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. Which land's stew, and which stew, grew into today's pan of tomato and chili with eggs cracked into it is a question on which accounts differ. The egg-topped version made pareve, with neither dairy nor meat so as to keep within Jewish dietary law, is associated with the kitchens of North African Jews, Tunisian Jews in particular, and with the wave of migration in the 1950s it spread to Israel.

Two accounts of shakshuka's origin stand side by side. One holds that the Turkish şakşuka reached the Maghreb under the influence of the Ottoman Empire and grew there into shakshuka. Gil Marks, who compiled the Encyclopedia of Jewish Food, suggested this line, while also noting some similarities with the Ottoman dish menemen. The other sees shakshuka as a vegetable stew rooted in the Maghreb, in Tunisia and Libya, and places it in the same family of western Mediterranean vegetable stews as piperade, ratatouille and menemen. This view is attributed to Anthony Buccini's study of western Mediterranean vegetable stews (2005, awarded the Sophie Coe Prize).

Neither account has prevailed. The Turkish şakşuka is a stew of vegetables or meat without egg, and does not line up as it stands with today's shakshuka, where the egg is cracked into the pan. That difference sits awkwardly with the idea of a dish handed down straight from Turkey. Even so, no record has turned up that would set aside the view that it travelled to the Maghreb under Ottoman influence and changed shape there.

The name is easier to follow than the dish. The word shakshuka goes back to the Algerian Arabic onomatopoeia shakshaka, to bubble up or to mix together, and in the late 19th century it was borrowed into French as chakchouka and from there into English. Where the name came from and where the contents of the pan came from are, however, separate questions. The accounts of where the dish began remain two: one line of Maghrebi origin spread by Jewish migrants, and another descending from Ottoman tomato stews.

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.