From the KITCHEN: ‘Teita’s Bitter Orange Jam’

We are around 25% of the way toward our goal with our summer “Buy a Back Issue” campaign. This essay, by Egyptian author and food scholar Salma Serry, appeared in KITCHEN issue of the magazine; you can support the campaign by buying a copy of this or other back issues or backlist books, available now through ArabLit.org/Shop. Images courtesy Salma Serry.

Teita’s Bitter Orange Jam

Home Economics, Umm Kulthum, and Gamal Abdel Nasser

By Salma Serry

It’s a bright and blistering morning in the middle of July here in Cairo. At first I think I really don’t need to be having breakfast outside on the balcony today. But I convince myself that if I have a little of the bitter orange jam (known as mirabbet lareng in Egypt), swirled in some fresh cold eshta, or clotted cream, with baladi bread, then I’ll be hitting three birds with one stone. First, I might be able to withstand some of the heat with the jam’s citrus freshness and the cold cream. Second, there is something different about the experience of eating food made with a recipe that’s been around for almost 90 years, a connection beyond sense and taste. Making the jam was a little Covid-19 quarantine experiment I embarked on last winter, when the oranges were in season, and after I was handed down three of my grandmother’s cookbooks: Kitab al-Ta’lim al-Manzeli, Hadaya Hawaa’s Jams, and Usul al-Tahy. Lastly and most usefully, by taking a couple of tablespoons for this breakfast, I would slowly but surely come closer to finishing the 15 jars of bitter orange jam the experiment had yielded, and which now sat on two cold shelves in the fridge, waiting to be eaten. I kept asking my friends if they would like a couple of jars, but they admitted they were not fans. Neither is my husband. So, to my disappointment, I remained the sole eater and appreciator of these 15 jars for six months. I admit, my jam ego was hurt. I understand that not everyone is a fan and not everyone shares my teita’s history but, really, there is nothing like this perfect preservation of winter’s nature to welcome summer. It’s a taste from my grandmother’s days, and a reminder of the stories she told me when I was a little girl. It is her life packed in a jar: a mélange of sweet aspirations, bitter financial circumstances, and sticky political events that shaped her relationship to food, and everything that she was.

The Home Economics Movement

At 10 years old, following her mother’s premature death, Widad (my teita) went to live with her maternal aunt Aisha, who was a graduate of Madrasat al-Thaqafa al-Nasawiyyah. Loosely, this translates as “The School of Women’s Culture.” With her six girl cousins and a building full of second cousins around her age, the years Widad spent there would make plenty of happy memories. Like the other girls in the family, she went to a girls-only school that laid special importance on domestic science. Classes in laundry and ironing, sewing and embroidery, as well as cooking and baking were a standard in girls’ schools of the time. She particularly enjoyed the cooking classes, where she and her classmates—all dressed in navy blue skirts and white shirts, with ribbons in their braided hair—would gather around a table and watch their teacher create all sorts of dishes. There was tomato sauce, baton sale, puddings, dolmas, and, of course, bitter orange jam. She would neatly write the recipe down based on her observations and then give her notebook to the teacher for grading. Her now-fragile and stained notebook, with the recipe for bitter orange jam dated 1950 and marked with her teacher’s red ink check, sits today in my library in a transparent sleeve, along with newspaper and magazine clippings of other recipes.

Her own grandmother, Neina Zainab, who lived in the same building, was a proud owner of a large clay oven, which sat on the rooftop and which she would use for daily lunch casseroles as well as festive baking. Every week before the two Eid holidays, all the women of the building, as well as family and friends, would gather with their children on the roof and sit on kilim rugs, filling trays of traditional kahk stuffed with dates, walnuts, pistachios, and honey paste for themselves, their neighbors, and the community. Taking advantage of access to the rooftop oven, Widad would make her favorite pastafrolla pie (a Greek jam pie) with her bitter orange jam, using her textbook Kitab al-Ta’lim al-Manzeli by Fatma Fahmi. She would put the pie in to be baked with the rest of the Eid cookies.

