People ask me about the significance of my blog name all the time. Cardamom is my favorite spice, and tea is my favorite drink, and the two are a perfect match, so that would be the easy answer, but that’s not exactly what inspired the name. There’s a very particular reason these are my two favorite things. Right before I started my blog, my sister and I were talking, and she reminded me that when we were growing up, our grandparents’ house always smelled like cardamom and tea.

One of my grandmother’s first jobs after immigrating was at the Swedish Bakery in Andersonville, Chicago. She had been living in the US for a few years, but she didn’t speak English yet, and the bakery owner, Mr. Bijour decided to place her at the cash register, which was incredibly stressful at first. But Marlies, the manager, who would later become the owner, gave her a study guide with all of the English phrases she would need for the job (this did the trick, and my grandmother started speaking English fluently in no time).

• 

• 

Even after she left her job to start working as a tailor, our family kept in touch with Marlies, and every year around Christmas time (right up until they closed up shop last year) she would sell my grandmother at least one pound of cardamom at cost, and this cardamom would end up dusted between thousands of layers of filo in dozens of trays of baklawa all year long.

Over the years, the whole house absorbed the scent of these bags of cardamom, tucked away in the pantry, as well as the heavenly aroma of cardamom baklawa, which was often baking away in the oven. The smell of cardamom had become a permanent fixture, whether or not there was any cardamom or baklawa actually present. And alongside the cardamom, there was the ever-present scent of black tea, or chai, as so much of the world calls it. We would drink chai and eat baklawa every weekend for dessert.

• 

• 

• 

• 

Ghraybeh (also spelled ghoraibi) isn’t a cookie I grew up eating, and I learned how to make it from Maureen Abood’s very helpful explanation and recipe. But while this recipe itself isn’t from my childhood, I’ve infused it with cardamom and tea, the namesake of my blog and my two most nostalgic sense memories. As you might expect, it’s perfect served with a cup of chai (which simply means “tea,” with or without spices—but either is lovely).

As anyone who’s tried it will tell you, the special thing about ghraybeh is its meltiness. This comes from the use of clarified butter instead of sweet cream butter. Clarified butter is entirely made up of butter fat, without any dairy solids or water, which are naturally present in unprocessed butter. Because clarified butter doesn’t have water, as long as you don’t add moisture to the dough, the clarified butter keeps the cookies from developing gluten, which makes the cookies even more crumbly and melty than shortbread made from sweet cream butter. To way oversimplify a complicated scientific thing (sorry scientists!), flour forms gluten when its proteins (gliadins and glutenins) combine with water. That doesn’t mean that avoiding water makes flour gluten free—wheat in all its forms is never suitable for a gluten-free diet. It just means that clarified butter lets you see flour from another delicious perspective.

Print