Luqam al-Qāḍī (The Judge's Morsels — Syrup-Dipped Fritters)

History

Luqam al-Qāḍī (لُقم القاضي) — "the judge's morsels" — are balls of leavened dough fried in oil and dipped in syrup, and al-Baghdadi's 1226 Kitāb al-Ṭabīkh preserves one of the earliest recorded recipes: strong yeast dough pinched into hazelnut-sized pieces, fried in shīraj (sesame oil), dipped in jullāb (rosewater syrup) and dusted with finely pounded sugar. The word luqma means simply "morsel, mouthful, or bite," and the dish is widely cited as first described in this 1226 Baghdad manuscript. It belongs to a much older family of medieval Arab fried-dough sweets, and the fritter itself long predates any single language's version of it. Its afterlife is unusually far-travelled: the Turkish lokma and the Greek loukoumádes both take their names from the Arabic, and cognate versions run from Ladino bimuelos to Arabic ʿawwāma and the spiral zalābiya, spread by Arab and Ottoman networks. The morsel also surfaces in literature and travel — it appears in the Thousand and One Nights tale of "The Porter and the Three Ladies of Baghdad," and the 14th-century traveller Ibn Baṭṭūṭa met a version at Multan, in today's Pakistan, that he recognised as luqaymat al-qāḍī. Al-Baghdadi records the dish, one of his favourites, rather than inventing it.

Ingredients

• strong dough
• sesame oil
• julep syrup
• fine sugar

Instructions

1. Make a dough with body and let it ferment.
2. Take hazelnut-sized pieces and fry in sesame oil (shīraj).
3. Dip in julep syrup (jullāb) and dust with finely pounded sugar.