Some time ago I got a bit carried away: I discovered Haus Publishing and their astonishing range of “travel” books, and it’s fair to say I bought quite a few. This is one of them. I had never heard of Scami before, and I didn’t really know what this book was about, but I figured someone talking about Damascus was likely to be fascinating.

Schami is an author, and Syrian, and (at time of writing) had been living in exile in Germany for decades. This book is (he says) essentially transcriptions of phone conversations he had with his sister, Marie: she wondered around their part of Damascus – the Old City, the Christian Quarter – and described what she was seeing, hearing, smelling, remembering. Alongside that are the recipes. Apparently Damascenes are well known for their cooking. The book collects recipes from friends, relatives, and associates of Schama’s family, alongside incidental details about how it can be served, why this person makes the best one, and so on.

It’s very close to walking with a resident, which of course is the point. It’s also an insight into familial and friend relationships – people that I will never know, with complexities I can never understand and which can only be hinted at here, but which speak to a vibrant city that is one of the oldest continually inhabited cities on the planet. It’s almost but not quite voyeuristic – it’s gossipy, for sure, but for me it stops short of being intrusive, so I didn’t feel uncomfortable about knowing these details of people’s lives.

I can’t wait to go back through the book with sticky flags, figuring out what to cook from it.