Seven in the Morning at the Village Oven

Seven in the morning in a mountain village, and the bakery oven has been going for an hour. The baker presses rounds of dough with her fingertips, spreads them with za'atar and olive oil, and slides them onto the oven floor. The name manakish comes from the Arabic for to sculpt or engrave — those dips. Women once brought their dough to the communal oven every morning. Before it rests, Muslim bakers recite the opening of the Fatiha and Christian bakers pray and make the sign of the cross. UNESCO inscribed the practice in 2023 as an emblematic culinary tradition of Lebanon, describing bread indented with the fingertips and topped with thyme, sumac, toasted sesame, salt and olive oil — and noting the morning gathering that its smell calls up.

The herb it is named for is Origanum syriacum, which Kew calls the most economic and edible wild plant in Lebanon, and it grows across these hills. Jewish tradition identifies it with the ezov of Exodus, the hyssop struck on the doorposts. In 1976 the poet Mahmoud Darwish made it a figure for Palestinian identity.

Told plainly: the wild plant became contraband. Israel declared it a protected species in 1977. Households were allowed ten kilograms a year, while picking commercial quantities risked heavy fines or six months in prison, and between 2016 and 2018 there were 26 indictments and 151 fines. The ban was repealed in 2018.

Sumac is the other half of the flavour, and its name comes through the Arabic summaq from a Syriac word meaning red. The oldest surviving Arabic cookbook, written in tenth-century Baghdad out of the Abbasid court kitchens, has a whole section of sumac stews, one of them carrying the name of Harun al-Rashid. In Palestine it goes over musakhan — roast chicken with onions, allspice, saffron and pine nuts on taboon bread, made in the olive-harvest season and eaten with your hands.

Za'atar is the morning bread, and it is just as good on eggs and roast vegetables at four in the afternoon. Sumac does what lemon does, over rice and onions and grilled lamb. Baharat is the seven-spice tin of the same kitchens, with rose in this one, which ties it back to thirteenth-century Aleppo. Thyme, Oregano, Mediterranean, Allspice, Ground and Cumin Seed, Ground are the four that turn up in nearly every pot on that table.

Seven products. One oven, and a morning that starts early.