The History of Ma’amoul, a Middle Eastern Cookie That Is a ‘Love Letter’ to Our Ancestors

Stuffed with nuts or dates, the shortbread cookie is enjoyed around Muslim, Christian and Jewish holidays

Lillian Ali - Staff Contributor

June 17, 2025

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Three days a week, Zeena Lattouf Joy rolls hundreds of balls made of semolina dough. She flattens them out; fills them with chopped walnuts, dates or pistachios; and uses a mold to shape them into decorated cookies called ma’amoul. With two other bakers in a shared commercial kitchen in New York, Lattouf Joy bakes tray after tray of the ma’amoul, making about 700 delicate butter cookies every week.

Ma’amoul is a traditional Middle Eastern cookie often enjoyed around Muslim, Christian and Jewish holidays, made by combining semolina flour with butter and milk, forming it into a dough, and filling it with nuts or dates. Some ma’amoul recipes use ghee, rather than traditional butter; others mix all-purpose flour with the semolina or add a small amount of sugar to the dough. Still others flavor the dough with rose water, orange blossom water or a marzipan-like spice called mahleb. Across all iterations, what sets ma’amoul apart from other shortbread cookies is the way they are shaped with a wooden mold with a decorative carving set inside, called a taabeh or a qaleb.

“I find it really meditative,” says Lattouf Joy, of the process of rolling, flattening, stuffing and molding. “It allows me to just kind of zone out.”

Lattouf Joy worked in behavioral psychology and negotiation for several years. “At some point along the way, I started to, you know, wonder: ‘What if I just baked bread?’” she says. She ultimately quit her job, and, in late 2023, she founded Zeena Bakery.

While many people think of knafeh or baklava when it comes to Arabic sweets, Lattouf Joy decided her “micro-bakery” would specialize in ma’amoul, which she grew up baking with her Palestinian grandmother. To start her business, the baker consulted with her mother and grandmother on the family recipe. There was just one problem, she says: The recipe “was totally off. It was not what my grandmother used to do.” So, in January 2022, Lattouf Joy practiced iteration upon iteration of the recipe, trying to fine-tune it, adjusting quantities of flour and baking soda until she evoked her grandmother’s treasured cookie.

Now, Zeena Bakery sells cookies at farmers markets in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene Park and Irving Square Park, as well as online, shipping thousands of them nationwide. She makes between 2,500 and 3,000 cookies each month, on average. Lattouf Joy says one idea motivating Zeena Bakery was to buy from farmers and try to center them in her business. She hopes that, as it continues to grow, the key stakeholders will stay the farmers she sources from and the employees.

“My goal is to center as many farmers as I can, whether they’re farmers in the Levant and Palestine or in New York,” says Lattouf Joy. “My hope is to create an environment that is about kindness and love and care.”

The origins—and many relatives—of ma’amoul

Before ma’amoul were treats served at special occasions, they were simple biscuits that fueled travelers. “‘Ma’amoul’ is not really a fancy word,” says Nawal Nasrallah, an Iraqi food writer and historian, known for translating medieval Middle Eastern recipes into English. It comes from the Arabic verb ‘amala, which means “to do” or “to make.”

Ma’amoul can be traced back to an Egyptian cookie called kahk, Nasrallah explains. In the medieval era, “basketfuls” of kahk could keep for weeks or months as travelers trekked on horseback or camelback. “They stay well for a long time,” says Nasrallah. “They didn’t take delicacies that would ferment or mold in one or two days.” Modern kahk, still enjoyed in Egypt, are nearly identical to ma’amoul, except that semolina flour is absent from the dough.

The adoption of kahk, and later ma’amoul, as cookies used in religious celebration can be traced back to ancient Mesopotamia, Nasrallah says. Ancient Sumerians would celebrate the coming spring and the goddess Ishtar by preparing qullupu, also a dry cookie stuffed with dates.

As time went on, the filled cookie, in the form of the ancient qullupu, the medieval kahk, and eventually ma’amoul and its Iraqi equivalent kleicha, stayed firm as staples of spring celebrations like Easter, Eid and Purim. Queen Esther, commemorated on Purim, is thought to have had her named derived from the ancient goddess Ishtar. Some say that the cookies, with their hidden filling, evoke Queen Esther hiding her Jewish roots in the Purim story.

Ma’amoul even has relatives as far as China, where mooncakes are made with carved wooden molds similar to taabeh. In fact, Nasrallah says the distinctive, circular patterns carved into the taabeh are moon-like, since Muslims follow the lunar calendar.

“Names differ from region to region, from one era to another, but, basically, the food is the same, and its function is more or less the same: celebratory food for religious festivals,” says Nasrallah.