Fahmi’s book was her textbook in school. It is one of the earliest cookbooks to be taught in Egyptian schools, following Mounira Francis’s al-Tabkh al-Manzeli (1914) and Jamila al-Alayli’s Sa’adat al-Mar’aah (1925). The book is rich in references to European and British recipes, such as rock biscuits, puddings, Victoria sponge cake, and tea cakes—all of which are often paired with jams. It draws a vivid picture of the prevalence of a knowledge base, economic system, and culture modelled after British ideals and values, during a time when Egypt was under British occupation. In fact, Fahmi was one of hundreds of women to receive state-funded scholarships to study home economics in England. In her case, as she states in the book, she was a graduate of the Training College of Domestic Subjects, Berridge House, Hampstead, in London, which was established in 1909 by the National Society for Promoting Religious Education. The college boasted a state-of-the-art science laboratory and was the first domestic science college in Britain to appoint a lecturer with a science degree.

Considered by some an antidote to the social imbalances that resulted from early capitalism and industrialization, home economics was regarded as one of the strategies undertaken to fix the ailments of society by economizing and organizing the way households were managed. In the book’s introduction, Fahmi describes how European nations realized the importance of the art of home economics and its role in fixing (eslah) the “environments” and straightening up (taqweem) the family, “no matter how humble its income.” This domain’s whole premise and literal name, “home economics,” relies on the principles of resource management, efficient production, and waste reduction, in an effort to support and manage (or hide the loopholes of) a new capitalist system that generated unmanageable amounts of waste. It is no coincidence that jam exists for that same purpose: turning excess produce (of something rather bitter, in our case) into a more palatable and sustainable consumer good that lasts longer than one season, and in doing so, reduces its waste.

Abdel Nasser and Becoming Samira

A decade later, Widad was married with two boys, pregnant with a girl, and had changed her name to Samira (Susu to her friends). This marked a shift to a softer name that was more en vogue, and it echoed many of her generation’s wish to mask their more traditional identities. Her two long braids were replaced with a short curly bob, and her dresses accentuated her silhouette with waist-cinchers and petticoats of puffed nylon. It was the 1950s: The monarchy was dethroned by the 1952 revolution, the last remaining British troops had left Egypt, and Gamal Abdel Nasser’s voice was everywhere on the radio. Every Saturday, she would pay a visit to the baqqaal, or grocer, of Manshiyyat al-Bakri, a neighborhood in Heliopolis, Cairo. Then she would pass by a kushk to pick up her weekly copy of Hawaa’. Hawaa’ was the trendy leading women’s magazine of the time. It was first published in 1955 by Dar Al Hilal, one of the four main privately owned publishing houses, whose ownership was transferred to the National Union, Nasser’s political party, in 1960 as part of a press nationalization movement. The magazine covered topics ranging from beauty and fashion to family and career advice, in addition to home management. Every couple of weeks, a complimentary booklet, titled Hadaya Hawaa’ (Hawaa’ Gifts), was included as a bonus with the magazine. These little booklets of 15 to 20 pages were a window into a world of aspirations. As one of their introductory texts mentioned, they were the “friend” and comrade on which every woman should rely as her guide to modern ways of thinking, behaving, dressing, and most certainly of cooking. Each booklet had its own theme, and every few weeks, a culinary one was published, full of recipes that were written and edited by Bahiya Uthman (another graduate of Berridge House), the co-author of the influential textbook Usul al-Tahy: al-Nathari w-al-Amali (1954), commonly known as Abla Nazira’s book.

The magazine was aimed at the housewives of Abdel Nasser’s much adored and fast-growing middle class. They lack any mention of cooks, servants, or household help that were a sign of high-income households. The single laundry detergent advertisement on the back cover of some issues is for a local brand, something that would not be targeted at the affluent classes. Other arts-and-crafts-themed pamphlets featured ideas on sewing and recycling. In some pamphlets, images as well as mentions of household size and number of rooms (two to four bedrooms maximum) are included, showing homes that were typical of middle-class family economic accommodations. In the culinary booklets, a plethora of recipes ask for leftover chicken and breadcrumbs to make salads and meatless stuffings, all of which would be unheard of in aristocratic households. Among the booklets that Widad (now Samira) especially loved is the one titled “Jams”:

“It [jam] plays a central role in the health and the economy, as it’s cheap, nutritious, and loved by most people… Its preparation, cooking, and storage is easy. There is an obvious difference between those that are ready-made in stores and the homemade ones.”

