If you grew up in Morocco, you know the attar. If you didn't, the easiest way I can explain him is this: he is the ChatGPT of the neighborhood. Except he was there first, by a few hundred years.
Every old neighborhood in Morocco has one. His shop is small, usually on a corner, and you can smell it before you can see it. The walls are covered in jars. Some are glass, some are old, some are not labeled at all because he doesn't need labels — he knows what's in them. Behind the counter there's a man, or sometimes his son who is learning, and that's the attar.
People think he sells spices. He does, but that's not really the job.
You go to him for cumin and saffron, sure. But you also go to him when your hair is falling out. When you can't sleep. When the baby has a fever. When you're getting married and your mother says to ask him what to put in the henna. When you have a cough that won't go away, he hands you something dark in a paper twist and tells you to boil it with honey, and three days later you're fine.
He knows all of this because his father knew it. His father learned it from his father. Nobody wrote any of it down. It just lives in him.
That's what an attar actually is. He's a recipe book that talks back. He's hundreds of years of trial and error standing behind a counter waiting for you to ask a question. Before there was Google, before there were pharmacies, before anyone wrote a cookbook, there was a guy in a small shop who knew.
My mom has known her attar for thirty years. When she walks in he doesn't ask her what she wants. He asks how she's doing, how my dad is, how I am. He remembers what blends she likes and which ones she stopped buying because someone in the family didn't like the smell. That's a normal relationship to have with the person who sells you spices. In Morocco, anyway.
When I moved to New York I went looking for that. I found nice shops, careful people, good saffron. I'm grateful for all of it. But there's no attar. There's no chair. There's no one who remembers my mom.
So I figured I'd try to be one.
That's what Sookies is. I'm not really starting a spice brand the way people mean it here. I'm trying to bring something across the ocean that doesn't have a word in English. The blends I make are answers to questions my mom and her attar would have spent twenty minutes on.
I'll be your attar. From Manhattan, with email instead of a wooden counter. Same idea though.
— Sookies Journal