What Is Sumac? The Sour Middle Eastern Spice

The last line on Li’l Habibi’s menu, under Sweet Endings, reads: Seasonal Fruit Tart, 14 — sumac pastry cream, fruit. Sumac is the one word on that line most people have to look up. It is a spice most Singaporeans have eaten on a plate of hummus or a Middle Eastern salad without knowing its name — the dark red dust on top — and it has a longer and stranger history than almost anything else in the spice cupboard. This is what it is, what it tastes of, and why it makes sense in a custard.

What sumac is

Sumac is the dried, ground fruit of a shrub. The plants belong to the genus Rhus, part of the cashew and mango family, Anacardiaceae, and grow across much of the temperate and subtropical world. The one used in cooking is overwhelmingly Rhus coriaria — Sicilian or tanner’s sumac — native to southern Europe and western Asia, from the Eastern Mediterranean through the Caucasus to northern Iran.

The shrub produces dense clusters of small, fuzzy red berries (botanically, drupes). Dried and crushed, they become a coarse, reddish-purple powder. That powder is the spice.

What it tastes like

Sour. Not hot, not bitter, not especially aromatic — sour, in a clean, fruity, lemony way, with a faint astringency at the finish. The sourness comes from a high level of malic acid, the same acid that makes a green apple sharp, rather than the citric acid in a lemon. That is why sumac reads as fruitier and rounder than a squeeze of lemon,.

The practical point is that sumac is acid in a dry form. You can put sourness onto a dish without adding liquid — which is exactly what you want on a salad that should stay crisp, on grilled meat that should keep its crust, or in a cream that should not split.

The name means “red”

The word came into English through Old French sumac in the thirteenth century, from medieval Latin, from the Arabic summāq, and further back from the Syriac summāqā, meaning red. It is named for its colour, and the colour is not incidental: the same plant has been a dye for as long as it has been a spice.

Before lemons, and after them

The Romans knew sumac and used it for its sourness, in dressings, the way we now use lemon — and they had it well before lemons became familiar in Europe. In medieval Europe, roughly from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries, sumac appears regularly in cookbooks written for wealthy households, including a sumac stew called sumāqiyya. An eleventh-century shipwreck excavated off Rhodes in the 1970s carried sumac in commercial quantities. It was, for a long time, a traded luxury.

Its other life was industrial. The leaves and bark of sumac are rich in tannins, and sumac-tanned leather is light, supple and pale — the leather known as morocco was one of them. Even the plant’s Latin name, coriaria, marks it as the tanner’s sumac. And sumac is one of the symbolic items on the haft-sin table laid for Nowruz, the Persian New Year.

Where you have probably already eaten it

Za’atar. The Levantine herb-and-seed blend is dried thyme and sumac, in proportions that differ by region; the sumac is what makes it tangy. Our glossary of Lebanese food gives it one line.
On mezze. Sprinkled over hummus, and in and on salads across the Levant.
With grilled meat and rice. In Afghan, Armenian, Iraqi and Iranian cooking it is scattered over rice and kebabs, and it goes on lahmajoun, the thin spiced-meat flatbread.
Musakhan. Sumac is one of the main ingredients of this Palestinian dish.

Why it belongs in a fruit tart

Our Li’l Habibi menu prints the words “sumac pastry cream” and nothing more, so we will not describe a recipe it does not publish. But the reasoning is not mysterious. Pastry cream is rich, sweet and soft; ripe fruit is sweet and soft. A tart like that needs acid to stop it from being one-note, and the usual way to supply it is lemon zest or juice. Sumac does the same job from a dry powder, with a fruitier sourness and a faint blush of colour, and without thinning the cream. It is also a very Levantine way to finish a very French pastry, which is roughly what Li’l Habibi does with everything.

The fruit on it is seasonal, which is the whole point of the dish — so we are not going to tell you which fruit is on it this week. Ask. If you want the other dessert on that card, the pistachio Basque cheesecake sits beside it; our post on the muhallebi at Hamilton Road covers how the two addresses end the night differently.

Two things worth knowing before you buy a jar

It is not poison sumac. Poison ivy, poison oak and poison sumac were once classed in the same genus but now sit in a different one, Toxicodendron, and they carry the allergen urushiol. They are easy to tell apart in the wild: poison sumac has white berries, the culinary sumacs have red ones. The spice in your jar is Rhus coriaria.

It is in the cashew family. That is a botanical fact, not a medical one, and we are not going to tell you what it means for any particular allergy. If you have a nut or cashew allergy, tell us before you order — Li’l Habibi’s menu asks for dietary restrictions in advance, and it asks for a reason.

At home, keep it airtight and away from light, as you would any ground spice, and use it as a finishing seasoning. A pinch over fried eggs, sliced tomatoes or plain yoghurt is the fastest way to learn what it does.

Where to taste it

The fruit tart is at Li’l Habibi, 55 Haji Lane, Tuesday to Sunday from 5.30pm; the full card, with its prices, is on our menu page. For a sweeter ending at Hamilton Road, the chocolate kataifi tart is the other Levantine pastry on our menus, and the labne carries taklia, another small Middle Eastern seasoning we have explained properly. More of these kitchen stories are collected in five years of Habibi-san. Neither of our venues is halal: we serve pork and alcohol at both.

Sources: Wikipedia, “Sumac” (genus, family, malic acid, uses across Levantine, Iranian and Palestinian cooking, etymology, medieval European cookbooks, the Rhodes shipwreck, tanning and morocco leather, Nowruz, the Toxicodendron distinction) and “Rhus coriaria” (range, the Roman use before lemons, za’atar); our own Li’l Habibi menu, unchanged since October 2025 and checked 29 September 2026.