This is the opening statement of the “Jams” booklet, in which it is hard not to notice the repeated emphasis on its economic aspect, and the attention given to elevating the lifestyle and wellbeing of the middle-class Abdel Nasser adored. The booklet’s recipe for the bitter orange jam itself, however, remains the same as the one from Samira’s old textbook. The only difference is that, at the time, instead of cooking it over a single wabur, she prepared it using her new four-burner stove that she’d gotten after her marriage, together with a water heater and refrigerator. It’s what the novelist Sonallah Ibrahim describes in his novel Zaat as the “holy trinity” that Abdel Nasser’s programs lured people into acquiring.

As the list of the appliances expanded in Samira’s home, so did the size of her family and her financial responsibilities. What helped her make ends meet was the newly launched rations program and the new consumer cooperatives that sprouted up everywhere in the country in the 60s. These ration cards provided her with kitchen staples like flour, oil, and eggs at half the price, and they allowed her to keep some money on the side to purchase the more luxurious ingredients, such as créme Chantilly, vermicelli chocolate, and maraschino cherries. The pamphlets required these ingredients for making European desserts, which typically called for jams as either fillings, toppings, or glazes.

Umm Kulthum’s Thursdays

Homemade sugar-dusted petit-fours, dainty sandwiches, and fluffy sponge cakes, all filled with the glistening golden bitter orange jam, were staples at Samira’s parties on the first Thursday of each month. These were Umm Kulthum’s Thursdays of the 60s. That was when her friends and family would get together in her apartment to watch and listen to Umm Kulthum’s live concerts broadcast on their brand-new television. On these Thursdays, she would spend the day in the kitchen, preparing for the arrival of her guests with large rollers in her hair before she coiffed it up into a dramatic bouffant. Every so often, she would send her children with a plate of some of these finger-food desserts to her neighbors. This “floating plate” kept drifting between the neighbors of the building, filled with all sorts of desserts and pastries from one house to another, as every housewife showed off her proud creations—and very rarely gave away her recipes. She believed there was no need to mention that the recipes were from Hawaa’ when receiving the compliments she typically brushed off with self-deprecating modesty. These compliments, and her reputation for being the family’s and the building’s best cook, were the marks of success that paralleled a working woman’s promotions. That and being a good mother, of course.

When she was asked, later, if she ever wanted to work and have a job, she answered with a chuckle, “Yes, a singer.” And singing was exactly what you would hear her do early in the morning before everyone else woke up:

“يا صباح الخير ياللّي معانا.. ياللّي معانا.. الكروان غنَّى و صحَّانا.. وصحًّانا..”

“Oh good morning to those with us, the nightingale sang and woke us up”

Every day at 6 a.m., she would echo Umm Kulthum’s young voice in a song that became a morning hymn to many, as she stood rummaging through her kitchen drawers, or flipping through magazines, looking for new recipes in her little sewing room. The jam would shortly after find its customary place on the table, next to a small bowl of fresh cream, which her children would plow into with toasted bread. A few hours later, the radio would again transmit Umm Kulthum’s songs after lunch at five in the evening, and then again later at nine, while the family gathered to have a light dinner. Her songs soon became an escape from an anxious reality. Everywhere, signs that the revolution might have failed were beginning to appear, and soon enough, the love for Abdel Nasser in Samira’s heart would quickly wither, after what happened the morning of June 10, 1967.

Early that day, the family woke to the exhilarated voice of the radio host, Ahmed Said, announcing the victory of the Egyptian Army in its war against Israel. This sent Egyptians into a euphoric state, heightened by songs and chants of victory. But when Abdel Nasser’s voice broke out on the radio hours later, announcing what was in fact a devastating defeat, everything changed. Samira stood in shock at the sight of her husband screaming out in anger and then breaking down into tears. It was the first and last time anyone saw him cry.

