Vegan

This makes a good side dish. The Arabs brought it all the way to Spain and Italy.

A North African dish which can be served hot as a side dish or cold as a salad.

Chicory is one of the vegetables believed to have been eaten in ancient Egypt. It has a pleasant, slightly bitter taste when it is cooked. In this Lebanese mountain dish, wild chicory is used.

The combination of spinach with chickpeas is common throughout the Middle East, but the flavors here are Egyptian. You may use good-quality canned chickpeas. It is good served with yogurt.

This is good hot or cold, as a first course. The Moroccan play of flavors, which combines preserved lemon with honey, garlic, turmeric, and ginger, makes this a sensational dish. I make it with the frozen Egyptian artichoke bottoms that I find in Oriental stores.

The Copts of Egypt observe a long and arduous fast during Lent—El Soum el Kibir—when they abstain from every kind of animal food, such as meat, eggs, milk, butter, and cheese, and eat only bread and vegetables, chiefly fava beans. Artichoke hearts and fava beans in oil is a favorite Lenten dish, also popular with the Greeks of Egypt. These two vegetables are partnered in every Middle Eastern country, and indeed all around the Mediterranean, but this dish with almonds is uncommon and particularly appealing. You can find frozen artichoke hearts and bottoms from Egypt that are difficult to tell from fresh ones, and frozen skinned fava (or broad) beans in Middle Eastern stores. But if you want to use fresh ones, see the box on the opposite page for preparing artichoke hearts or bottoms. If your fava beans are young and tender, you do not need to skin them.

This hot, spicy, garlicky mixture is the all-purpose, ubiquitous Moroccan sauce for fish. It goes on every kind of fish—fried, grilled, baked, and stewed. It is marvelous, and I strongly recommend it, but not for a fish with a delicate flavor. Use half of it to marinate the fish in for 1/2 hour before cooking, and pour the rest on as a sauce before serving.

You have to love garlic to appreciate this most ancient of sauces.

This is particularly delicious with grilled fish.

This is the common all-purpose dressing for fish. It can also be used as a marinade.

In Greece it is made whenever chickens are boiled. In Egypt we called it beid ab lamouna and shorba bel tarbeyah. The stock can be prepared in advance, but the rest must be done at the last minute.

This very popular Tunisian soup is eaten for breakfast. In poor families it serves as a meal during the day. Little cafés in popular areas serve it in the morning to people going off to work.

It is a bread dough made with olive oil.

I like to make this Lebanese salad with basmati rice, because the grains stay very separate.

This is an instant salad to make with canned chickpeas, but they must be good-quality.

This is one of a few Turkish pilafs which are cooked in olive oil and eaten cold.