Certain building blocks of Gazan cuisine are repeated again and again throughout the book: a spiced broth key to nearly all the stews, a mix of spices used in most rice dishes, a chile paste used as ingredient and condiment. In this chapter, we provide these foundational recipes, as well as some pointers on technique.
Filfil Mat’hoon/Shatta • Ground Red Chile Pepper Paste
Daggit Toma u Lamoon • Hot Garlic and Lemon Dressing
Jibna Baladiyya • Fresh White Farmer’s Cheese
Kishik • Fermented Wheat and Yogurt
Chickpeas: Many recipes call for this staple legume. We give measurements for dried chickpeas, which should be pre-soaked overnight and then boiled until just tender before use. You may also use canned, precooked chickpeas: One 15-ounce can equals about half a cup of dried beans. If using canned chickpeas, strain and rinse several times before using.
Cucumbers: The cucumbers available in Gaza are the small, thin-skinned, and almost seedless Middle Eastern khiyar, sometimes sold in the United States as Lebanese, Persian, or “mini” cucumbers. Any burp-less variety will do.
Cumin: Perhaps more than any other spice, ground cumin characterizes Gazan cooking. Cumin should ideally be toasted and ground immediately before use, otherwise the flavor dulls.
Dill: Fresh dill greens and dill seeds are both widely used in Gaza’s cuisine. The seeds should be crushed in a mortar and pestle, using strong, circular strokes, in order to release their natural oils. “You’ll know when it’s enough,” Laila’s grandmother used to advise. “You can smell them!” Dill seeds can usually be found in Turkish or Polish markets; they are also readily available online.
Garlic: Rare is the Gazan dish that doesn’t include garlic—often lots of it! Use fresh garlic, never jarred, pre-minced, or dried.
Green Chile Peppers: Fundamental to nearly all Gazan recipes, the local variety of green chiles is hot! Jalapeño or serrano peppers make a decent substitute; use hot Italian green peppers if you prefer less bite. Avoid Thai or bird’s-eye peppers. Remove the seeds and membranes before using, and be aware of exactly how hot the pepper you’re using is; they vary a lot.
Mastic: Also called “Arabic gum,” mastic is the resin of a Mediterranean shrub. It is sold in small hard drops (or “pearls”) and is used throughout Greece and the Middle East to season and thicken sweets. In Gaza it is widely used to perfume soups, as well as in many sweets.
Nigella Seed: The tiny, slightly bitter black seed of the Nigella sativa flower, often called “black cumin.” It is used to flavor breads, cheeses, and pickles.
Red Chile Peppers: Used to make filfil mat’hoon, itself a basic ingredient. These chiles should also be hot, but not brutally so; mild red cayenne or serrano peppers would make a reasonable substitute. When preparing filfil mat’hoon, make sure you chop the peppers rather than using a food processor. Otherwise, the seeds produce a bitter taste.
Red Tahina: This brick-red Gazan variety of tahina is made by roasting sesame seeds in small batches over direct heat (for the more familiar “white” variety, the seeds are steamed). Add a little dark sesame oil to white tahina to achieve a similar effect, or make your own in a high-powered blender! Some health-food stores are now marketing a roasted-sesame tahina; this is very similar to the Gazan variety.
Squash: Several recipes call for koosa, small Middle Eastern squashes with pale skin, sometimes referred to as “grey squash” in Asian and Mexican markets. If this is not available, it is better to substitute yellow summer squash than dark-green zucchini.
Sour Plums: Extremely tart little dried plums, known as arasiya, are traditionally used to lend sourness to broths and stews. As these plums are now scarce, pomegranate molasses—available in Middle Eastern groceries—is a good substitute. We find that adding prunes and pomegranate molasses to recipes calling for dried plums is ideal: The prunes provide the sweetness, the pomegranate the sourness.
Makes 5–6 cups (approximately 1.5 liters) of broth
For preparing the chicken
¼ cup (30 grams) flour
1 tablespoon salt
1 lemon, juiced, and rind reserved
For the chicken broth
Chicken parts, such as back, neck, and wings, or whole chicken cut into parts, skin removed
3–4 tablespoons olive oil
1 medium onion, chopped
2 dried bay leaves
1 cinnamon stick
1 teaspoon whole allspice berries
1 teaspoon cardamom pods
1 teaspoon whole black peppercorns
2 whole cloves
1 sprig rosemary
1 very small piece cracked nutmeg
2 pebbles of mastic, crushed with a little salt
2 teaspoons salt (to taste)
Clean chicken carefully in a bath of cold water, flour, salt, and lemon juice, then massage with spent lemon rinds as described in “Common Sense” on page 26. Rinse, then set aside in a strainer on top of a bowl for 10 to 15 minutes, until you see that bloody juices have run out of the chicken.
