Shakshuka Period AOrigin theory CVerified

Tomato-and-egg shakshuka became a fixture on tables across the Middle East and North Africa over the course of the 19th century. When the name and the recipe first appear in writing is not known, though the dish seems to have settled into everyday cooking in the second half of the century.

The tomato at its centre came from the New World. It turns up early in the region's records: from 1694 in the palace provisioning accounts of Istanbul, and in 1798 in the catalogue of Egyptian plants drawn up by the scholars who travelled with Napoleon, entered under both its Latin and its Arabic name. A palace account book and a botanist's list, though, are not the same thing as a vegetable to be had in any kitchen on any day. Tomatoes became a matter of course in everyday stewing only in the 19th century. The first printed Ottoman cookbook, of 1844, uses tomato without ceremony for the sauce of stews, for dolma and for pilaf, and its Arabic translation was published in Cairo in 1878, by which time tomato cookery was circulating among kitchens that read and wrote in Arabic. A pan of tomatoes stewed down with eggs cracked into them could only become an everyday dish from that period onward.

Eggs and onions had long been at home in the region's kitchens, and chili had reached the Maghreb during the 16th century. Shakshuka did not appear out of nothing. It belongs to a family of western Mediterranean vegetable stews rooted in the Maghreb, in Tunisia and Libya, and it was into that stew that New World tomato and chili went, and the egg with them, 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 şakşuka, 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 şakşuka 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 française (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 no contemporary record has been put forward to support it. It cannot yet be treated as a first attestation.