Iraqi cuisine grew up between two rivers, and that explains its two most prominent traits. The ancient agriculture of the Euphrates and Tigris basin gave it rice, wheat, dates and freshwater fish; and its location on the trade routes between India and the Mediterranean brought in cardamom, turmeric, tamarind and pickled mango — ingredients that barely appear among its neighbors to the west.
The result is a cuisine resting on three anchors: sourness — tamarind, dried lemon and fresh lemon in almost every stew; baharat — an aromatic, relatively sweet spice blend based on allspice, cinnamon, cardamom and cloves; and bread, which in Iraq is not a side but a utensil — the samoon torn into the soup and used to soak up the sauce.
Many of the dishes here are known to Israelis not through Iraq but through Iraqi-Israeli cooking: kubba hamusta, amba and tbit arrived with the great immigration from Iraq in the 1950s and blended into the local cuisine until their origins were almost forgotten.
The ten dishes, with a calorie estimate per serving
| Dish | Type | Calories per recommended serving |
|---|---|---|
| Amba | Cooked mango sauce | about 30 per 2 tablespoons (30 grams) |
| Kleicha | Date cookies | about 250 per 2 pieces (70 grams) |
| Samoon | Diamond-shaped bread | about 275 per piece (90 grams) |
| Iraqi bamia | Okra and meat stew | about 410 per serving of stew (350 grams) |
| Kubba hamusta | Sour soup with semolina dumplings | about 490 per serving |
| Masgouf | Grilled fish | about 470 per serving (250 grams) |
| Iraqi dolma | Stuffed vegetables | about 420 per serving (300 grams) |
| Tashreeb | Stew over bread | about 620 per serving |
| Tbit | Chicken stuffed with rice | about 820 per serving |
| Quzi | Lamb over rice | about 900 per serving |
What characterizes Iraqi cuisine nutritionally
- Sourness in every dish — and not just for flavor. Tamarind and lemon appear in bamia, dolma and kubba hamusta. Beyond balance, the vitamin C in lemon improves the absorption of plant iron from the legumes and herbs in the same bowl.
- Legumes alongside the meat, not instead of it. White beans in tashreeb, chickpeas in stews — a method that lowers the amount of meat per serving and raises the fiber. Tashreeb reaches 10 grams of fiber per serving.
- White rice and white bread are the backdrop for almost everything. This is the main drawback, and it recurs in Persian cuisine too. A full Iraqi meal usually includes both rice and bread.
- The fish. Masgouf is the dish with the best protein-to-calorie ratio here — 50 grams of protein in about 470 calories, with omega-3 and almost no carbohydrates.
- Dates instead of white sugar. Kleicha is sweetened mostly with fruit — almost all the sugar in it comes from the dates rather than white sugar, unlike baklava and sholeh zard.
- Sodium. Amba, samoon and pickles — each one on its own is reasonable, and together an Iraqi meal easily reaches a high amount of sodium.
Six ingredients that unlock this cuisine
| Ingredient | What it is | Reasonable substitute |
|---|---|---|
| Tamarind | A tart concentrate from the pods of the tamarind tree | Lemon juice + a teaspoon of silan (date syrup) |
| Iraqi baharat | An aromatic blend: allspice, cinnamon, cardamom, cloves, cumin | Commercial baharat in the same amount, adjusted to taste |
| Dried lemon | A lemon dried in the sun; deep acidity and a little bitterness | Lemon juice at the end of cooking |
| Cardamom | The hallmark of kleicha and of Iraqi coffee | No real substitute |
| Fenugreek | The ingredient that gives amba its signature aroma | No substitute — better to skip it |
| Fine semolina | The shell of kubba; absorbs water and stretches without tearing | Flour does not replace it — the dough will shrink |
Where to start
The easiest way in is bamia or tashreeb — one-pot stews that demand time, not skill. Masgouf is remarkably easy in the oven version, and amba in the version here takes about a quarter of an hour of work plus about 20 minutes of cooking, followed by chilling. The dishes that really take practice are kubba hamusta, because of stretching the semolina shell, and dolma, because of the hour of stuffing and the flip at the end.
Alongside this cuisine it is worth looking at its two neighbors on the site — Turkish cuisine and Persian cuisine — which share many ingredients with it and arrange them completely differently. And Moroccan cuisine, far from all of them, offers the sharpest comparison: Moroccan dafina and Iraqi tbit are exactly the same Sabbath dish, born of the same constraint in two communities that never met.
Frequently asked questions
Question: What is the national dish of Iraq? Answer: Masgouf — a river fish split open and grilled upright facing an open fire. It is identified with the banks of the Tigris in Baghdad more than any other dish, although dishes like dolma and quzi are more common in homes.
Question: What is the difference between Iraqi, Turkish and Persian cuisine? Answer: Iraqi cuisine relies on the sourness of tamarind and dried lemon, on the aromatic baharat blend, and on bread as an eating utensil. Persian cuisine is built around rice and stew with a sweet-and-sour balance, and Turkish around bread, the grill and starters. Many shared ingredients, a different meal structure.
Question: Where did amba come from? Answer: From India. Iraqi Jewish merchants who traded between Baghdad and Bombay in the 19th century encountered mango pickling there and brought it to Iraq, and the name āmbā — mango in Marathi — stuck. In the 1950s it reached Israel with the immigration from Iraq. The details are in the amba recipe.
Question: Which Iraqi dishes suit vegetarians and vegans? Answer: Amba is fully vegan, samoon is pareve if you leave out the milk powder, and kleicha can be made vegan with oil and water and without the egg wash. Dolma, bamia and tashreeb come in traditional meatless versions in which legumes take its place.
Question: What is Iraqi baharat and how is it different from other baharat? Answer: A blend based on allspice, cinnamon, cardamom, cloves, cumin and coriander. It is sweeter and more aromatic than the Levantine blends and less spicy than them, which is why Iraqi stews get a “sweetish” scent even when they contain no sweetener at all.