Humiliation and confusion took over all of Egypt, but Samira had a different sort of realization. She became aware of how, in just a second, rigid masculinity could come tumbling down. She noticed how she remained flexible yet rooted throughout this entire ordeal. Things began to change, and people’s blindfold of trust in the Nasserist project fell off. Samira’s parties soon shrank, becoming smaller in size and lower in budget, as the economy deteriorated with Abdel Nasser’s wars and unrealistic dreams. Yet Umm Kulthum’s songs still played in the background, albeit with a more nationalist tone to boost morale. And so Samira’s bitter orange jam was gradually withdrawn from elaborate desserts in tea-party spreads, to stay within its little reusable glass jars—essential sustenance on the breakfast table.

The Eighties and On

On Samira’s first visit to her newlywed daughter’s apartment, she presented her with a book and a tin box of sablé biscuits sandwiched with lareng jam. She had carefully wrapped the book in yellow wrapping paper and had kept it safely hidden inside her closet: a copy of Nazira Niqula and Bahiya Uthman’s Usul al-Tahy: al-Nathari w-al-Amali for her daughter Salwa (my mother), who would soon move abroad to the newly formed United Arab Emirates with her husband. More than 800 pages of recipes, kitchen tips, and instructions fill its pages. Samira had never taught her daughters cooking the way she was taught. Instead, she would casually let them watch her and help out with getting things out of the fridge, washing dishes, or making salad if they wanted. Their own schools stopped home economics at an early age. Instead, as girls, they were required to do mandatory public service upon finishing their higher education. My aunt was assigned to the nearby family planning center, and my mother to a consumer cooperative. These were the days when the government was trying to contain an explosive population growth rate and to assist families with employment and provisions during an economic depression. Samira hoped this book, taught in schools, discussed in radio shows and even popular plays, would be her daughter’s guide to figuring out the kitchen while far away from her.

Every following summer, her daughter would return to Egypt loaded with brown jars of Carnation Coffee-Mate for Samira, which Egypt lacked because of strict import control policies. In exchange, she would go back to the United Arab Emirates with six jars of jam, the fruit of which she could not find in the markets of the Arabian desert. With the jam, Samira would give Salwa some of her newly discovered “international” recipes, which she wrote down after watching cooking shows on television. Salwa kept her mother’s recipe notes, usually written on the backs of tearaway calendar pages, in between the pages of Abla Nazira and Bahiya Uthman’s book. For years, the book stayed in a small black cupboard that moved with the different homes her daughter had, but it always remained in close proximity to the kitchen, at hand whenever needed. With time, it lost its cover, and some of its pages fell apart.

After her husband’s death, Samira stayed behind in her apartment in Alexandria, where her family gathered on Fridays, for Eid, and for birthdays. Her fridge started to welcome ready-made strawberry and raspberry jams, and her kitchen counter featured a constant stream of boxes of petits fours from the nearby bakery. Yet she aggressively resisted store-bought cakes and preferred to make her own Greek pastafrolla pie every weekend, until shortly before her own passing. And when she made the pie during the months that followed winter, she typically took out that one jar at the back of the fridge to spread on the pie’s top a good layer of the chunky, tangy citrus preserve, which was always part of her kitchen.

My Fifteen Jars

Staring at the 15 jars in my fridge, I wonder what it would be like if they were sold in some rustic organic farmer’s market and labelled “Granny’s Bitter Orange Jam” in English. It would probably sell like hotcakes, attracting more people than my best friends and husband, who were clearly lacking in taste. I take out the open jar and scoop a couple of spoonfuls into a saucer. I turn up the fire on the stove and toast my baladi bread quickly on both sides, so that it is slightly charred by the flame. The smokey toasted bits of bread are the best accompaniment to fresh, cold cream. I pour my tea, Syrian Zhourat, and put everything on a small tray, then head to the balcony.

