Shakshuka Period AOrigin theory CVerified

The tomato-and-egg shakshuka we know today came to the tables of the Middle East and North Africa in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, roughly between 1850 and 1920.

The key to it was the tomato. The tomato is a vegetable brought from the New World, and even after it crossed into the Mediterranean it long remained an ornamental; only in the 19th century did people begin cooking it down for everyday dishes. Once the tomato had spread as a cooking ingredient across the region, a shakshuka of stewed tomatoes with eggs cracked into them could take shape in the kitchen. Egg, tomato, and chili alike were foods that folded into an existing local stew after the Columbian Exchange.

Shakshuka did not appear out of nothing. It belongs to a family of western Mediterranean vegetable stews, alongside the Basque piperade, the Provencal ratatouille, and the Turkish menemen, and it had long been rooted in the Maghreb, in Tunisia and Libya. Into that stew went New World tomato and chili, and the egg, to make the dish as it now stands. It was North African Jews, and Tunisian Jews in particular, who cracked in the egg and made it pareve, in keeping with Jewish dietary law, and with the wave of migration in the 1950s the dish spread to Israel.

Shakshuka's origin comes with a plausible-sounding story of transmission: that it is a direct descendant of the Turkish saksuka, which developed in the Maghreb after arriving there under Ottoman influence. Gil Marks's Encyclopedia of Jewish Food advanced this line.

But the account gives way at several points. To begin with, the Turkish saksuka is a vegetable-and-meat stew without egg, and the egg is essential to shakshuka as it exists now, so the two are different dishes. Anthony Buccini's Western Mediterranean Vegetable Stews and the Integration of Culinary Exotica (2005, awarded the Sophie Coe Prize) placed shakshuka not at the end of a single line of transmission from Turkey but within a family of western Mediterranean vegetable stews sharing a common ancestor. On this view it is a native Maghrebi stew, of a piece with piperade, ratatouille, and menemen.

The name itself speaks to a native origin as well. The word shakshuka comes from the Algerian Arabic onomatopoeia shakshaka, to bubble up or to mix together. In the late 19th century this word was borrowed from Algerian Arabic into the French chakchouka, and from there into English, the path traced by the Oxford English Dictionary and by Alain Rey's Dictionnaire historique de la langue francaise (2011). It is a word that crossed from Maghrebi Arabic to the northern shore of the Mediterranean, not a borrowing from Turkish. The dish and its very name both come out of the Maghreb.

Even so, the origin has not settled to a single point. The accounts of where it began remain twofold: one line of Maghrebi origin spread by Jewish migrants, and another of Ottoman tomato stews. The story of direct Turkish descent has receded, but just how the native Maghrebi stew branched to its various homes remains open. That one myth can fall and still the origin cannot be narrowed to a single thread is where the history of shakshuka now stands.

A note in passing: a date of a first appearance in French Tunisia in 1894 circulates online, but tracing it leads only to second-hand blogs and never reaches a contemporary source. It cannot be treated as a firm first attestation.