If so advised in the recipe you are using, brown the chicken pieces in a little oil for a few minutes on high heat.
Add 2 cups (480 milliliters) of water and bring to a boil, continuously skimming off any scum that rises to the surface. Add another 4 cups (1 liter) of water—enough to fully submerge the meat—along with the rest of the ingredients.
Bring to a boil again, then lower heat and simmer, partially covered, for 45 minutes to 1 hour. Discard spices. Strain and cool, reserving only meat and broth.
For beef, lamb, or goat broth
Follow the instructions above, substituting the specified quantity of meat from the recipe you are following, and substituting 2 tablespoons of white vinegar for the lemon juice. Strain the meat, then pat it dry or set it in the fridge to air-dry for 30 minutes. If you are cooking a vegetable stew, brown the meat first. Allow for 2 to 3 hours of cooking time on a stovetop or approximately 1 hour in a pressure cooker, until the meat is fork-tender.
A good basic broth, rich with spices, is key to some of Gaza’s (and indeed the entire region’s) most elaborate festive dishes like fatta or maqlooba. It also makes a delicious base for humbler fare like mulukhiyya, fogaiyya, or shorabit freekah.
For soups, this broth is often made with the less meaty parts of a chicken: the back, neck, and wings or head. For special occasions the whole animal is used to make the broth. The meat, tender and perfumed with spices after boiling, is served separately or incorporated later into the final presentation of the dish.
For some recipes, such as the many vegetable stews we feature in this book or some of the rice dishes, like maqlooba, we recommend browning the meat or chicken in a little oil before adding water. For other recipes, you can skip this step and proceed immediately to boiling the meat.
While starting with a basic homemade broth is best, the amateur cook should not be discouraged or dissuaded from trying recipes without it: use a good store-bought broth or natural bouillon paste and simmer with an assortment of the whole spices suggested below. Or consider making a large batch of broth and freezing portions in glass jars or resealable bags.
Placing the whole spices in a disposable tea filter or a piece of gauze tied together with kitchen twine makes it easier to fish them out and dispose of them when the broth is done. If unavailable, simply add spices and spoon or strain them out after cooking.
Rarely will you come across a cuisine that gives more importance to cleanliness. Arab cooks in general are very fastidious about the freshness and purity of ingredients—so much so that even in medieval times, the hallmark of a good cook was the gleaming cleanliness of his pots and pans. One of the secrets to the bright, vivid tastes of Gazan cuisine may be the scrupulousness with which meat and vegetables are washed, scrubbed, and purged of any grimy or gamey tastes. This is an accomplishment anywhere, but more so in the sweltering heat of a place where the electricity is cut more than eight hours a day and the coldness of refrigerators and freezers must be carefully preserved.
The result of this careful attention is a unique precision of flavor. Each thing tastes richly of what it is, with no smudgy indistinction. Broths are clear and golden; seafood is robust without low-tide murkiness. Zanakha, or gaminess, is considered the sign of a careless cook.
Every cuisine has its own “common sense”: basic techniques that are automatic to the experienced cook and that in many ways define the taste of the food. This elemental vocabulary is largely learned by observation over time. For those who haven’t imbibed these lessons at their mother’s knee, here are some axioms of Palestinian cooking.
Makes about 12 ounces (340 grams)
1 pound (approximately 500 grams) red hot chile peppers, stems removed
2½ tablespoons salt
¼ cup (60 milliliters) olive oil
First, prepare your storage containers or Mason jars. Sterilize the jars by boiling them in water for 3 minutes, then carefully remove them using tongs and allow to air dry completely before proceeding. Make sure there is no moisture inside or the pepper paste will spoil.
Next, hand-chop the peppers to a medium-coarse grind, or pulse them gently in a food processor until they are ground but not yet a paste. The seeds should remain whole and visible. Otherwise, the resulting paste will be bitter. Add salt. Mix well, then place the mixture in a strainer for 10 to 15 minutes, until an adequate amount of moisture has been drained and no more liquid is emerging. The less moisture, the longer you can preserve the pepper paste.
