Take a handful of tears. This is not an attempt at poetry: They are, in fact, called tears, these tiny, translucent fragments of resin, glittering like sugar and giving off the scent of high, sweet pine. The fragrance is the flavor. They come from inside a mastic tree, an evergreen cousin to the pistachio, that abounds in the Mediterranean and the Middle East and thrives in difficult soil, in the sandy remains of crushed rock, where less hardy plants might wither. Once rooted, fed by the sun, the trees can go for long stretches without water — without any care at all.
Recipe: Mouhalabieh (Milk Pudding)
Only a species indigenous to the southern coast of the Greek island Chios produces this precious sap, prized since antiquity as medicine and seasoning for food. (In the 19th century, breath-purifying mastic chewing gum was an indulgence reportedly as beloved by the women of Constantinople as tobacco by the men.) Local lore holds that the trees began to weep in the third century A.D., mourning Saint Isidore, a Roman naval officer martyred for being a Christian; but the Greek historian Herodotus had already cited mastic as a rare luxury alongside cinnamon and frankincense in the fifth century B.C. So valuable was the resin that during the War of Greek Independence, which started in 1821, the Ottoman sultan sent a fleet to lay waste to the island but stipulated that the villages of the mastic farmers be spared. (He was not so lenient in later violence.)
Mastic feels like stones between the fingers and turns pliant between the teeth — although “if you bite it, it cracks,” the French Palestinian chef Fadi Kattan says. Under a pestle, it crumbles into a shimmery dust. Stir this into liquid, and there’s a slight thickening, a sudden heaviness, verging on syrup. Kattan, a founder and owner of the restaurant Akub in London, likes to add ground mastic to the juices running off a roast to finish the meat in lush velvet. You must be judicious in measuring, he says, because the taste is subtle but strong: first a pang of bitterness; then cool, damp forest. “It’s an invitation to travel,” he said.
A thousand-year-old ingredient finds
a modern-day application.
One of the loveliest embodiments of this singular flavor-fragrance is his version of mouhalabieh, a delicate Arab milk pudding whose origins go back to the seventh century. Requirements are few: a pot of milk off the stove; a whisking-in of sugar; mastic, pounded down to powder; cornstarch, to help the pudding set; and vigilance. As an early recipe in the 10th-century Baghdadi cookbook “Annals of the Caliphs’ Kitchens” warns: “You should never stop stirring.” Kattan suggests tracing the number “8” with a wooden spoon over and over along the bottom of the pot, rotating it so no part of the surface goes untouched and always crossing back through the center, the hottest point, where the milk is most at risk of scorching. “It can be tricky at the end,” he says. “It goes from being quite liquid to quite solid in a few seconds.” When it’s near custard, pour the mixture, still hot, into individual bowls. Let rest an hour at room temperature, then another two or more in the refrigerator, until it wobbles.
From his childhood in Bethlehem, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Kattan remembers his grandmother bringing mouhalabieh to the table in little green glass pots, topped with rosewater or orange-blossom syrup. For him, a dusting of broken pistachios is enough — a callback to the mastic tree. The pudding was one of the first desserts he served at his restaurant Fawda, opened in 2015, down a narrow alley in Bethlehem’s old city. He had to close it at the start of the pandemic but planned to reopen last December. Then came the attack by Hamas on Israel and Israel’s bombing and ground invasion of Gaza.
In Kattan’s cookbook, “Bethlehem: A Celebration of Palestinian Food,” published in May, he writes of serving mouhalabieh with candied Jaffa oranges or red dates from Gaza. “We celebrate the land,” he tells me. But he fears that ingredients, and a whole culture, are disappearing. He asks, “Am I at the brink of becoming an archaeologist who can only tell sad stories?”
Almost all the world’s mastic still comes from Chios. Today the island is beset by climate change — spiking temperatures, wildfires, torrential rains — and, over the past decade, has been host to hundreds of thousands of refugees from Syria, Afghanistan and Africa. But the mastic groves remain. Every summer, farmers weed and prune, sweep the soil, spread white calcium carbonate on the ground and cut fine, shallow slits at the base of the trunks, to wake up the trees and remind them of their purpose. When the time is right, they cut more, up and along the bark and the branches, and wait. Days pass. The sticky sap from the wounded trees beads and swells, and then it falls.
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