For an Aleppino in exile, the smell of soap is like Proust’s madeleine. It brings back their childhood, and beyond that, the city’s whole more than thousand-year-old history and traditions. The tragedy that has struck Syria today, and in particular the city of Aleppo, is yet another reason to want to know more about the people, the culture and the know-how of the handiwork they have been faithfully maintaining for centuries. Aleppo soap, that smooth little cube in its inimitable hues, throws open the doors to an entire civilization: the caravanserais, the meeting point between East and West, the religious tolerance, the architecture of the souks and the hammams, or Turkish baths, the treasures of the desert.
Françoise Cloarec had been a frequent visitor to Syria for nearly 15 years when a soap-maker from Aleppo asked her to write a book about his country’s soap.
Olive oil, glasswort (salicornia) picked in the desert, laurel oil: each ingredient used in the Aleppo soap formula offers an encounter with the land and the people: fragments of life and huge swaths of history.
Readers will discover the secrets of production: the carefully balanced ingredients, the slow cooking, the still-liquid soap being poured straight onto the floor of the huge cooling rooms, the impressive ritual of cutting the bars, the stamping (each block of soap is stamped with a seal like a coin) and the drying. Then comes the description of the properties and uses of Aleppo soap, its history and the secrets of the steam baths.

Aleppo soap, its properties, history and production; the portrait of the people that make it and a guide to how to use it. A lovely, lavishly illustrated book about this jewel of Middle Eastern craftsmanship, the symbol of a culture at risk today.