The Secret Behind a Beloved Palestinian Dessert

Credit…Linda Xiao for The New York Times. Food stylist: Maggie Ruggiero. Prop stylist: Sophia Eleni Pappas.

Take a handful of tears. This is not an attempt at poetry: They are, in fact, called tears, these tiny, translucent fragments of resin, glittering like sugar and giving off the scent of high, sweet pine. The fragrance is the flavor. They come from inside a mastic tree, an evergreen cousin to the pistachio, that abounds in the Mediterranean and the Middle East and thrives in difficult soil, in the sandy remains of crushed rock, where less hardy plants might wither. Once rooted, fed by the sun, the trees can go for long stretches without water — without any care at all.

Recipe: Mouhalabieh (Milk Pudding)

Only a species indigenous to the southern coast of the Greek island Chios produces this precious sap, prized since antiquity as medicine and seasoning for food. (In the 19th century, breath-purifying mastic chewing gum was an indulgence reportedly as beloved by the women of Constantinople as tobacco by the men.) Local lore holds that the trees began to weep in the third century A.D., mourning Saint Isidore, a Roman naval officer martyred for being a Christian; but the Greek historian Herodotus had already cited mastic as a rare luxury alongside cinnamon and frankincense in the fifth century B.C. So valuable was the resin that during the War of Greek Independence, which started in 1821, the Ottoman sultan sent a fleet to lay waste to the island but stipulated that the villages of the mastic farmers be spared. (He was not so lenient in later violence.)

Mastic feels like stones between the fingers and turns pliant between the teeth — although “if you bite it, it cracks,” the French Palestinian chef Fadi Kattan says. Under a pestle, it crumbles into a shimmery dust. Stir this into liquid, and there’s a slight thickening, a sudden heaviness, verging on syrup. Kattan, a founder and owner of the restaurant Akub in London, likes to add ground mastic to the juices running off a roast to finish the meat in lush velvet. You must be judicious in measuring, he says, because the taste is subtle but strong: first a pang of bitterness; then cool, damp forest. “It’s an invitation to travel,” he said.