Both cultures have brought their own culinary heritage. Since Jewish dietary laws forbid the mixing of meat and milk at one meal, there are a wide variety of dairy and vegetarian dishes. The Ashkenazi world brought Russian borsht (beetroot soup), piroshki (yeasted pastries filled with curd cheese, cabbage, potato, sauerkraut or mushrooms), cheese blintzes (pancakes), kreplach (a kind of ravioli) and potato kugel (a potato pudding). They also introduced challah (egg bread), bagels, lekach (honey cake), babka (a yeasted butter cake) and plava (sponge cake), as well as various cheesecakes and strudels.
Sephardic specialties include Moroccan couscous, Tunisian breiks (filo pastry cigars) with an egg or potato filling, Lebanese sambousak (spinach turnovers), Syrian kibbeh and various sweet pastries and cakes that are usually filled with nuts or dried fruit and coated in sugar syrup.
Israel has also adopted many indigenous dishes as its own. The most famous is falafel (chickpea rissoles), which are sold by street vendors all over Israel. Falafel are stuffed inside pitta bread with a variety of fresh and pickled salads and topped with tahini as well as a hot chilli sauce. Other Arab dishes include the ubiquitous hummus bi tehina (a chickpea and sesame seed paste), dolmas (stuffed vine leaves) and ka’ak – Arab flat bread topped with za’atar – a mixture of wild marjoram, thyme, oregano and olive oil.
Israel grows an abundance of fresh fruit and vegetables. Dates, figs, pomegranates and apples have been grown since biblical times. Israeli avocados and Jaffa oranges are world famous.
A few cheeses are made, mainly from goat’s or ewe’s milk. Kachkaval, a hard yellow cheese also known as Kasseri, is made in a few villages in the Golan Heights. Labaneh, a fresh white cheese made from drained yoghurt, is sometimes rolled into balls and stored in olive oil with rosemary and dried chillies.
The Egyptian civilization, which dates back more than six thousand years, is one of the oldest known to man. The Egyptians were the first people to bake bread and were eating a well-balanced diet when most of mankind was still hunting for food. Herodotus called Egypt ‘the gift of the Nile’ – without it Egypt would just be another part of the Sahara Desert. The rich, fertile Nile Valley produces fruit, vegetables and grains – especially wheat, barley, corn, rice, sugar cane, oranges, lemons, watermelons and dates – all year round.
For centuries, the peasants or fellahin have lived on a diet based on vegetables, grains, legumes, fruits, sweet pastries filled with nuts, and coffee. Egyptians do not like their food hot and spicy, although ta’liya – a mixture of crushed garlic and coriander – is widely used to flavour vegetable stews.
Ful medames (small brown broad beans flavoured with garlic and cumin) is the national dish. The beans are dressed with olive oil and lemon juice and served with aiysh baladi (wholewheat Arab bread) and various pickled salads. Falafel (broad bean rissoles) have been made in Egypt since the days of the Pharoahs. Another popular dish is bissara, a thick broad bean soup flavoured with onion, garlic, cumin, mint and melokhia – a green leafy vegetable that can be eaten fresh or dried. Dried melokhia leaves are often added to soups to give them a thicker, more glutinous consistency. Egyptians also love egg dishes, especially eggah, a thick omelette similar to the Italian frittata, which is served cut in wedges like a pie.
Desserts and pastries include the ubiquitous ba’lawa and k’nafeh, zalabia – little pastry fritters soaked in sugar syrup that are similar to the Greek loukoumades – and balouza, a kind of jelly flavoured with rose water and topped with chopped almonds or pistachios. Balouza should not be confused with basbouza, which is a semolina and almond cake coated in lemon-flavoured sugar syrup. Another refreshing dessert is koshaf – a dried fruit salad with almonds and pine nuts.
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Insects, leaves, flowers, petals, seeds, roots and galls. China, India, Java, Egypt, black Africa, the gardens and valleys of Morocco, blending perfumes foreign to our European senses. Spices violent with all the wildness of the countries where they have ripened, sweet from the loving culture of the gardens where they have flowered, here is all the fascination of your dark kitchens, the odour of your streets. Spices are the soul of Fez.
– Madame Guinaudeau, Traditional Moroccan Cooking
North Africa
North African cooking, perhaps more than any other in the Mediterranean, has been moulded by a long history of invasions and occupations. The indigenous people of the Magreb, the coastal strip along the southern shores of the Mediterranean that make up the modern states of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya, were the Berbers – a light-haired, fair-skinned people, who are thought to originate in Asia Minor. The Berber diet was based on wheat, lentils, broad beans, goat’s milk and honey. Kesksou (couscous) – the most famous dish of North Africa – was invented by the Berbers.
In the first millennium B.C. the Phoenicians set up trading posts along the coast of North Africa and founded Carthage, near modern day Tunis. Although the Carthaginians planted wheat, olives and vines in the fifth century B.C., it was the Romans who developed agriculture on a grand scale, building aquaducts and canals as far away as Numidia in eastern Algeria. They built such vast estates of wheat fields that Carthage became known as the granary of Rome.
In the sixth century A.D. the Romans were overthrown by the Vandals, followed by the Byzantines. After the death of Mohammed in 631, the Arab Muslims overran North Africa and converted the people to Islam. The Arabs were great agriculturists and re-established Roman irrigation systems that had been destroyed by the Vandals. They built new underground canals in Tunisia and Morocco using techniques they learnt from the Persians.
New vegetables were introduced as well as all kinds of citrus fruit, rice and sugar. In the eighth century, the Arabs swept across the Straights of Gibraltar and invaded Spain, where they remained until they were expelled by the Spanish Inquisition in 1492. Spanish Moors and Jews fled Al-Andalus (the old word for Moorish Spain) and sought refuge in the Magreb, bringing with them a rich culinary heritage after 700 years in Spain. They encouraged the use of olives and olive oil in cooking instead of the Berber smen (a kind of clarified butter). They brought new vegetables and fruits: aubergines, carrots, turnips, quinces, apricots, peaches and cherries, as well as new vegetables from the New World – tomatoes, potatoes and chilli peppers. Exotic spices – cumin, cinnamon, saffron, turmeric and cloves – and warka, a paper-thin pastry similar to filo pastry, were introduced.
In the sixteenth century much of the Magreb (except Morocco) came under Ottoman rule. The Ottoman culinary influence is still apparent today. Tunisian brik and Algerian bourek both derive from the Turkish börek. Sweet pastries such as baklava and ktaif have obvious Turkish origins.
In the nineteenth century Algeria, followed by Tunisia, became a French Protectorate. (The French did not gain control of Morocco until 1912, at the same time that the Italians snatched Libya from the Ottomans.) The French were nicknamed Pied-Noirs (Black Feet) on account of their heavy black boots. Later, Pied-Noirs came to refer to anyone of Italian, Spanish or Portuguese origin – many of whom were Sephardic Jews – who lived in the Magreb. When Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia became independent many Pied-Noirs returned to live in France, bringing their adopted North African cooking with them, which had some influence in introducing the French to new exotic flavours and new ways of cooking.
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