Unusual Nuts from Mosul

The commercial center for distributing nuts and seeds, collectively called karazat, to other Iraqi markets, is the northern city of Mosul. Nut trees growing on the mountains of northern Iraq have always been the source of nuts like pistachios, walnuts, chestnuts, acorns, and the like. However, some other varieties of nuts also grow there, but they are unknown to outsiders, such as habbat khadhra, butum, and sissi.

Habbat khadhra and butum are the dried berries of varieties of terebinth trees, which have been growing in the region since ancient times. One of the 1700 bc Babylonian recipes written on cuneiform tablets calls for ‘butumtu,’ described as green. The decipherer of the tablets, Jean Bottéro, left it as unidentified, with a possibility of it being green wheat or barley (Mesopotamian Culinary Texts), but to me it looks suspiciously like our butum (Pistacia atlantica), the kernel of the tree’s berries, the size of a pea, which tastes like the regular pistachio (Pistacia vera). The bunches of butum berries are left to dry on the trees, then they are kept in brine for a while, after removing the outer skin, to make them easier to crack with the teeth. The resin of the tree is also used as gum, which we call ‘ilich mei (literally, ‘water gum’) to differentiate it from the imported sweet gum ‘ilich ingileez (English gum). Medieval Arabic sources describe the plant – its fruit and resin – in similar terms, except that they called the gum ‘ilk al-butm and ‘ilk al-Anbaat (gum of the indigenous Iraqis) to differentiate it from ‘ilk al-Roum, also called mastaka (mastic gum).