Embracing Middle Eastern sweetness
The cultural significance of sugar in Dubai's culinary landscape reflects deep-rooted traditions and hospitality, highlighting its role in celebrations and everyday life
Sweetheart, sweet dreams, sweet cakes, sweet cheeks, sweetie pie, sweet talk, sweet tooth: all the popular slang allusions to sweetness are good, approving and loving. The other three flavours have bitter, sour and saltier associations.
Sweetness is the one universally loved taste: where national palates might disagree on savoury flavours, everyone, and everywhere, smiles at sweetness.
It is the first thing we ever taste, the beguiling, comforting, overwhelming hug of sweet mother’s milk. But it is also the crescendo of a relentless chorus of sour-mouthed bitterness against sugar, as latter-day quacks and gutful soothsayers who call themselves nutritionists and dieticians, warn us that sugar is the work of the devil, that it is poison, the root and branch of disease and death – “Ah! Sugar, it’ll rot ya teeth!”
This is all nonsense. Not just nonsense, but cultural, culinary, philistine nonsense. I’m telling you now, ain’t no nutritionist or dietician taking away my marshmallows.
We taste only four things; imagine removing one of them. Synesthetically, consider the world without yellow – you’d miss the Gault&Millau printed guide, for starters. However, you could still see and function, and you would eventually get used to it, but we would be immeasurably poorer aesthetically. The answer to an overweight, sickly population is not to demonise an ingredient – first starch, then fat, now sugar – it is to eat less, move more, prepare your own meals and use a knife and fork. Or chopsticks. Or your hands.
I discovered the importance of sweetness relatively quickly in Dubai and the UAE. Food rich in intense, concentrated flavours, with all of that wonderfully gloopy sugar in pastries and coffee – in the qatayef and basbousa and baklava, the luqaimat, halawet el jibn and kunafa. And yes, Dubai Chocolate. However, a brief gahwa aside and note on my assimilation, I’m actually beginning to enjoy replacing sugar with the lurking presence of uncracked cardamom seeds in my java.
Still, sugar is fantastic stuff – crunchy and soft, intense and subtle. It complements everything, melting into a syrup or caramel, and is soft or hard, preserving, and the secret enhancer of myriad other flavours. Of all the ingredients and tastes in the global pantry, sugar is the last one you would give up.
Embracing sugar and sweetness in this part of the world is both a culinary and culturally rewarding experience. And, if you think about it, sugar is the purest, quickest and blamelessly unequivocal way to pass on goodwill and happiness. Offering a chocolate cake or a muffin is a thoughtful yet profound act of kindness. It isn’t the heart or the soul of hospitality; it is simply love. There is not a birthday, a wedding, an anniversary, a proposal, a seduction, or a failure commiserated that doesn’t come with sugar.