Pour the strained mixture into containers and cover with a generous layer of olive oil to prevent spoilage. Refrigerate. The paste may be used immediately.
Unlike most chile paste recipes, this one calls for fresh, not dried, chiles. Called shatta in some families, it is ubiquitous throughout Gaza: as an ingredient in recipes, as a condiment to accompany meats, or mixed with feta cheese or labna and eaten with flatbread for a Gaza-style breakfast. Anaheim, Aleppo, or Korean red peppers work well here.
Makes about ½ cup (118 milliliters)
6 cloves garlic
½ teaspoon salt
3 or 4 hot green chiles, finely chopped (adjust to taste)
Juice of 3 lemons
Using a mortar and pestle, crush the garlic cloves and salt to a rough paste. Add the chiles to the crushed garlic and pound slightly. Stir in the lemon juice and mix well, scraping in any bits of garlic from the bottom of the mortar. Increase the quantity as necessary.
This simple hot-and-sour dressing is served with innumerable dishes, from hearty stewed fava beans to eggplant salads.
“They make something like this in the rest of Palestine,” many of the cooks we interviewed would say as they showed us how to prepare a favorite dish, “but we add hot chile peppers and dill.”
Hot chiles and dill: the Gazan combination par excellence. How Gazans developed this love affair with the chile pepper is a culinary mystery for the ages. Whereas Lebanese cooks tolerate no spicy heat at all and cooks from other parts of Palestine and the greater region use spice in moderation, Gazan cooks (specifically those from Gaza City itself, as opposed to rural areas) make you sweat, whether using a local variety of fresh hot green chile peppers—generally crushed in a mortar with lemon and salt—or else ground red chile peppers conserved in oil and sold as a condiment and ingredient called filfil mat’hoon.
Ubiquitous dishes such as tabeekh bamia, okra stew with lamb, and mulukhiyya, green mallow soup, are served with a blaze of hot green chile and dill seed in lemon juice, cutting the dark, rich tastes with their brightness. Green chiles are ground with meat to make kufta and mashed in clay mortars to make dagga, Gaza’s distinctive hot tomato salad.
The same peppers, ripened to fiery redness, are sun-dried for winter use in dishes such as maftool, a Gazan variety of couscous, perfuming the grains as they steam. In the summer, fields of bright red peppers—ripe for pickling and grinding—blanket what little remains of Gaza’s seaside farmlands.
In fact, chile peppers play a nutritionally important role in Gaza. They grow fast and require little irrigation, making them a viable local product and very inexpensive in the market. For many of the poorest Gazans, nutritionally rich red chile provides some of the vitamins, iron, and potassium to which they do not otherwise have access, given the inflated prices of irrigated fruits and vegetables. Indeed, lunch for many schoolchildren in Gaza is a filfil mat’hoon sandwich.
Makes 2 servings
6 cloves garlic
½ teaspoon salt
1 green hot chile pepper, coarsely chopped
1 red hot chile pepper, coarsely chopped
2 tablespoons fresh dill
1½ teaspoons ground coriander
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
In a mortar and pestle, combine the garlic and salt and mash well. If you do not have a mortar and pestle, use the pulse function on a food processor. Add the chile peppers and pound (or pulse) them until well crushed. Stir in the dill, coriander, and olive oil and mix.
Dagga refers to Gaza’s famous hot tomato salad (see page 50), but it is also the general term for all manner of “pounded” dressings or sauces: “pounded” is the literal translation of the word. This one serves as a dressing or stuffing for fish of all kinds.
Makes approximately 1¼ cup (300 milliliters) of sauce
2 to 4 cloves garlic
½ teaspoon salt
½ cup (120 milliliters) tahina paste (available in specialty grocers, health-food stores, or online)
½ cup (120 milliliters) freshly squeezed lemon juice
¼ cup (60 milliliters) cold water (more as needed)
Using a mortar and pestle, thoroughly crush the garlic and salt to a paste. Stir in the tahina and lemon juice and whisk well until smooth. The mixture will become quite thick as it emulsifies. Bit by bit, add water and continue stirring until you have a smooth sauce of medium-thick consistency, similar to a chocolate sauce. Adjust the salt and lemon to taste.
