Author: Miriam Berger / Source: Atlas Obscura
The prickly cactus fruit has intrigued chef Fadi Qattan since childhood. He and his grandmother would sit on her porch in the Palestinian city of Bethlehem peeling off the thick, spiky skin of the seedy yet sweet fruit that she bought by the bucket from nearby villages.
Then they’d eat the colorful fruit as it came: juicy and chunky and quick to lose its ovular shape after the first bite or slice of a knife.At his restaurant, Fadwa Café and Restaurant, in Bethlehem, Qattan incorporates the cactus fruit into his cooking—though it’s a struggle. The fruit “has a very delicate flavor,” says Qattan, so when cooked with other produce, the taste often gets lost. It’s also very acidic, further limiting its culinary utility. Qattan has perfected a cactus fruit jam and dessert based on its juice. But his favorite use is pairing cactus fruit sauce with shrimp from the Jaffa seaport along the Mediterranean Sea.
For Qattan, cooking with cactus fruit isn’t just about eating local—it’s also political. Qattan lives in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where Palestinians like him need an Israeli-issued permit to travel to Jaffa, a historically Arab city located at least one checkpoint and fewer than 50 miles away in Israel. For him, this cactus fruit dish is a symbol of Palestinian dispossession.
That’s a lot of politics for one fruit, but that’s the prickly cactus fruit’s nature in the region. Like with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict itself, very different stories are told about the cactus fruit depending on whom you ask. Called sabr in Arabic and sabra in Hebrew, the fruit has become a core but disputed symbol of Israeli and Palestinian national identities.
After a century of conflict, the sabr-sabra divide still infuses everyday art and language. Surprisingly, though, its core use in the kitchen hasn’t really changed. People still buy it in the market, now often already peeled or with the thorns removed, ready to eat just as it is.
“It’s not a beautiful fruit,” says Qattan, comparing the texture and qualities to passion fruit. “When you chop it up, it breaks. It’s very fragile. It doesn’t look nice once its peeled and worked with.”
Like many Palestinians, when Qattan sees cactus fruit, he sees remnants of the Palestinian villages that were destroyed or conquered in what is now Israel during the 1948 war for Israel’s independence, called the nakba, or the catastrophe, by Palestinians. (Today there are around five million United Nations-recognized Palestinian refugees, the descendants of those who fled or were expelled from their homes.) For generations, Palestinians had used the hardy plants to form fences around their land. As a result, the only sign of some villages’ one-time existence is lines of cacti.
“If you look at most Palestinian villages demolished in Israel, what’s left is cactus fruit and olive trees,” says Qattan. Since 1948, he adds, this has imbued the cactus plant with a “mythical symbolism.”
About 65 miles and a disputed border away, Israeli Shachar Blum views cactus fruit, which he calls sabra, very differently. Blum owns Orly Cactus Farm in southern Israel, the largest producer of the prickly plant in the Middle East, and he insists it’s the next big, antioxidant-packed super fruit. He’s even developed a powder to use in shakes, along with cactus-based jams and spicy sauces.
Blum’s father built the farm in the 1970s, and Blum describes his obsession with cactus fruit as rooted…
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