Xalwad Reer Xamar (Mogadishan Halva)

Xalwad Reer Xamar (Mogadishan Halva)

The phrase “Xalwad Reer Xamar” shows how tribal the Somali people really are, as it literally means “Halva of the Clan of Hamar.” The word “hamar” is the Arabic word for redden (حمرْ), but it’s also the name (unofficially) used by Somalis for Mogadishu. “Reer Xamar,” who by the way belong to the larger ethnic group known as the Benadiri people and whose skin color can range from very fair to blue black, are linked to the original history of Mogadishu, its recent background with the Middle East, and its continued connection to diverse cultures as far away as India. Further, the word “mogadishu” comes from the Arabic phrase “muqd el shah” (مُقدِ الشاه) or the introduction to the shah, which is still very close to the Somali way of pronouncing the name as in “Muqdisho”. 

Enough about the history of Mogadishu, lets get back to my favorite dish, the halva. There really isn’t any other dish that I would prefer to this one. If I was stuck on a Somali island somewhere, I would want to have that. There isn’t a time where I remember halva not being part of my life. There’s a joke in my family that once I was crying so much as a baby that my mother shut me up with halva.  I have always loved this dish. Always.

I may not remember how it came into my life, but there is a day that I clearly remember I decided to learn how to cook it. It was noon, at the wedding of one of my uncles, and I was already fidgeting. Everyone was happy, and they were all looking forward to the “alle barri” (sacrifice), which was preceding the wedding reception of that evening. They would enjoy a wonderful lunch of Persian rice with all of its flavors, accompanied by the most tender goat meats, freshest juices and lots of prayers for the young couple. For me, however, it was all about the halva, which would not be cooked for a few more hours and would not be served until later that evening. 

“There she is,” I whispered to my cousin. “Do you see her?”

She was as beautiful as ever, and sat so elegantly. She seemed so confident in herself, in her worth, and in her skills. One look at her, and you would wonder about who she was. Her name was Batuulo, and she was a Mogadishan lady in our neighborhood who was always invited to cook the halva for all of the celebratory occasions. 

That day, I stalked her after lunch, watched her cook this dish, and was truly amazed by the amount of sugar that goes into it. I was probably eight or so and hadn’t understood yet the negative effects of sugar on our health, and I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t have changed my mind even if I did. I was just so awe struck by her craft. It was like a dance. She was cooking it in a restaurant-sized pot, using a wooden spatula that was taller than she was. When it was time to stir it, she would hold onto the upper middle part of the spatula and literally fly over to the other side of the pot; leaving everyone gasping. They were all worried she would fall into the hot sugar, and be burned alive. They asked to help her, but she didn’t need any help. 

“You will only be in my way!” she would yell them off. 

She was like a soldier, and I was totally sold. 

“I want to do that,” I told my cousin.  

The following days, I visited Batuulo often and I would charm her with my wit and she would find me irresistible. She would laugh, and wonder why such a young boy was so interested in her world. She wouldn’t understand my deep desires, because for her this was just what she did for a living, but I would continue to poke at her until she finally let me learn how to do it.

“It all starts with the purest of starches,” she would say, as she tasted the started with her pinkie. “If the starch is not pure, your halva will be paunchy. These women are vultures, and they will not blink twice about lying to you.  So, don’t trust them. Trust your tongue.”

The ladies at the Bakaare Market probably wondered why she was talking to this skinny little boy about such things, but Batuulo would go on and take me to the sugar lanes and we would buy the whitest and brownest of sugars. When we ended up at the butter lanes, she would sit and nearly sink her nose into the subag. She would only buy the kind that made her feel dizzy, she said. 

She taught me to make the dish bit by bit. Each afternoon, for nearly a month, I would stop by at her house on my way from school. After shopping, she would sit me down and tell me stories about how she had learned it from her grandmother, a woman who was a maid for a rich family in the 1930s, and how she groomed the young Batuulo to one day work for the same family. After the family moved to Egypt in the late 1950s, when the Somalis were on the brink of independence, Batuulo began offering her expertise in different kinds of foods to the locals. The halva stuck.

Those afternoons slowly became much more than learning how to make the halva, they become a chance for a young boy to learn from a living history in a way that wasn’t really possible in our schools at the time. Her classroom became my favorite classroom because I realized it was changing the way I saw myself, my neighborhood, and Somali community at large.

Today, I think about those afternoons whenever I set out to make this dish. I’m still not at the point of flipping myself over the big pots, but I delight in my halvas. 

INGREDIENTS:

1 cup of white sugar

1/2 cup of brown sugar

1/2 of corn starch

2 cups of water 

1/4 of stick butter

1/4 cup of veggie oil

1 teaspoon of nutmeg

1/2 teaspoon of cardamom

1/4 teaspoon of cloves

Dash of orange and red food colorings.

METHOD:

Put the butter, oil, and the spices in a pot and let them come to a nice mix over medium heat. Take it off the heat, and put that aside. Mix the starch, 1/2 a cup of the water, and the food colorings. Put that aside. Then put together the sugar (both types) and the rest of the water into another pot, and let that come to a boil over high heat. Then add the starch, and cover. The halva will start to get sticky quickly, but let that come together for at least thirty seconds. While still over high heat, stir the halva using a wooden spoon. Keep adding the butter mix as you stir until you have used up half of it, which will be about a full minute, and then turn the heat down to medium and cover the halva for another full minute.  Add slowly the rest of the butter pix and keep stirring the halva until it becomes almost one batch, lumping together as you stir, which should be about another six or seven minutes. Take a foil roaster pan and place the halva into it. Let the halva cool for at least thirty minutes or so before you begin to cut it up. Enjoy!