Whether used to smother fish kufta, to accompany falafel, or as a dressing for roasted cauliflower, this basic tahina sauce always strikes a marvelous balance between the mellowness of sesame paste and the bright tang of lemon. In the absence of a mortar and pestle, a high-powered blender works wonders to emulsify the sauce. It’s a good idea to mash the garlic first, though.
A zibdiya is the most rudimentary and most precious kitchen item in every household in Gaza, rich or poor, urban or rural, as well as in Gazan Palestinian households in the diaspora. It is simply a handmade heavy unglazed clay bowl made with Gaza’s rough, sandy clay, accompanied by a lemonwood pestle. Though similar implements exist elsewhere in the region, the zibdiya’s absolute omnipresence in the preparation and presentation of all manner of foods in Gaza makes it a key to the whole cuisine.
As you will see, there are few recipes in this book that don’t begin “In a mortar and pestle, crush….” Crushing, pounding, grinding: the base of flavor for nearly every dish, and often the first thing a curious child will be asked to help out with. The many spices used in Gazan cooking are ideally ground in a zibdiya. Its rough walls are perfect for crushing garlic to a creamy pulp or for grinding dill seeds just until fragrant. It serves for mashing and mixing salad ingredients, then doubles as a handsome bowl to serve the salad.
But that is not all! It is also a vessel for cooking. The much-beloved zibdiyit gambari (see page 294) is a shrimp stew covered in pine nuts and baked in a larger zibdiya, known as a kashkoola, until crusty on the outside and meltingly delicious inside.
Local potters pile these simple bowls—as well as larger clay pots for qidra, Gaza’s richly spiced meat and rice dish with garlic and chickpeas, and braziers for hot coals—in great mountains outside their kilns in the market area of Gaza. They cost about 50 cents each.
The modest price of the zibdiya makes it no less special. Several of the cooks we interviewed—from former government ministers to rural housewives—commented on their zibdiyaat with pride: several had seen twenty years of daily use and were regarded almost as family members.
For cooks who don’t have a zibdiya from Gaza (they can be very difficult to obtain due to the ban on exports and near hermetic closure of the territory), any rough mortar and pestle with a wide base will serve. Mexican molcajete, South American batans, or Thai kruk mortars all work well. Avoid glazed or marble ones; they’re too slippery for grinding.
Makes approximately 2 cups (250 grams)
½ tablespoon nutmeg
1 tablespoon ground red pepper
1 tablespoon cinnamon
2 tablespoons ground cardamom
2 tablespoons ground cloves
2 tablespoons dried lime powder (also known as loomi; the whole limes are readily available in Middle Eastern groceries)
½ cup (50 grams) ground allspice
½ cup (50 grams) ground black pepper
½ cup (50 grams) garlic powder
1 cup (100 grams) turmeric (if preparing for use in qidra)
This is a standard spice mix named for the rice dish in which it is most notably used. Individual cooks vary both the ingredients and their proportions, but the taste is always distinctive. With the turmeric omitted, this mix is used in a variety of other rice dishes, such as sayadiyya, maqlooba, and mjadarra and is known simply as ibharat ruz or rice spices. With turmeric, it is used exclusively for qidra.
Use the freshest spices available, grinding them yourself if possible. Store in an airtight container.
On SpicesPepper, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves…the spices that for centuries moved the world’s economy in their storied transit from Southeast Asia to Europe all passed through Gaza. Its location, right at the narrow point between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean, put it on the key routes linking the trade coming by sea from Asia and by caravan across Arabia to the Via Maris and the network of Mediterranean ports. Its position at the crossroads between the region’s major empires made it a nexus of trade from the Bronze Age on, as it weathered the rule of Egyptians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, and Ottomans.
The tastes and customs of successive generations of rulers and traders were incorporated into local ways, making contemporary Gazan cuisine a tangle of many traces. While the humbler food of peasants and villagers has always relied upon what grows on the land, the richer and more luxurious dishes of wealthy urbanites make extravagant use of the exotic spices that once flowed through Gazan markets. Spiced rice dishes like qidra and maqlooba are inherited from the Abbasid Empire’s courtly tastes, while spiced stuffed vegetables seem to have been popularized by Ottoman rulers.
If the standard Gazan spice combinations form part of a continuum with other parts of the region, Gazans’ passion for dill and for hot peppers—introduced to the continent from the Americas via the Portuguese empire in the sixteenth century—is absolutely unique.
