Rice, dates and dressing up… welcome to my Iraqi seder

I asked on Instagram about Iraqi Pesach traditions and was deluged by messages from Ashkenazim wailing: “You eat RICE!” It’s true. We do eat rice. Sometimes all eight nights. Iraqi friends who are married to Ashkenazim report that their partners “turn conveniently Sephardi for Pesach”. If you’re Ashkenazi reading this and not married to a Sephardi, I can only apologise. Is it a bad time to reveal we also eat beans, pulses, corn and seeds?

I didn’t taste kugel till I was in my thirties, although Iraqis also turn to potato at Pesach. Instead of making kubba shells from bulghur wheat, at Pesach we mash potato, bind it with egg and fry it to make kubba poteta or poteta chap. Or we use rice for the shells of kubba halab, which my son calls “kubba with a coat of yum”; it literally means “Aleppo kubba”. Or we grind rice with pounded meat for the shells of kubba shwandar, and simmer them in a sweet-and-sour sauce with beetroot. We might serve this with more rice, maybe with broad beans and dill. There is often lamb, and sometimes fish, perhaps saluna, fish baked in a source which is hamedh-helu (sweet and sour), the iconic Iraqi flavour, made by mixing lemon juice and (more) date syrup, or with pomegranate molasses, tamarind or dried limes for the sour, or sugar for the sweet. There might even be kechri, the Iraqi Jewish comfort food of rice and red lentils.

Saluna, an Iraqi fish-based dish[Missing Credit]

We don’t have a vast repertoire of Passover cakes – the Judeo-Iraqi Arabic word for cakes, kekayi, is borrowed from English – but we do make macaroons. Chewy ones called hajibada or masafan (the word possibly related to “marzipan”), made of almonds, sugar, egg whites, cardamom and orange flower water, shaped into stars, a pistachio sliver sunk into the top of each one, and baked until golden.

It’s not all about the food. Our Haggadot are different too. Instead of Hebrew (and a bit of Aramaic) on one side and English translation on the other, ours have the Hebrew and Aramaic at the top, then translations in both English and Judeo-Iraqi Arabic underneath – and the Judeo-Iraqi Arabic is written in Hebrew script and contains a lot of Aramaic, so it can get confusing. The Arabic translation is called the sharh, the “explanation”. Our Haggadah also lists the heads of the talmudic academies at Sura and Pumbedita going back to 589 CE. Iraqi Jews have been doing this a long time.

A Baghdad Haggadah, 1883Getty Images

Some Iraqi Jews sing parts of the seder, such as Ha Lachma, not in Hebrew, but in Judeo-Iraqi Arabic, and afterwards the children leave the room, wrap the afikoman in a cloth and tie it to themselves like a traveller’s bundle, and may grab costumes and walking sticks, then march back in. The grown-ups then ask where they’ve come from, and the children say Egypt. And where are they going? The children reply Jerusalem. We go straight into Mah Nishtanah (sung with a different tune) and then eat the egg, much earlier than in an Ashkenazi seder – according to my Haggadah this is “to sustain us through the reciting of the Haggadah”, as if there’s any chance of us starving. Alongside the wine, the children may be drinking mai zeeb, currants boiled and then strained to make a rich, sweet juice. Our maror is lettuce, and our karpas is often celery leaves instead of parsley, but it’s our charoset – which we call halek – which is really different from the Ashkenazi version. It involves no apples – you can’t cement together a pharaoh’s city with apples. You need stickiness. You need heft. You need to chop up walnuts (ready chopped are no good because the texture needs to be jagged, and the nut dust binds it all together) and mix them with velvety black silan (date syrup) and cardamom. It’s crunchy, it’s sweet and it’s sturdy. And dates are crucial to Iraqi identity – there’s a saying that “a house with a date palm will never starve”.

As for the plagues, we do not dip our fingers into wine and then on to a plate for each plague. This has always deeply stressed me out when I have been at seders where this happens – putting plagues on your plate? That you eat off? Instead we make sure the plagues come nowhere near us. We put the wine (pouring drops, not using our fingers) into a plastic cup, then get rid of it. Some people just bin it. But some – including mine – go outside and tip out the plague wine away from our homes – on the street, down a drain or, if you happen to have antisemitic neighbours you might feel negative about, this is your moment. Some use a ceramic cup and smash it, and in some families this is a job for an unmarried woman, to increase her chances – although who knows why disposing of plague wine would make you more likely to find a husband.

And while we don’t hit each other with leeks or spring onions during the seder (that’s the Persians), at the end of Pesach, we do hit each other (gently!) with green branches and say santak khathra! meaning “have a green year!” It’s a wish for new growth, new roots, new trees, new fruit, new hope. Have a green year.

Samantha Ellis is the author of Chopping Onions on my Heart (Chatto & Windus)

To get more from Life, click here to sign up for our free Life newsletter.

Topics:

Pesach

Topics:

Support the world’s oldest Jewish newspaper