice (one website referred to it as homemade honey) and then dipped in sesame seeds. In the middle are dates fourées, dates stuffed with a sugar walnut paste. I'm not sure what the ones in the back are, some kind of walnut meringue. They're my favorites. The ones in the front are sesame sticks.

It's become a truism of food history that Moroccan food is a kind of throwback to the flavors of medieval Europe, when people cooked with a lot more honey and nuts, and when meat and other savory dishes were more likely to be flavored with the spices that we now associate with sweets, like cinnamon or cardamom. When I think of Moroccan food, I think of it with a sense of modernity's doubletime: the time of my family's leaving Morocco, after World War II, and the time when I grew up, in the seventies and eighties in Toronto.

I have been living away from home for almost ten years now, in the strange and wonderful place that is the United States. My parcel from home made me want to pack up our stuff, get on a plane and go home to bake with my grandma. I would like to be having tea with her right now, in my favorite apartment in the world. It's time to learn how to make these cookies, so that they not only recall time spent in the kitchens of the past, but also time invested in flavoring the future.