Introduction, Sababa

INTRODUCTION

In a city full of night owls, I am among the earliest of risers. Tel Aviv is a place of sizzling days that can leave you wilting, of beach jaunts and afternoon naps and dinners out after the sun slips behind the Mediterranean Sea. But on mornings like this, just after the light begins to drift in through the wispy shades, the city feels like it belongs only to me. So I leave my husband sleeping and sneak out of the bedroom, grab my two-wheeled plaid shopping cart, slip out the door, and make my way the short distance between our apartment and the entrance to the Carmel Market, known in Hebrew as Shuk HaCarmel or, quite simply, the shuk.

A tree rustles, gently shaken by an ocean breeze from down the road. A bus trundles down our block as a surfer, his wetsuit peeled back like a banana down to his waist, walks barefoot toward the waves. I turn the corner and, just like that, the main artery of the shuk is visible ahead, a ragtag tableau of tarps and awnings ascending half a kilometer in front of me.

It always feels like an impossibility that in a town of 350,000 food-obsessed denizens, my flip-flopped feet could be the first to touch this asphalt that will be walked on by thousands by day’s end. But right now, it’s just me and the morning workers getting ready for the day ahead. I watch my step as vendors hose down the floors in front of their stalls one last time before the day begins. A mini forklift drops a pallet of spring garlic, its long stalks still attached, near the sidewalk. I sidestep a giant crate of watermelons to make my way inside. There are onions and beets waiting to be claimed, too, the boxes reminding me of those newspaper bundles you see being thrown off trucks in old movies. Except here, the headlines waiting to be unfurled are edible ones.

I’m on the hunt for herbs for my daily carafe of tea: mint, lemon verbena, maybe some sage. The fragile leaves fare better when I rescue them at the beginning of the day, before the heat takes its toll. The morning crew at the first produce stand on the left is sorting through tomatoes, tearing wilted leaves from bunches of lettuce and letting the sacrificial dark-green outer layers fall to the floor to join a fast-accumulating mountain of trimmed herb stalks, errant grape vines, corn husks, and carrot tops.

People aren’t quite up to speaking yet; there is so, so much conversation ahead. A man walks around with a round metal tray, balancing glasses of milky coffee, delivering standing orders for vendors clearly seeking fortification for the day ahead.

Early in the week, new produce trickles into the market, trucked in from all over Israel. If I hang around long enough, drink a coffee, and catch up with my friend Miki at his little café around the corner, I can watch the shuk come to life. In a country that can be traversed by car from top to bottom in six hours, of blink-and-you-miss-them micro-seasons, where people look at you funny if you ask for a peach a week out of peak, where you learn that avocados are ephemeral, and eventually know the exact week in the summer that the watermelons get mealy, it’s best to stay close to the market. So I shop early; I shop often. I shop like this because I can.

“Hetzi kilo,” (half a kilogram), I say to the cherry vendor, whose head barely clears the glistening pyramid of reddish-purple fruit piled in front of him. He hands over the goods as the fish vendor perched on a nearby corner upturns a Styrofoam crate full of ice onto the sidewalk before her.

“Sababa?” I ask, using the local turn of phrase that perfectly describes what I love about this food in this country at this moment. Sababa, derived from the Arabic word tzababa, technically means “great” or “wonderful,” but has come to define a state of being, where everything is cool as can be. It’s an invitation to agree on a “yes” in a country where, as the old joke goes, two people generate three opinions. Sababa means, quite simply, “everything is awesome.”

When it comes to Israeli food, everything really, truly is sababa. People around the world have developed an insatiable appetite for these sunny, spicy flavors, and a desire to learn how to re-create them at home. It’s a moment that has blossomed into a movement with staying power, one anchored in an effortless blend of the new and the familiar and a desire to get to know a faraway land that—quite literally—brings so much to the table.

And for me it all begins here in the shuk. It may be quiet now, but within an hour it will be a place of happy action as people come to eat, drink, and shop. As the first Middle Eastern pop song blares, people start to trickle in: a line cook picking up the errant ingredient for his restaurant’s mise en place; a woman grabbing a single apple on her way to work; an early treat from the one vendor ready to hand-crank orange juice into a glass.

I guess you could say I came to Israel for love but stayed for the shuk. I met my now-husband, Jay, on a blind date, arranged by our mutual friend Jessica, while he was in New York for work. Within a few months, we were shuttling back and forth over the Atlantic, and a year later I was one-way ticketed for better, for worse, for life. Tasked with finding a larger apartment for the two of us to live in and knowing that moving to Tel Aviv would be an adjustment, Jay surveyed dozens of places before signing a new lease for us. I had no idea what to expect the first time I ascended the sixty-nine steps with my heavy bags, and when I opened the door to our fourth-floor apartment on an early December day, I cried.