As I sit in a shady corner, dipping into the jam while my Cocker Spaniel eyes every bite, I recall how impatient I was when peeling all the oranges one by one, inconvenienced by how I couldn’t touch my phone with sticky fingers to check my notifications. “Shred the peel very thinly so it is almost transparent,” the recipe says. And shred and peel the oranges I did, as well as the tip of my finger. I then had to soak the peels for 12 hours, twice, and google words and measurements from the recipe that are no longer in use. Have you ever heard of Alexandrian magour (الماجور الاسكندراني) and agana? Me neither, nor had my mother or aunts, but thanks to a friend, I learned they were both types of large, deep earthenware pots used for cooking and storing food. This sent me deep down into a rabbit hole on the use of pottery and its different types in old Egyptian cooking. While I do not have a magour or agana, I own a large beautiful earthenware biram with a lid in which I usually store clarified butter, and which I put to work for this 24-hour soak. And so, after soaking, resoaking, straining, simmering, skimming and sterilizing jars, this jam-making process made me approach teita’s memory in a slightly different light.

Almost all my memories of her are while she was cooking in the kitchen, making beautiful creations that catered to every family member’s cravings and desires. Naturally, I grew up assuming that her relationship with the kitchen was nothing but a passionate hobby and that the immeasurable sum of hours she spent making food for her family was all out of selflessness. But reading through the cookbooks she left behind has given me a broader context to her life, which situates her culinary experience in the heart of gender, political, social, and economic struggles. It is easy to over-romanticize our grandmothers and their food, as we see everywhere nowadays with commercializing and marketing the teita/grandma/nonna figure. Yet their ties to food are often over-simplified in the name of “generosity,” “selflessness,” and “unconditional love.” Their experience is glossed over with a certain naivety and nostalgia that is divorced from the realities of their time, as if one can take any woman from any time and her relationship to food and the kitchen would be the same universally.

What I found between the lines of her cookbooks, on the back of her newspaper recipe clippings, and in her collection of women’s magazines, are stories of the heavy expectations placed on women, modernist aspirations, and financial hardships. My image of her became much more complicated, nuanced by her own struggle with making a family, maintaining a “happy” home, and cutting corners to better save. But more than anything, it made me think of the person beyond her domestic duties, obligations, and expectations—even if they were self-imposed. It made me think of her as a little girl receiving lessons in how to make steamed ginger puddings like countless other girls in the first half of the 20th century, in schools operating under a colonial British ideology of “elevating” women. I pictured her flipping through the cookbooks, selecting which hors d’oeuvres might impress her neighboring working wives, as a way of proving that she, too, could be successful staying at home. It made me think of how she sat budgeting every month’s groceries as the country’s economy went spiraling downhill, as it funded wars and unrealistic nation-building projects. And in an unforeseen way, this jam brought me closer to an understanding of Egypt’s story. A bittersweet one that I have returned to, to live and continue, after my mother left 30 years ago. A story of a country and its people that is layered with nuances as rich and complex as the flavors and textures that meet in lareng.

Today, as I sit savoring the citrusy preserve, I acknowledge the privilege I have: the ability to make choices, as a woman. I have no doubt that she truly loved cooking—it would have been impossible to garner such a legacy in the kitchen if she did not truly have a passion for it. Still, I believe she might have been someone else entirely if it wasn’t for external and social factors. One thing remains true, though: what she left behind of her life, including her recipes and her cookbooks, amount to so much more than a reduced image of the grandmother. The greater part of her life was heavily influenced by factors she did not choose. And it is in this quiet acceptance of the mundane, the ordinary, and the dull—over what she could have been, if things had been different—that real strength lies. The tiresome task of thinly and meticulously peeling the bitter orange, soaking its peel repeatedly for 24 hours, then cutting, juicing, straining, and sweetening something that is otherwise too sour and bitter to the taste, over and over and over again. It is an act of persevering, of sustaining herself and her loved ones through hardship, and of finding some sweetness within her life—when perhaps all she wanted was to heal Egypt’s shattered hopes after Abdel Nasser, and to sing on the radio with Umm Kulthum.

Salma Serry is a doctoral researcher and cultural worker specialized in the history of food in West Asia and Egypt. Find more of her writing at salmaserry.com/.