Day Two: Sunday 25 June

The strangest ideas occur to you in the middle of the night. High on the success of my first new recipe attempt, I lay awake in bed, trying to recall the name of a dessert that my Iraqi grandmother used to make. Why I was thinking of dates mashed with spices at 2 in the morning is a mystery, but once the idea was embedded I couldn't shake it off.

A quick conversation with my dad confirmed the name that had escaped me: halawi, a play on the Arabic word halwa meaning sweet (both noun and adjective) and halawiat, a generic term for dessert. Both words cover all manner of spreadable, sugary delights, but the recipe in question comprised (to the best of my memory) of melted dates that are mixed with fennel seeds and left to cool to form a thick, fragrant paste. My grandmother (Bibi, in Arabic) always kept it in an ancient Carte D'Or ice cream tub, and would bring it out at the end of a meal for a final, sweet hit. You can eat it on its own or with khobez bread, but my family have always preferred to spread it thickly on plain crackers, such as Bibi's cherished water biscuits. This is a delicate business, as halawi is solid stuff; put too much pressure on the knife and the whole thing is liable to crack into a hundred fragments, leaving you with sticky fingers and a lap full of crumbs.

I'll be the first to admit that, as a child, I couldn't stand halawi: why would you ever want to ruin dates with something as yucky as fennel? And why did it smell so much? No, I only wanted choc-ice for dessert, thank you, and so would turn my nose up at halawi whenever it was offered. Meanwhile, my dad reached for cracker after cracker, lost in nostalgia for a time when he could eat it every day, when the dates came, not wrapped in clingfilm, but in baskets, fresh from the back garden.

Unsurprisingly, my dad's memory extended only to his experiences of eating halawi, not to its preparation, and so I called Bibi to get the recipe first hand. To my relief, she seemed to have no recollection of my disdain for the dish (or was at least polite enough not to mention it), but was instead delighted to hear that I was interested in making it. When I asked if she would give me the recipe she laughed and said "there isn't one". Halawi is one of those family dishes that is always present in the kitchen in some form or other, but is so well known, and has so many variations, that no one has ever felt it necessary to write the recipe down. It turns out that the fennel seeds, my defining memory of the sweet, are by no means obligatory (I had to prompt her to mention them at all) and that sesame seeds and rosewater are also optional. In a final traditional-family-recipe cliché, after hanging up the phone I realised that Bibi had neglected to pass on any instructions related to measurements. You use the dates you have and tailor everything accordingly. That's it.


So off I trotted into the kitchen, the recipe in my head, as it seemed in the spirit of the dish not to need to write anything. There was a squashy packet of Medjool dates lodged at the back of the cupboard, and I pitted them in turn, a slow but surprisingly therapeutic task, even though it makes your fingers a gooey mess. As I worked I imagined how different it would have been to make halawi in Bibi's tiled kitchen in Baghdad, homemade yoghurt dripping gently in a corner, molasses boiling on the stove, with the hot desert sun burning relentlessly through the open window. Back in drizzly Britain, I tipped the fruit into a frying pan on a gentle heat, prodding it impatiently with a wooden spoon to encourage it to soften. Little by little the unfortunately brown and sticky pile began to give, rendering a textured paste to which I added ground ginger and fennel seeds. I neglected to add the traditional cardamom as I didn't have any, and, unlike my Iraqi  relatives, don't see the need to add it to every dish in the kitchen. (Sorry, Dad). Merely opening the bottle of rosewater reminded me of dinners at Bibi's house, where it makes its way into all sorts of dishes, even plain boiled rice. Only a drop is enough to scent the entire kitchen, and my sister (whose superior olfactory capabilities make her the ultimate recipe tester) came along to investigate.

Teaspoons in hand, we carved away at the unattractive-yet-fragrant brown blob, and closed our eyes to taste it, trying to work out what was missing. After much deliberation, and adding a little bit more of everything, we concluded that it tasted good. Not the same as Bibi's, but good all the same. As I scooped it up into an appropriately battered plastic tub to harden, it occurred to me that the curse of the inherited family recipe is that, no matter how hard you try, no matter how strict a recipe you follow, it will quite simply never taste the same as you remember. Food is bound up in so much more than just method and ingredients: flavour is tied to feeling, to fellow diners and the environment in which a meal is shared. It's true that this realisation can leave you, like Proust, bitterly disappointed that the taste of youth cannot be experienced anew, but sometimes I think it's for the best. The past is a different country; ultimately, what matters is the here and now. After all, six-year-old me couldn't stand Bibi's halawi. But my own? Well, 20-something me likes it just fine.