Off-beat Jerusalem Food

• The shouk (http://jerusalemblog.blogspot.com/2006/06/abundance.html ) is the best place for fruits, vegetables, nuts, olives, baked goods, salads, and more.
• More includes prepared foods for "take-out." Many restaurants will also pack their food to go.
• In a Parisian farmers’ market each pile of pile of produce is so aesthetically arranged it demands some term other than pile. Even string beans are lined up in perfect emerald rows. Customers are forbidden to touch. With practiced precision the stall keeper removes the requested amount of peaches or strawberries, then rearranges the rest. Each table says, "I am an artwork."
• At the shouk, each table says "abundance." Customers pick up sweet carrots to put in a plastic sack (called a "nylon"), weigh the merits of individual cucumbers (small is tastier), choose the pears as if they could tell which will be most flavorful. Abundance has its own beauty, and color is not lacking.
• One of the tiny shouk restaurants offers Indian vegetarian food.I could tell you the exact location, but where's the fun in that? Its sign is in English.
• A p'tilia is like a largish camping stove, except that it runs on kerosene instead of gas. Cooks who know how to use them get exquisite results. On Agrippas Street and in the shouk itself the tastiest food awaits you in pots set on p'tiliot. Coming into Mahaneh Yehuda from Agrippas, you'll see (to your left) the pots of an Iraqi restaurant. Ask what's in each.
• On the next to last cross-street on your right you'll find the tempting kettles of a tiny Persian restaurant. Both have signs in Hebrew only, but you cannot miss them. Don't.
• The shuk is the best place in Jerusalem for seasonal fruits and vegetables. The quality is high, the prices low.
• In the early spring, fo for shesek. You may come across a Jerusalem Post article claiming that a shesek is a "cumquat." Wrong. Shesek, though the same size and shape as kumquats, are not citrus fruits. Shesek have smooth skins that, when ripe, are yellow and imperfect. Their seeds are about the size of small apricot pits, but shesek seeds are smooth, slightly concave, and solid as far as I can tell. The fruit is smooth and sweet.
  I have heard people claim that shesek are medlars. Actually they are loquats, so they would have to be "Japanese medlars," which, authoritative sources assure me, are not medlars at all. Loquats are delicious. In season, they are very cheap. They do not always make it to the supermarket, possibly because markings on their skin make them look imperfect to people used to industrial fruit.
• By July figs abound, and variety follows variety through summer and fall.
• Lychees in season, peaches (the small ones are best), cucumbers year round (likewise), fresh unripe dates followed by fresh ripe one followed by freshly dried -- abundance.
• Several stores specialize in excellent cheese from Israel and around the world. A friend familiar with cheese shops in France and in New York found Bashar's impressive. The staff is very friendly. They press enticing samples on customers.

Copyright 2007 Jane S. Fox