Makes approximately 3⅓ pounds (1½ kilograms)
5 cups (approximately 1 kilogram) wheat berries or whole wheat flour
1¼ cups (approximately 225 grams) brown lentils
½ cup (approximately 70 grams) cumin seeds
½ cup (approximately 50 grams) whole sumac berries (ground sumac may be substituted if milling at home)
¼ cup (25 grams) coriander seeds
¼ cup (25 grams) caraway seeds
½ cup (50 grams) dill seeds
5 dried red chile peppers (to taste)
¼ cup (75 grams) salt
1 teaspoon citric acid or sour salt
Toasted sesame seeds
Toast the wheat berries, lentils, and spices individually on medium heat in a large skillet, stirring constantly until golden and fragrant, taking care not to let them burn. If using the flour, toast this separately. Mix and grind in small batches using a spice grinder or high-powered blender. Stir in the salt and citric acid, mixing well. Store in sealed containers. Before using, add 1 tablespoon of toasted sesame seeds per cup of dugga.
Makes approximately 4½ pounds (2 kilograms)
6 cups (approximately 1¼ kilograms) wheat berries (substitute wholewheat flour if making at home)
1¼ cup (250 grams) dried chickpeas (substitute gram/chickpea flour if making at home) 5 dried red chile peppers
½ cup (50 grams) dill seeds
½ cup (100 grams) red lentils
½ cup (50 grams) cumin seeds
¼ cup (25 grams) coriander seeds
¼ cup (25 grams) whole sumac (ground sumac may be substituted)
1 tablespoon whole cloves 1 small bunch high-quality sun-dried basil
½ cup (40 grams) dried zaatar or oregano leaves
1 whole nutmeg
1 teaspoon citric acid or sour salt
½ cup (100 grams) salt
Toasted sesame seeds
Toast the wheat berries and chickpeas (or flours) in a pan in the oven, or in a large skillet over medium heat, until fragrant and golden. Set aside. Then toast the peppers, dill seeds, cumin seeds, coriander seeds, sumac, cloves, and zaatar one by one on low heat, being careful not to burn them. Combine all of the ingredients and add the basil, nutmeg, and salts.
Grind this mixture to a fine powder in a high-powered spice grinder or blender. Seal in airtight containers, adding 1 teaspoon of toasted sesame seeds to each cup of dugga just before consuming (sesame seeds spoil quickly and should not be added before use).
Dugga, not to be confused with the spicy tomato salad dagga, is an intensely nutritive blend of roasted and ground grains, legumes, and spices. It is eaten with olive oil and bread, baked on manaeesh, sprinkled on sliced oranges, or, in some modern kitchens, used as a seasoning for chicken or meat.
While each cook has her own variation of dugga, what is unique about the Gazan blends is their dazzling array of ingredients, including more pulses, herbs, and spices than in recipes from Egypt, where dugga is also consumed. Here are two varieties, one more urban and the other more Bedouin in style.
Gazan families generally roast up enough ingredients to fill a sack, which they then take to the community mill. There it is ground into a fragrant powder that can be stored in airtight containers for some months. If you don’t happen to have a community mill, grind the mix yourself in a spice grinder: substitute the wheat berries in this case for whole-wheat flour, toasted carefully in a skillet on a stovetop until golden. You can also substitute lentil flour for the lentils, or else bake them in a 400°F (200°C) oven for 10 minutes, then transfer them to a food processor and pulse till powdery. You can also try asking a natural-foods store to mill it for you.
Take care to stop the food-processor blade as soon as you have a uniform, loose powder. If it starts to become a paste, you’ve gone too far.
Um Hana grows and sun-dries her own basil in her rooftop garden. You can substitute high-quality dried basil instead.
Some households have a lightness and a joy to them that you feel the moment you walk in. Maybe it is the brightly colored posters on the wall or the tidily raked courtyard blooming with herbs. Maybe it is the eager faces of the six little girls who come out to greet you, shiny black braids hanging down their backs as they run up the stairs ahead of you. For whatever reason, Um Hana’s household in the northern town of Beit Lahiya is a tangibly happy place, and this probably has a lot to do with Um Hana herself.