It had giant Belgian windows, slate-gray marble kitchen countertops over huge double-width drawers, and a deep, wide balcony overlooking a ragtag assemblage of low-slung buildings cloaked in brilliant-pink bougainvillea, and it took in more natural sunlight in an hour than my tiny Upper West Side co-op saw in a month. The kicker was the location, steps from this market. We went to the shuk the next morning, and I never stopped going. The shuk became my constant companion, the organizing principle of my days, a comforting routine that has evolved into a way of life and a habit of cooking joyfully from this country’s bounty.

It’s not that Israel or its cuisine was new to me. In some ways, I had spent a lifetime preparing for this move, immersing myself in the insanely delicious and incredibly diverse culture of Israeli food. My American parents spent a year here while my father did graduate work in Jerusalem, and I missed being born here by two months. At the age of nine we took a month to explore the country. Within twenty-four hours I went from drinking Tropicana from a carton in suburban California to a place where juice was pressed from oranges and pomegranates that had been split open before me to reveal colors so vibrant they seemed artificially enhanced. I had my first shawarma, the meat crowned with lamb fat and spiked with garlic, its crisped exterior carved with a long serrated knife straight into a warm pita bread. The crunch of falafel became a Pavlovian temptation.

Over countless visits and extended stays—including a five-year stint in Jerusalem after college and frequent visits to Tel Aviv—I had become all the more smitten with the edible life here. Israel’s food scene had gone from notoriously sleepy, with an endless onslaught of hummus, tahini, and falafel (repeat), to something altogether different. An always-hungry population expanded their repertoire beyond these time-honored staples, though by no means leaving them behind. As the world opened up, Israelis did, too, with chefs and eaters venturing abroad to see what the world had to offer.

The thing is, Israel has always had the goods: olive oil extracted from fruit grown on politically contested but topographically blessed steppes. Cheeses formed from the milk of goats, cows, and sheep who graze on lands that have been tended by shepherds since biblical times. I started tasting dishes that reflected a harmony of local ingredients prepared with a wider-reaching embrace of global influences, the inevitable outcome of cooking for and by a population with so many distinct immigrant traditions.

Until the recent past, a chicken roasted with za’atar, the skin crisped up to perfection, might have been a stretch for an American home kitchen. Today, it’s just the kind of dish we instinctively want to eat. Shakshuka used to be little more than a tongue-twisting tangle of syllables (for the record, it’s shahk-SHOO-kah). Now, the combination of garlicky, rich tomato sauce, roasted peppers, and skillet-baked eggs—with almost as many variations as there are Israelis—has been adopted as a pitch-perfect, all-day, eminently customizable culinary darling.

And in a society where the market rules, the week’s freshest produce—be it lush ripe figs, perfumed persimmons, or juicy grapes—are found on restaurant menus, layered between slices of local fish crudo and adorned with little more than grassy local olive oil, flakes of sea salt, and thin rings of hot green chilies.

And so, in a new city with a world-class resource for all the raw materials steps from my house, I started mining the Israeli pantry for ingredients and spices, using homegrown and regional staples in ways that reflected my own tastes. My own style developed, one that included dishes that could be ready in twenty minutes, combined with others that took a little more effort or needed to be cooked for hours; some that honored my Ashkenazi (Eastern European) Jewish heritage and others learned from Arab and Jewish Israelis who reflected this country’s multicultural, multiethnic culinary melting pot.

Kitchen stalwarts like tahini, silan (date syrup), harissa and schug (hot sauces from North Africa and Yemen, respectively), and za’atar, the spice blend with an ancient pedigree and endless modern kitchen applications, became my go-to staples. As I settled in, I discovered surprising ways to use them at home, taking inspiration from the population of immigrants from more than one hundred lands who call Israel their home. I’ve had the privilege of cooking with some of these people at their homes and mine, and some of those recipes are here, too.

This book is a reflection of the things I like to make from the bounty I’ve found right outside my door. This is by no means a comprehensive guide to the foods of Israel, but rather a window into how I like to cook right now. Using the same flavor-packed staple ingredients that I do will give your cooking a lift, every day, hopefully opening up new doors to delicious. I hope you love these recipes as much as I do, and I hope, more than anything else, that it’s all sababa.