The recipes

Our selection of recipes here includes traditional, age-old dishes, cooked just as they should be, with no change or modern touch. Others are fairly traditional, but we allowed ourselves poetic licence and updated them to suit the times or our sensibilities. And then there are recipes that are just loosely inspired by the flavours of Jerusalem — delicious concoctions that could have easily fitted on many Jerusalem dinner tables but have yet to become local classics.

We don’t mean to cover all of the city’s foods, or even substantial parts of it, nor all of its communities. This is impossible. Smarter people have delved deep into Jewish and Arab cuisines and have documented both extensively. Other communities in the city have also had their foods written about. So a lot is omitted. Some typical local dishes like kugel (slow-cooked noodle cake), bagel (Arab or Jewish), pashtida (savoury flan), pastelikos (little Sephardi meat pies), tchulent or hamin (everything cooked in one pot overnight for Shabbat), strudel, challah (sweet Shabbat bread) — all are left neglected. Ashkenazi foods particularly are under-represented. This has to do with our personal backgrounds and the types of flavours we tend to cook and eat.