variety of Lebanese mezze and salads is enormous. In recent years, many have become world famous such as hommus bil-tahineh (a chickpea and sesame seed paste flavoured with garlic and lemon juice), baba ghanouge (an aubergine and tahini dip), tabbouleh (a tomato, parsley and burghul salad) and falafel (a dried broad bean and chickpea rissole). Mezze are always served with khoubiz (Arabic flat bread). There is a liking for mahashi (stuffed vegetables), especially aubergine, courgettes, peppers, Swiss chard and vine leaves stuffed with a mixture of rice, tomatoes, herbs, cinnamon and summa (sumac), which adds a distinctive tangy, lemony flavour. Various savoury pastries are made including sambousak and fatayer, which are usually filled with spinach, curd cheese or potatoes.
Kibbeh is the national dish. Kibbeh el–Heeleh (vegetarian kibbeh) is made with a mixture of mashed potatoes or pumpkin, burghul, nuts, onion and spices. Kibbeh can be baked, fried or simmered in a yoghurt, tahini or kishk sauce. Kishk is a kind of flour made with fermented and dried yoghurt and burghul.
Various cheese are made from goat’s or ewe’s milk: Jibneh khadreah (a fresh goat’s cheese made in the Lebanese mountains), Jibneh trabolsyeh (a crumbly white cheese similar to feta), Areesh (a curd cheese made with yoghurt and lemon juice) and Halloum (a slightly chewy hard cheese that is sometimes flavoured with black cumin seeds).
Meals usually end with fresh fruit – which Lebanon produces in abundance: red and white cherries, prickly pears, pomegranates, medlars, custard apples, jujubes and mulberries, as well as all kinds of citrus fruit, melons, apricots, peaches, plums, grapes and figs.
Pastries are usually eaten between meals with a cup of Turkish coffee. Ba’lawah (baklava), are made in many shapes and sizes and filled with chopped almonds, walnuts, pine nuts, cashews or pistachios. K’nafeh (shredded wheat pastries) are filled with chopped nuts or fresh cheese. Both ba’lawah and k’nafeh are coated in ater – a sugar syrup flavoured with rose water and orange flower water. Other traditional desserts include tamriyeh, little envelopes of paper-thin pastry with a sweet semolina filling scented with rose water, and kellage, sweet fritters filled with ashtah (clotted cream) that are made during Ramadan. Kellage is the name of the wafer-thin sheets of pastry used. Ma-moul bil-joz (walnut pastries), rass bil-tamer (date pastries) and ka’k el-eed (ring-shaped biscuits) are all Easter specialties.
Israel has been called a country in search of a cuisine. The State of Israel was created a little over fifty years ago and is inhabited by immigrants from more than seventy countries. Jews divide into two cultures: Ashkenazi Jews – from Northern and Eastern Europe and Russia; and Sephardic Jews – from Spain, North Africa, the Middle East and as far away as Yemen, Ethiopia and India.
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.
Libya Tunisia Algeria Morocco
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
