Sabich in Jerusalem: the fried-aubergine and egg pita

Overview

Sabich is not a Jerusalem dish so much as a dish Jerusalem eats. It is a street-food staple found across the country, and its street-food fame belongs less to this city than to Ramat Gan, near Tel Aviv, where it was popularised at counters in the mid-twentieth century. Its deeper roots are older and elsewhere still: it comes from the Iraqi Jews who brought it to Israel, and it is a portable version of their traditional Saturday morning breakfast — fried aubergine and eggs slow-cooked overnight, eaten cold because the Shabbat rules forbid cooking on the day itself. That heritage is the whole key to the thing.

Physically, sabich is a pita packed to bursting. The two constants are fried aubergine and hard-boiled egg; around them go hummus, a drizzle of tahini, chopped salad, pickles, and — the ingredient that defines it — amba, a pungent, tangy, mustard-yellow sauce of pickled mango that is sharp and faintly funky and unlike anything else on a sandwich counter. It is assembled to order, wrapped in paper, and eaten standing up, dripping. Done well it is one of the great vegetarian street foods anywhere: rich, sour, soft and sharp all at once.

Its name comes with a story worth telling and not quite believing. It is often explained as a Hebrew acronym for salad, egg and aubergine, which is neat and almost certainly invented after the fact — a backronym. The likelier origin ties it to an Arabic word for morning, fitting the breakfast heritage. Enjoy the acronym as folklore; the morning story is the one that squares with where the dish comes from.

What to order

The base decision is the vehicle and it is usually just b’pita — in a pita — though some counters will also build it in a laffa, the larger flatbread, for a bigger, messier version.

What you are really choosing between is how it is dressed, and the counter will often ask.

• amba — the pickled-mango sauce, and the single ingredient that makes sabich itself. It divides people sharply: sour, pungent, a little challenging. If you have never had it, have it — a sabich without amba is a fried-aubergine sandwich, not the real thing — but ask for it on the side the first time if you want to meet it gently.
• zhug (also written s’chug) — the fierce green or red chilli paste, which is how you ask for heat. “Charif” is the plain word for spicy if the name escapes you.
• the egg — the standard is a hard-boiled egg, but the more traditional touch is the brown, slow-cooked egg (the kind left overnight in a low oven), which comes out creamy and faintly smoky. A place that offers it is showing its roots.

Beyond that, the good stuff is in the layering: proper hummus, real tahini, a fresh chopped salad, a scatter of pickles, sometimes fried potato. The best sabich has everything in balance, so no single element — not even the amba — drowns the rest.

What to avoid

Almost everything that separates a great sabich from a sad one comes down to the aubergine, and the aubergine is the easiest thing to cut corners on.

The failure to watch for is greasy, oil-logged aubergine — slices fried in advance, piled up, and left sitting in their own oil until they are heavy and slick rather than soft and lightly crisp. A counter that fries aubergine through the day, draining it properly, gives you the dish; one that reheats a grey pre-fried heap gives you an oily one. If the aubergine looks like it has been waiting since breakfast, so has your sabich.

Be wary, too, of the token sabich. Many falafel counters keep it on the board without really making it, and you can tell: a thin, under-filled pita with a single mean slice of aubergine, no amba offered, the salad an afterthought. Sabich is a generous dish by nature, and a stingy one is usually a sign the place makes its living on falafel and treats this as a sideline. The stands that take it seriously fill the pita until it barely closes.

Finally, a sabich handed to you already cold has lost the point. The pleasure is warm aubergine against cool salad and sharp amba, assembled the moment you order; a pre-wrapped one from a chiller shelf is a different, lesser object made for convenience, not for eating there.

Practicalities

Sabich began as a morning food and its heritage is breakfast, but in practice it is eaten all day now, and it makes a particularly good weekday lunch — filling, meatless, quick, and cheap enough to be an everyday meal rather than a treat. It has no fixed hour, but it does answer to the city’s rhythm: the many stands run by Jewish owners shut from Friday afternoon through Saturday for Shabbat, so a Saturday sabich means seeking out the counters that keep different hours. Work that out before you are hungry on a Saturday and you save yourself a walk.

Expect roughly ₪22 to ₪35 for a well-built pita, a little more for a laffa version. A price at the very bottom of that, or below it, usually signals the under-filled token version rather than a bargain; the generous ones cost a shekel or two more for a reason you can see in the wrapping. Cards are normal, but the smallest independent stands are the likeliest to prefer cash, and it is worth having a little.

One last, purely practical warning: sabich is a messy sandwich, and amba stains. It drips, the yellow sauce marks clothes and does not come out easily, and this is genuinely a dish to eat leaning forward over the paper, not one to carry while wearing anything you care about. Take the napkins offered; you will use all of them.