Rachel Shabi’s mother has made delicious Iraqi pastries for her family. At 82, she can no longer make the bite-sized treats and her daughter has had to brush up her own baking skills
It’s at once evocative, delicious and reassuring: the taste of my mother’s homemade Iraqi pastries. Folded circles of aromatic, buttery dough that are popular across the Middle East, these bite-sized treats can be stuffed with dates or with crushed sugary nuts; there are fried savoury versions filled with spiced chickpeas or meats. But my favourite was always the cheese variety – served hot out of the oven, so that the filling is wonderfully gooey, the pastry still soft and fragrant, a small piece of Iraq giving comfort and sustenance throughout my childhood and beyond.
Now aged 82 and dealing with some of the physical hindrances of later age, my Iraq-born mother, Maureen, recently told me that she could no longer bake the pastries – rolling and shaping them was too unwieldy. She has been making sambusak, along with various other Middle Eastern pastries, for some six decades, and so this information marked another closing, another limitation, another tear at one of many small things that all together make up a person, a personality, a life.
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