Sabich

fried aubergine, long-boiled egg, tahini and amba packed into a pita: the Iraqi-Jewish sabbath breakfast turned street food

Origin: Ramat Gan & Israel

From the journey of Eggplant / Aubergine.

Sabich is an Iraqi-Jewish dish that became an Israeli one, and it is unusually well documented as such. Its components are the traditional Shabbat breakfast of the Jewish community of Baghdad: fried aubergine, hard-boiled eggs cooked overnight, and salad, all prepared before sundown on Friday because no cooking could be done on the sabbath itself. The eggs, left in a low oven or in the embers for hours, come out beige, dense, and faintly sweet, and are called beitzah ḥamin. Iraqi Jews arrived in Israel in very large numbers between 1950 and 1952, and the plate was put into a pita in Ramat Gan sometime in the 1960s. The usual attribution is to Sabich Tzvi's stall, and the name is variously explained as a shortening of the vendor's own name or as an acronym of the Hebrew for aubergine, egg, and salad. The acronym story is neat enough to be suspicious and is very likely a back-formation. Amba is what makes it. A tangy mango pickle, fenugreek-heavy and startlingly yellow, it came to Baghdad from India through the same Gulf trade that brought tamarind, and no substitute reproduces it. Without amba a sabich is a decent aubergine sandwich; with it, it is the thing itself. The aubergine must be fried, not roasted or grilled. It is salted, drained, and fried in enough oil to go silky and collapse, and that richness is what the tahini and the amba are cutting against.

Ingredients

Ingredients

  • 2 large aubergines, sliced into 1cm rounds
  • 300 ml oil, for frying
  • 4 eggs
  • 4 pita breads
  • 4 tbsp amba (mango pickle sauce)
  • 2 tsp salt

Tahini sauce

  • 6 tbsp tahini
  • 1 lemon, juiced
  • 1 garlic clove, crushed
  • 100 ml iced water, approximately

Salad

  • 2 tomatoes, finely diced
  • 1 cucumber, finely diced
  • 1 small bunch parsley, chopped

To serve

  • 2 tbsp zhug or chilli sauce

Method

  1. Salt the aubergine slices generously and lay them in a colander for thirty minutes. Rinse and press dry between cloths. This draws out water so they fry rather than steam.
  2. For the traditional eggs, simmer them very gently for two hours, or bake them in their shells at 120°C for three, until the whites turn beige and the yolks go dense. For a quicker version, hard-boil for nine minutes.
  3. Whisk the tahini with the lemon juice and garlic. It will seize into a stiff paste; keep whisking and add the iced water a little at a time until it loosens into a smooth pourable sauce. Season with salt.
  4. Mix the tomato, cucumber, and parsley with a pinch of salt.
  5. Heat the frying oil to 180°C and fry the aubergine in batches for three to four minutes a side, until deep gold and completely soft. Drain on paper.
  6. Warm the pitas and split them open at the top, keeping the pocket intact.
  7. Build in this order: a smear of tahini inside, then aubergine, then sliced egg, then salad, then amba, then more tahini and the zhug. The order matters, as tahini first stops the bread going through.
  8. Eat immediately and over a plate.

Notes

Amba has no substitute and is sold in Middle Eastern shops and online; mango chutney is not the same thing and is sweet where amba is sour and fenugreek-bitter. Salting the aubergine is worth the half hour. The long-cooked egg is the authentic touch and genuinely different in texture, but a nine-minute egg makes a perfectly good sandwich. Do not grill the aubergine, since the dish depends on the richness that frying gives.

The Gastrographer

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