We have come to her house to see how she prepares dugga, a powdery mix of toasted wheat, legumes, and spices that many Gazan families prepare in bulk. The little girls crowd around, giggling and sneaking tastes of the toasted wheat. Some are Um Hana’s daughters; some are the daughters of her husband’s second wife. He married a second time, she tells us, winking, in hopes of having a son. More girls ensued. All seem to live together in unusual harmony.
Up on the building’s roof, Um Hana shows us the planters she made from halves of oil-drums, now vivid with flowering basil plants, as well as the hutches in which she raises rabbits and the dovecote where the second wife raises pigeons. Both the rabbits and pigeons serve to supplement the family’s diet; occasionally they sell a rabbit for extra cash.
From the rooftop one can see across devastated fields and heaps of rubble all the way to the border with Israel and the smokestacks of the Ashkelon power plant. Beit Lahiya was badly hit during the attack in 2008 and 2009; Um Hana grimaces recalling how white phosphorus rained down over the neighborhood, how the whole family hid in the storeroom throughout the twenty-two days of madness. Thank God, she says, all of us are all right and our house was not destroyed. Others were not so lucky.
But the girls continue to cavort on the rooftop, and the rabbits need to be fed, and somehow the sheer vitality of the household pushes onward.
Makes approximately 11 ounces (300 grams) of cheese
2 cups (approximately 260 grams) powdered milk
6 cups (approximately 1½ liters) of water, boiled then left to cool until warm
½ tablet of cheese-grade rennet (available in natural food stores)
5 tablespoons salt (for brine—add more if needed)
1 tablespoon dill seeds
1 teaspoon dried red pepper or 1 fresh green chile pepper, deseeded and chopped
Combine the water with the milk powder in a blender; make sure the water is not too hot or else the cheese will coagulate too quickly. Dissolve the rennet tablet in a little water and add, mixing well. Pour this into a large tray until about 2 inches deep and cover, or ball up in a cheesecloth and set aside in a strainer. After 1½ hours, the mixture should have partially solidified. Cut it into even squares or pieces.
If the cheese is in a tray, gently pour out the excess liquid, then flip or gently transfer the pieces onto a cheesecloth. Cover it with another cheesecloth or kitchen towel to absorb excess moisture. Put a heavy tray on top of the cheesecloth and leave it for 30 minutes.
Meanwhile, prepare the brine: Bring 5 or more cups of water to a rolling boil. Remove it from the heat, and stir in a tablespoon of salt for each cup of boiling water. Let the salt dissolve well and allow the solution to cool completely. Stir in the dill seed and dried red pepper flakes or fresh green chile peppers. Gently transfer the cheese to the cooled brine. Store for at least a week before consuming.
One of the ration items that has been distributed by donor organizations for decades now is powdered milk. While only young children drink milk in Palestinian society (as in many Middle Eastern societies, yogurt is the go-to dairy product), everyone recognizes the nutritional importance of dairy and finds ways to use powdered milk to make more familiar products. Among them is this fresh cheese made by local farmers and sold at public markets as jibna baladiyya (country cheese). It is often eaten for breakfast with bread and olives, and is particularly well suited as a topping for manaeesh and as a stuffing for savory cheese pastries.
In the highlands of Beit Lahiya, we stop at a tiny family-run dairy farm to inquire about the dairy industry. Nafi Attar, who runs the farm with his father, receives us.
He explains that their family has farmed for generations. In the past, they had a large piece of land where they raised sheep and cows, but that land became part of the Israeli-imposed buffer zone, inaccessible to many. They now keep a small herd of Dutch dairy cows in a stable in a largely residential area. Nafi explains that his father learned this kind of dairy farming while working at a large industrial dairy in Israel. Before that, his grandfather had farmed the old way, raising a hardier local breed and grazing them freely.
Raising the productive Dutch cows in a barn was very profitable, says Nafi, as long as feed was inexpensive. But prices on imported feed have risen, from 7 shekels before Operation Cast Lead to 25 after, forcing the prices of both locally raised milk and meat to go up accordingly.
Moreover, with the current electricity outages, people are buying less fresh milk because it will not keep without reliable refrigeration. Instead they’re depending more upon powdered milk rations or Israeli dairy, which is often allowed in when Palestinian dairy is not. When electricity was not such an issue, says Nafi, his neighbors would buy six or seven liters a week; now they buy one half-liter.
