Ṣābūniyya (White Almond Nougat)

History

Ṣābūniyya (صابونية) is a sweet of dissolved sugar cooked with sesame oil (shayraj), rose-syrup (julāb) and a little honey, thickened with dissolved starch, then studded with peeled, finely pounded almonds and, once set, dusted with perfumed powdered sugar. Cooked firm and allowed to set in sheets, the same confection also served as a luxury filling for the "crowned" (mukallal) sanbūsaj, which were then fried in sesame oil. Its name derives from Arabic ṣābūn, "soap" (صابون) — traditionally read as a nod to the sweet's smooth, opaque, soap-like white body. Al-Baghdadi's book carries the first proper written halwa recipes, but ṣābūniyya sits within an older tradition of medieval Arab whipped and boiled sugar-and-nut confections. The best-documented branch of that family is naṭif, a honey, egg-white and nut candy recorded in tenth-century Baghdad and generally held to be the ancestor of European nougat and Spanish turrón, carried west into al-Andalus. Ṣābūniyya is thus a sugar-and-starch cousin within this white-confection family, not a straight-line forebear of nougat.

Ingredients

• raṭl sugar
• sesame oil
• rose-water syrup
• ūqiya honey
• starch
• peeled almonds
• perfumed pounded sugar

Instructions

1. Dissolve sugar, lift it from the cauldron, and place it in a vessel.
2. Add sesame oil; when it boils, pour on some rose-water syrup (jullāb) and, per raṭl of sugar, an ūqiya and a half of honey, and stir.
3. As it nears setting, add starch dissolved in water and stir, feeding in the rest of the jullāb until it sets.
4. Stir in finely pounded peeled almonds and cook through.
5. Ladle into a dish, spread it, and dust with finely pounded perfumed sugar.