Basbousa

Basbousa (Basbousa, بسبوسة) is a sweet made by baking a semolina batter in a flat pan and soaking it with sugar syrup. It is also known for being cut into squares or diamonds, each topped with a single nut. It is moist, but unlike a smooth sponge cake, it lets you feel fine grains of wheat. It is widely enjoyed from the Middle East to North Africa, Egypt among them, and depending on the region there are closely related sweets called namoura or harissa. During Ramadan and at celebrations, it is cut from a large tray to suit the number of people.

Between porridge-like sweets and baked sweets

Sweets that combine semolina with fat and a sweet liquid appear in medieval Arabic cookbooks. A porridge-like sweet cooked in a pot and a sweet baked in a pan and then soaked in syrup involve different processes. The existence of old semolina dishes does not mean that today’s basbousa has continued in the same form for more than 1,000 years.

In research on the history of Middle Eastern cuisine, porridge-like semolina sweets and old sweets in which fat is rubbed into the grain are examined as related dishes. Cookbooks from 13th-century Syria and 14th-century Egypt describe samid, a thick, sweet semolina porridge. Fustuqiyya nabulusiyya, found in a 14th-century Egyptian cookbook, bears the name of Nablus and is a baked semolina sweet made with pistachios; it has been examined as close to the present-day group. Food historian Limor Yungman, who reads these cookbooks, points out the shift in process from sweets that are boiled to sweets that are baked.

Making the batter, then sweetening and moistening it

Semolina is mainly the endosperm of durum wheat ground into granules. Basbousa is finished soft while keeping these granules. Sugar goes into the batter before baking, and syrup is added after baking as well, so sweetness and moisture are adjusted in two stages. The firmness of the baked cake differs from that of the finished sweet after it has absorbed the syrup.

In one Egyptian-style example, the semolina is first combined thoroughly with melted ghee. Ghee is fat from which the milk’s water and milk solids have been removed. Rather than mixing the flour and liquid all at once, the grains are first coated with fat, and then milk or a similar liquid with sugar dissolved in it is added. After the liquid goes in, the batter is not overmixed and is left to rest. This method lets the grains take up moisture without developing a bread-like elasticity.

How finely the semolina is ground also changes the result. A medium grind makes it easier to keep the sense of fine grains, giving a different mouthfeel from a batter made with finely ground semolina. Some methods add a little coconut, and the texture also differs depending on whether the white shreds are left long or chopped finely and mixed in. Some versions use eggs or yogurt and some do not, so the ingredients of a single home recipe (ingredient proportions and method) cannot be made requirements for all basbousa.

Mixes for baking at home are also sold in Egyptian supermarkets. One person who bought such a mix locally in 2017 combined the mix of coarsely ground rice and corn flours with yogurt and butter, baked it and poured syrup over it. They noted that it had a corn aroma and a graininess different from grains of wheat.

The syrup soaks into the baked grains and the gaps between them

The cake is baked until the surface browns, and then syrup is added. Because the process includes soaking it with liquid, it is hard to get the texture right if the baking is too light. It is a sweet that combines the toastiness created in the oven with moisture added afterward. The concentration and temperature of the syrup, and the resting time after it is poured, are adjusted to suit the pan and batter used. A single rule such as “a hot cake always gets cold syrup” cannot explain how it is made in every region.

In the pastry-shop-style method introduced by Tasbih of Egypt, no eggs are used, and the aim is a dense softness with the flavor of ghee. In the Levant, on the other hand, some namoura recipes use flower water or tahini, while revani, made with whipped eggs, has a cake-like lightness. What they share is semolina and the syrup it absorbs, but the differences become clear when they are viewed not as different names for the same finished sweet but as a group with overlapping ingredients and techniques.

Revani served with cream: a related sweet of baked semolina batter cut into pieces. Photo: Biser Todorov, 2020-07-14, location unknown. Original image / CC BY-SA 4.0. Original size; no further processing.

A word for rubbing together, and a story about a kiss

The name basbousa is explained in connection with bas, the motion of rubbing flour or semolina together with fat by hand. The step of coating the grains with fat thus connects to the explanation of the name. There is also a folk story that the name comes from a husband begging his wife for “just one kiss.”

In that story, the wife of a merchant who brought semolina back from the Levant makes a sweet, and her husband, delighted by the smell of it baking, asks for a kiss. The wife wants to finish the sweet first, and the exchange between the two of them is said to have become the name. It is a story people tell to enjoy the name, not a record that identifies an inventor or a date of origin.

Basbousa cut into squares and topped with walnuts. Photo: stu_spivack / color adjustment: Hohum, CC BY-SA 2.0, original image. No processing in this work.

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