Week 8: Egyptian Pancake Dumpling, Qatayef
And we’re back! This week, I have made the Egyptian dessert, qatayef. Although it finds its origins in the Middle East, qatayef is an extremely popular street vendor food as well as a household dish. Although I couldn’t personally meet anyone this week, my advisor, Ms. Fluitt, was kind enough to get a recipe from her acquaintances. The dessert itself is similar to a dumpling in the sense that it is folded with some kind of filling. But instead of the thin wrapper of a dumpling, the qatayef is more like a folded pancake.
This time around, I made the filling to be chopped pistachios with a touch of cinnamon. Oftentimes, the filling is also other nuts like walnuts or almonds, cheese, and even raisins. You’ll notice that these are not particularly sweet fillings, and from the recipe of the batter, that isn’t sweet either. There is a type of syrup (not viscous) that these are dipped in at the very end, but it leaves a rather faint flavor. I’ll mention here that I used both orange extract and orange blossom water (here it is again due to the Middle East origins!) for the ‘orange blossom extract’ at the request of my family.
Now, the reason I bring up the lack of sweetness in this dessert is because of some information I got from Brenda Bonine herself. As I have previously mentioned and Ms. Bonine brought up straight away, non-European cultures don’t have a very strong concept of ‘dessert.’ A large majority of the time, dessert simply means fruit or nuts. But, there are also two things important to keep in mind. For one, Africa is a huge continent filled with very diverse cultures, so each region has its own unique desserts. And secondly, there are fairly significant influences for more modern takes on each dessert. For example, the qatayef can also be commonly made with nutella filling. This is a bit more extreme of an example, but I ended up doing a little more research after something Ms. Bonine mentioned. She explained that during her son’s honeymoon in Zimbabwe and South Africa, they were served sweet pies as a part of the wedding blessing celebrations. This is a bit different than the usual meat or vegetable pies that are often served, but as yams are native to Africa, pies with yam filling are a relatively big move towards more of a European-influenced idea of dessert.
As much as I would love to do a deeper dive into the history of change in African desserts, I can’t go on forever, and I believe that can be left for my final presentation. That’s all for this week then, and I’m excited to add this to the cookbook!
