The story of seventy-year-old Saadiyah in producing orange blossom water

Al Mustaqbal daily newspaper portrayed in its edition of Monday, the sweet story of a seventy-year old woman called Saadiyah Hariri, and her life experience with the distillation of the famed Lebanese orange blossom water. Um Mhamad, from Saida, boasted that she has been extracting the essence of orange blossom for decades from the confinement of a small room annexed to the family house. She said she spends the whole months of March and April of each year at her private “laboratory”, and described to the reporter the different phases of the ‘making of’. After picking, collecting and sifting the blossoms, she empties them in the traditional copper jar (alembic), the ‘karake’ leaving them to simmer under the burning firewood. A tube permeates a water filled barrel built inside the karake to cool down the vapor of the blossoms passing through it announcing the birth of the product which she proudly pours in special glass bottle.  Um Mhamad expounds on how she brought up her children and provided for them from this very specialized and strenuous job. Her extremely dry but rose-pink hands have been marinated with “the aroma of the southern city’s orchards,” she finally said. (Al Mustaqbal, April 4, 2016)