For the moment there is still a local market for milk used to make butter and cheese, and one frequently sees dairy farmers such as Nafi selling their products in the city of the back of a donkey cart, although as the border selectively opens to manufactured products, this too may disappear when the market is confronted with cheaper imports.
Makes approximately 2 quarts (1¾ liters)
2 pounds (approximately 1 kilogram) spring wheat berries, soaked in water for an hour
4 cups (approximately 1 kilogram) whole-milk yogurt or buttermilk, left at room temperature overnight, more as needed
5 tablespoons salt
3 tablespoons dill seeds (optional)
4 tablespoons red-pepper flakes (optional)
Wheat bran, for coating
Pick through the wheat berries, rinse, and strain well. Crush the wheat berries coarsely using a heavy mortar and pestle, or pulse several times in a food processor; the idea here is to release some of the natural starch. Don’t be alarmed if the wheat berries do not actually crack.
Mix the wheat with yogurt or buttermilk. Adjust the quantity of yogurt or buttermilk to achieve a dough-like consistency.
Cover with plastic wrap pierced with holes. Set aside to ferment for three days, preferably outdoors or by a window that has been slightly cracked open. In a pinch you can also just let the mixture sit in a bowl on a countertop.
Knead the mixture daily. Once it has fermented, add the salt, dill seeds, and red pepper flakes. Divide it into palm-sized patties, then dust these with wheat bran or flour and leave them to dry on a clean cheesecloth in direct sunlight or indoors in a sunny location. If you decide to make the liquid form of kishik, as described in the introductory paragraph, then add 2 cups more buttermilk.
Tip: An aunt from Laila’s extended family in California informed us that instant dry yeast can also be used to speed the fermentation process. Simply soak the crushed wheat berries in a bowl full of water. Sprinkle with a generous pinch of yeast (but don’t mix it in). Set this aside for several hours, then strain the wheat, discard the water, and mix in the yogurt or buttermilk as above. Cover with perforated plastic wrap and set aside for seven days, then freeze or use immediately.
Before refrigeration was available, throughout the Middle East and Central Asia, kishik was a means of conserving milk for later use: a fermented paste of yogurt and grains, formed into disks and dried in the sun. The disks could be stored all year and then crumbled or ground for use in salads, stews, and savory pastries.
In Gaza, kishik is traditionally made with sheep’s-milk yogurt and flavored with dill seeds and red pepper flakes.
Instead of sun-drying, some families now make a liquid version of kishik that may be frozen and then defrosted for immediate use. To do this, add 2 cups more buttermilk and set aside in a bowl covered with a perforated plastic wrap to ferment for 7 days, then freeze in resealable bags or jars. This is the method we kitchen-tested, with excellent results.
Palestine forms part of a broad cultural continuum that stretches across the lands once known as Bilad il-Sham, the Levant. Its cuisine, therefore, has much in common with other cuisines from this region, between what is now Turkey and the edge of the Nile. Birthplace of the olive tree, Palestine has a rich indigenous food heritage. Moreover, the many civilizations that have contended for this storied corner of the world have all left their mark on its cuisine: the perfumed rice of the Persians, the date preparations of the Arabs, the yogurt dishes of the Turks.
Palestinian cuisine can be divided into urban, rural, and nomadic variants, with distinctions between the northern, southern, and coastal regions. Northern Palestinian cuisine relies heavily on yogurt-based sauces and tart flavors and shares much with Lebanese and Syrian food, whereas the south tends to use tomatoes as a base for stews and meats. The coastal areas of Palestine, from Haifa down to Gaza—more urban and sophisticated—were known for their seafood and use of exotic spices, while the farming interior relied principally on seasonal agricultural products, wild greens, lamb, sheep’s milk, and grains such as barley and freekah.
Gaza’s cuisine once fit more tidily into this geographically defined continuum, but the massive influx of refugees in 1948 from neighboring areas changed its culinary habits. Now in Gaza one finds a little of the coast and the greater Mediterranean, a little of the farming regions, a little Egyptian influence, and a little influence from migration to the Gulf, all mixed up with the native Gazan love for dill, hot pepper, fresh herbs and earthy spices. In the end, the commonalities with broader Palestinian cuisine remain strong: stews and stuffed vegetables for family meals, rice and meat for festivities, elaborate sweets for special occasions, and of course, that quintessential combination of zaatar and olive oil at any time of the day or night.