A family tradition

Despite ma’amoul’s ties to spring holidays, Lattouf Joy sells the confection year-round, mostly to customers who didn’t grow up with the cookies. She sees spikes in sales around religious holidays, as Christians buy them around Christmas and Easter, and Muslims order them around Eid.

Like many others, I grew up making ma’amoul in our home kitchen. Twice a year, for each Eid, my mother would combine semolina and butter into a crumbly mass on a large metal pan—the same one she uses for stringing green beans and any other big projects. One chunk at a time, she would pour in milk and knead it until it hit just the right texture. We would sit at the table and roll the dough into balls, and then “open” those dough balls the way you would make a pinch pot in art class. I would spoon spiced, sweetened walnuts or dates into the “pot,” close it tightly and press it into our mold, lining metal baking sheets with hundreds of delicate cookies.

“Because it’s so labor-intensive, and each cookie is handmade, it really brings together so many people from the family,” Lattouf Joy says. From measuring ingredients to mixing fillings to molding, baking and dusting the cookies with powdered sugar, it’s a long process.

Traditionally, families prepare or purchase ma’amoul to give to family or friends during celebrations. Lattouf Joy describes the excitement around ma’amoul when she is visiting her family in Amman, Jordan, with people comparing sweets shops and recipes. Since my parents’ families live across Syria and Europe, we bring tins of ma’amoul to local friends, and if my brother or I visit my parents around Eid, we always leave with at least one hefty Tupperware of cookies.

“Of course, the Arab way is to be hospitable and to have plenty,” says Lattouf Joy. “If you have a party with 50 people, you’re making at least 150.”

While an aspiring ma’amoul baker may be frightened at the prospect of shaping 150 cookies, baking them can be a rewarding experience. Lattouf Joy’s biggest tip is to “be patient.”

Personally, I started making ma’amoul as a child, and I was awful at it. Chopped walnuts would poke thought the dough, which I had made too thin in some places and too thick in others. I would silently place a misshapen cookie onto a sheet pan, hoping my mother would not notice it. Of course, she would always notice and always try to fix it. After years of practice, I now manage to at least shape them correctly.

“Don’t be upset, don’t judge yourself if it doesn’t go as you want it to be,” Lattouf Joy says. “My philosophy is: It almost always tastes great.”

She also says to expect a very sticky dough that can be hard to work with, recommending lining the molds with plastic wrap to keep the mixture from sticking.

In a blog post, Lattouf Joy writes that Zeena Bakery is a “love letter” to her grandmother and “a love letter to all of our ancestors—yours and mine.”

“I’m not selling a cookie, I’m selling so much more than that,” she says. “Understanding history and culture and celebrating ancestry, whether it’s mine as an Arab or somebody else’s.”

Lillian Ali’s Family Ma’amoul Recipe

For the dough:

• 1 cup room-temperature butter
• 1 cup all-purpose flour
• 1 cup semolina flour
• 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
• Milk (amount varies, between a few tablespoons and a third cup)

For the fillings:

Walnut filling

• 1/4 cup sugar
• 1/8 cup water
• 1/2 teaspoon lemon juice
• 10 ounces chopped walnuts
• 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

Date filling

• 1 package of baking dates (macerated, pitted dates blended into a smooth paste, which can often be found at Middle Eastern grocery stores or online)

Method:

1. Mix butter, all-purpose flour, semolina flour and baking powder well, until you get a crumbly dough. Let it sit at room temperature, covered in plastic wrap, for at least 12 hours.
2. While the dough rests, you can prepare the fillings. For the nut filling, mix sugar, water and lemon juice in a pan. Boil while stirring until the sugar is dissolved and the mixture thickens. Then, add the sugar mix to the chopped walnuts and add the cinnamon.
3. When it is time to make the cookies, preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.
4. Working in chunks of dough, add milk a splash at a time, working it in until the dough is soft and rolls into a ball.
5. Take a chunk of dough and roll it into a ball around the size of a ping-pong ball.
6. Use a finger or thumb to push a hole into the center of the dough, and then carefully thin out the walls of the cookie until you can fit about a tablespoon of filling into it. You should end up with a small “bowl” with walls around half a centimeter thick.
7. Spoon a tablespoon of chopped walnuts into the cookie, or pinch off around a tablespoon of date paste and put it in the cookie.
8. Close the cookie and gently roll it back into a ball.
9. You can press the cookie into a ma’amoul mold, or press it slightly onto a flat surface and decorate by lightly pressing the tines of a fork into it, as you would for peanut butter cookies.
10. Repeat steps 4-9 until all dough is made into cookies. Place finished cookies on a baking sheet.
11. Bake at 350 degrees Fahrenheit until lightly golden, 20-25 minutes, but could vary based on your oven.
12. Allow cookies to cool completely before sprinkling powdered sugar on the walnut cookies.

Lillian Ali | Read More

Lillian Ali is an editorial intern with Smithsonian magazine.