AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
Right now, at this very moment, most of you have eaten or are about to eat your breakfast. Given our hours, we're obsessed with the morning meal, which is why we're doing a series about what people have for breakfast around the world. Today, NPR's Emily Feng takes us to an ancient city in northern Syria, where a sticky pudding frequently starts the day.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (Singing in non-English language).
EMILY FENG, BYLINE: Friday mornings in the city of Aleppo are wonderfully slow and sleepy. It's a day off for almost everyone, and the streets are quiet except for the call to prayer...
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: (Non-English language spoken).
FENG: ...And the occasional vendor.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: Yeah.
(SOUNDBITE OF METAL CLANKING)
FENG: ...And the sounds of stores cooking Aleppo's favorite Friday dishes, like ful (ph), a garlicky dish of fava beans, and fatteh, chickpeas smothered in creamy tahini yogurt sauce. But I'm on the hunt for something sweet.
(Non-English language spoken).
I want mamounieh (ph), a sweet, smooth pudding made of fine semolina, a kind of wheat and garnished with cheese strands and slivers of nuts.
AHMAD ISA: (Speaking Arabic).
FENG: Mamounieh is from Aleppo, Ahmad Isa says, though it's spread across Syria. Isa's the owner of Isa Sweets shop here in Aleppo, and it's a popular morning spot for mamounieh lovers. And Isa says, it is hard to get the dish wrong.
ISA: (Speaking Arabic).
FENG: It's simple, he says. It's just clarified butter, semolina, sugar and some water. And inside the shop, his employees stir two big vats of the steaming creamy yellow mamounieh, keeping it constantly in motion in the pan so it does not caramelize.
It's a little sweet for me in the morning, but very nice.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #4: It is quite sweet.
FENG: So I add a liberal handful of the salty string cheese that Isa has given us to the top of the mamounieh. Other diners around me order it with hummus and pita bread on the side.
ISA: (Speaking Arabic).
FENG: People love mamounieh here because it's appetizing and ancient, says Isa, tracing back more than 1,000 years the Abbasid Dynasty in the 8th century. And so, when Allepo native Amaar Wafa'i takes a bite of mamounieh on Friday mornings, he's filled with memories of his father.
AMAAR WAFA'I: My father (laughter) - he makes mamounieh very, very, very well.
FENG: His wife, Lama Wafa'i, jumps in to offer me her own recipe for mamounieh...
LAMA WAFA'I: (Speaking Arabic).
FENG: ...Which she says tastes much better than this restaurant-made pudding.
L WAFA'I: (Speaking Arabic).
FENG: "Every time we taste mamounieh," she says, she thinks back to childhood when mamounieh was always on the family dining table on Fridays.
L WAFA'I: (Speaking Arabic).
FENG: At every gathering of relatives, she says, But memories of the war also come up. A ruinous civil war just ended over a year ago in Syria, and Aleppo was one of the cities most damaged throughout the nearly 14 years of fighting. Some of the buildings on the same street as this restaurant remain gutted, collapsed from air strikes or with concrete walls riddled with artillery marks.
ISA: (Non-English language spoken).
FENG: Isa, the store owner, shut down months after the revolution began, he says, He reopened only a decade later in 2021, as the fighting which had killed thousands of civilians subsided a bit.
ISA: (Non-English language spoken).
FENG: "And thanks to God," he says, "we have stayed open since then."
Emily Feng, NPR News, Aleppo, Syria. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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