Israeli Kitchen

It’s a shuk where shoppers must enter through a security gate. The only other shuk I’ve seen with this is Shuk HaCarmel in Tel Aviv.

Shuk Rosh Ha-Ayin is located, of course, in Rosh Ha-Ayin. It’s a town with a large Yemenite population, located in the center of the country and only a short drive from where I live. The open-air market is open on Fridays, and people come from all around the area. I visited there with Baroness Tapuzina one hot Friday not long ago.

Once inside, we saw it’s not a shuk for produce. More for cheap clothes and household goods.

The tentlike structures don’t reveal how big it really is inside. Here are a few glimpses.

I was interested to see the mixture of people buying, side by side. The vendors seemed to be mostly local Yemenites.

A limited selection of kippot, and a cute kid with long, curly peoht (sidelocks), Yemenite style.

Can you do the can-can?

There is always a selection of fantastic shoes in the shuk. Hard to resist these.

And the usual selection Chamsah amulets for blessing and protection against the Evil Eye.

Pay no attention to the woman behind the curtain. She’s simply trying on a blouse.

There was a small section devoted to food.  This being the Middle East, there had to be many varieties of olives, each with its unique seasoning.

We chatted with this lady, who bakes all kinds of delicious Yemenite breads with her own hands, and sells them there.

There was kubanah, a round, rather sweet loaf. It’s meant to be saturated with clarified butter and left overnight on the hot plate. Most traditional Yemenite breads are loaded with oil, marg, or butter. This is a remnant of their rural past in Yemen, when everyone lived in primitive conditions and labored hard. A generation after the great Yemenite aliyah (immigration to Israel), the incidence of heart attacks in the Yemenite community rose sharply.

I think the biggest killer is probably Jachnun, a heavily fat bread meant to be placed inside the cholent to cook and swell up overnight. It has the typical almost-sweet taste favored by Yemenites in bread.

Below from left to right: flat saluf and round kubanah. Above the kubanah, lupine seeds boiled with turmeric, and above those, red and green schug.

Saluf is like a big pita, and lachuch is a flat, floppy, spongy, and delicious bread. No fat in lachuch, luckily.

The handwritten cardboard sign advertises  kubanah – lachuch – Lupine seeds – hilbeh (fenugreek relish) – red schug (fiery hot sauce) – green schug -

And samneh (ghee flavored with fenugreek).

I bought some samneh, curious to taste this flavored, clarified butter. I found the taste of fenugreek put me off. Yemenites hold very strongly by fenugreek, attributing to it the power of increasing virility in men, and fertility in women. I guess the Ashkenazi in me rebelled. I like Hawaij spice for chicken soup, enjoy the fire in Yemenite cooking…but fenugreek, I can do without.

I liked the sign above the bread stand, though.

This Malabi vendor let me take a photo before I gulped the thick, smooth white pudding down.

It was getting late. We needed to return home and cook our Shabbat meals.

On our way out, we saw a Chabad hassid perched on top of a car, expounding on the week’s Torah portion in the hot sun. He was admirably learned and earnest.

What I loved, apart from him himself, was that when he paused to shlook down some water, everyone – men with kippot or without, women in modest long skirts or in shorts – everyone shouted “Amen!” to the blessing he said over his drink.

We ate lachuch instead of challah for our Shabbat night meal.