Kleicha

Kleicha (كليجة) is an Iraqi baked sweet in which a filling of dates or nuts is wrapped in wheat dough. It comes rolled and sliced, round, or half-moon shaped, and is scented with cardamom or rose water. Families bake it at the end of Ramadan, serving it to guests during Eid and exchanging plates of it with neighbors.

A date filling is not just cooked down

Dates are the fruit of the date palm. Because their firmness varies with the degree of drying and the variety, they are pitted before being made into a filling and warmed to soften them as needed. Some recipes (the proportions of ingredients and the method) loosen them with fat and a little heat to make a spreadable paste. Rather than evaporating the moisture at length to make jam, this step evenly breaks down firm fruit into a state that can be layered with the dough.

Philip Juma, who cooks Iraqi food in the UK, adds cardamom to the date paste and rolls it out into a rectangle between sheets of paper. The dough is rolled out in the same way, and the two sheets are layered, rolled up tightly and cut into short pieces. The cut surface shows alternating dough and dark dates. Every bite reaches the filling; it is a method in which a flat filling is wrapped many times over in thin dough.

The aroma of the dough, and differences in leavening

Kleicha dough uses wheat flour, fat and liquid, and in some versions yeast is added and the dough is rested. Juma’s recipe uses butter and oil and mixes nigella into the dough. Nigella is a small black seed from a different plant than sesame. Besides putting cardamom in the filling, some households also add it to the dough.

Besides yeasted versions, there are also recipes that use baking powder. Whether egg is mixed into the dough or only brushed on the surface also changes the result. Egg brushed on the surface gives the outside shine and color, separately from the inside. The similar filled sweet maamoul is often made with semolina, but simply calling kleicha another name for maamoul hides differences such as its mainly wheat-flour dough and the way it is rolled.

Changing the shape to tell the fillings apart

Fillings other than dates include crushed walnuts or pistachios bound with sugar or rose water. Grinding oily nuts too finely turns them into a paste, while leaving them coarse lets you feel the pieces when biting. Grinding them together with sugar is also used.

In the El Mutwalli family’s example, the date ones are made into short rolls, the pistachio ones into small balls and the walnut ones into half-moons. These are not markers shared by every Iraqi household, but they let the fillings be told apart without breaking the pieces when they are arranged on the same plate. The family also makes an unsweetened kleicha with cheese and sesame, so the name is not limited to date cookies.

Household work that crosses religions and borders

Eid al-Fitr is the Islamic festival celebrating the end of the Ramadan fast. Families prepare kleicha several days beforehand and serve it with tea or coffee to visitors. Iraqi Christians also bake it for Christmas and Easter, and Jewish communities also had a custom of festive kleicha. Each community makes a sweet of the same name according to its own calendar. The origins of this sweet cannot be explained from any single religious occasion.

In the household of Reem El Mutwalli, who was born in Baghdad and moved to Abu Dhabi as a child, the method was passed down from her mother Busaina to her daughters and to Aida, who is from the Philippines and works in the home. Her mother checks the flavor and the finished result, while Aida handles the filling, shaping and baking. Gift sweets have been made with the skills not only of family members but also of a person who works in the same household.

In 2020, this household’s recipe and steps were written down in collaboration with Smithsonian staff. The method, which until then had been judged by eye and hand, was made reproducible in other places. Besides being a festive gift, it is also handed out in memory of family members who have died; kleicha is used both on days of welcoming people and on days of remembering them.

A medieval name preserved in wooden molds

The food historian Nawal Nasrallah has found the name kalija in the cookbook al-Wusla ila al-Habib, attributed to the 13th-century Aleppo historian Ibn al-Adim. In one instance it appears as an option for making a ring-shaped baked sweet into a disc shape, and in the other as a step in which dough is pressed into a dedicated wooden mold. Kanz al-Fawa’id, an Egyptian cookbook from around the 14th century, also mentions a round cutter similar to that for kalija. Medieval sources show a relationship between a named sweet and the tools used to shape it. However, they do not record the same formula as today’s rolled date pastry.

Nasrallah further considered the relationship between sweets offered to the ancient Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar and the medieval name and moon shape. However, this is a historical hypothesis drawn from comparisons of names, shapes and festivals. It does not treat today’s kleicha and the ancient sweets as a continuation of the same formula.

Her own family memories preserve the work done two or three days before Eid: the family arranged filled pastries on large baking trays, sent them to a neighborhood bakery, and once baked, stored them in baskets. After the filling ran out, the leftover dough was rolled thin and cut out with a small tea glass to make unfilled fufeifiyat. As household gas ovens spread, more families began baking small batches year-round, but each household still differs in how it chooses which shape to give to whom.

Kleicha with the date filling visible in the cut surface. Photo: Miansari66, original image, public domain declaration. No processing.

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