My earliest memory is of eel. My father was snacking on it and it was grey and wobbly. I slurped it down as I did with all the bites he offered me; his was a gesture of faith and as a picky eater, my receptivity showed real trust. He presented me with so many treats I loved at first taste: the pearly innards of a mangosteen; a dark silky nugget of hammour’s liver and her dual lobes of grainy roe; a mysterious purée he called “banana juice”, which he served in a plastic tea set to cheer me up over the arrival of my baby sister. Food became a source of fascination, as well as sustenance. Then, one day, the record needle scratched hard across our awesome pact and broke it. The reason was honey.
My first taste of honey was traumatic. There’s no way to sugarcoat a revulsion so visceral; a cellular shudder summoned from the marrow in my bones to a part of my brain that could only be expressed in a violent gag. I carried this aversion into young adulthood, my certainty refreshed after reading that two women whose food writing I admired – Ruth Reichl and the late M F K Fisher – once bonded over a shared hatred of honey.
Honey collecting is an honoured tradition throughout the Gulf region. The honey my father favours is unpasteurised and unfiltered – as prized honey tends to be – and it’s dark as molasses and cloudy with good stuff like pollen and beeswax. It’s almost always sold in Vimto bottles (which begs the question of who is drinking all that Vimto and where they are recycling the empties). This honey never crystallises and gums up the neck of the bottle, as most raw honey is likely to do, which is why you’ll find that high-end honey around the world is typically sold in jars. The liquid texture of the local honey is probably due to its high ratio of fructose to glucose.
The honeys of the samr and the sidr blossoms are the two best-loved Emirati honeys. Most of it is made by Western hive bees that are farmed locally to meet demand. But what locals hold most dear is the intensely complex honey of the wild dwarf honeybee, found in small combs wrapped around the sidr tree’s branches. The truly obsessed will contend that for their money, the best liquid gold on the market is actually from Wadi Du’an, a secluded valley in Yemen, south of the Empty Quarter, where the flowers of the ilb – or buckthorn tree – yield seasonal honeys that are among the world’s costliest.
So, what changed for me? In New Mexico, where I live, a squeeze bottle of honey is placed on every table where the local cuisine is served. The honey is nothing special; it’s pasteurised to be runny and it’s the colour of straw. It also turned out to be the perfect gateway honey for me. Honey is the preferred condiment for sopaipillas, puffy square pillows of fried dough that are served alongside enchiladas and burritos. For years, I avoided the honey and ate my sopaipilla unadorned. Then, one day, a friend urged me to try a bite of sopaipilla he had constructed. Earthy and pungent, the swirl of red chile sauce and honey stirred something new and instinctive in me – and it was just as profound as my initial rejection 30 years earlier. I wish my dad could have been there.
Nouf Al-Qasimi is an Emirati food analyst who cooks and writes in New Mexico
