What’s cooking? Kataief

This article first appeared on The Media Line.

Deep within the heart of Jerusalem’s Old City the Shaheen Restaurant lies tucked away, the smell of cooking desserts luring passing tourists to stop and investigate. A team of young boys efficiently flick pancakes from the hot grill and catch them in a basket under the supervision of their father. What’s cooking? Kataief, a sweet to break the dusk to dawn Ramadan fast.

The rapid approach of Eid Al-Fitr means that Ramadan is almost over. Throughout the holiest month in the Islamic calendar Muslims fast, consuming no food or water, during the hours of daylight. Each evening to signal the end of the vigil families, gather with friends and neighbors to celebrate with the iftar meal. Central to this is the kataief pancakes like those Ghazi Shaheen and his sons have spent the last month cooking.

“We learned this pancake from the grand-grand-grand-father – our family was working (like this) nearly 300 hundred years ago,” Shaheen told The Media Line. In the past mixing the batter was extremely time consuming but things have improved since the introduction of machines to do the work, Shaheen said. But the rest of the work is still done by hand – fortunately Shaheen’s four sons are on holiday and so are on hand to help out.

His boys normally come and work after finishing school for the day like he did for his father from the age of ten, Shaheen said, pointing to a photograph of his father preparing identical pancakes over a grill thirty years earlier.

But his sons don’t seem to mind, “We like to work with our family. We will keep doing this until we go to university,” Nidal, the youngest at 11, said.

Kataief is cooked during the morning in small kebab shops, like Shaheen’s, and collected by shoppers on their way home after midday prayers. Once home the pancake is rolled and stuffed with sweet cream cheese, walnuts or honey and eaten as a dessert. Arab cuisine is famous for its appeal to the sweet tooth, with dishes like knafeh and baklava guaranteed to give you a sugar rush, and the pancakes prepared during Ramadan are no exception.

All day while preparing the kataief Shaheen is fasting, something that cannot be easy surrounded by the smell of browning pancakes. “It’s not too difficult, (though) the first day of Ramadan (can) be hard. But then the next day it will be regular.”

Exactly when the Ramadan fast will end and the small restaurant will go back to cooking lamb kebab for the remainder of the year was not yet clear. As Shaheen explained “We don’t know when it will (end).” Eid Al-Fitr begins when the new moon is spotted in the night sky over Jerusalem by religious leaders – maybe that’ll be tomorrow, maybe the day after, he concluded.