Akko Fish Sandwich

At Akko the fish comes off boats moored against an Ottoman sea wall, and what makes the sandwich is as much the dressing as the catch. A small Mediterranean fish, red mullet or grouper or dentex depending on the morning, is salted and fried hard in shallow oil or grilled over coals, then laid into bread and built up with the coastal cupboard the old city keeps: a smear of tahina, a spoon of amba, chopped tomato-and-cucumber salad, sliced chili or a thread of s'chug, pickles, a hard squeeze of lemon. It is a frame for one fresh fish, but a dressed frame, the fish carried by sauce rather than left bare on the bread.

The bread is whatever the stall pulls fresh that day, chosen to take a hot, oily filling without surrendering to it. A length of laffa wraps the fish and the dressings into a soft bundle; a split roll holds a boned fillet upright; a pita opened into a pocket takes a smaller fish and a heavier load of salad. The fish itself is the variable the cook cannot control, shifting with the catch from a delicate red mullet to a firmer grouper, kept on the bone for flavour or boned for ease, and seasoned with little more than salt and sometimes cumin before it meets the fire or the oil.

The faults gather at the fish and the balance of the dressing. Overcook a small fish and the flesh dries and tightens, all of it gone in a few bites; undercook it and the oil reads heavy and the skin slack. Drain it badly and the bread turns to paste; build the sandwich dry and there is nothing to carry the catch. Lean too hard on the amba and tahina and the fish disappears under the sauce, which is the real risk of dressing a sandwich this much. The good one keeps the fish in front: hot and just set, the bread softened only at the edges, the amba and lemon sharp enough to cut the oil while still letting the fish read through.

It eats loud and a little messy, by hand, over paper. The first thing is the smell of fried fish and hot oil off the pan, then the sour-funk of the amba pushing up through it, citrus and pickled mango and fenugreek. The bite is fish first, soft and briny, then the tahina coating the mouth, the chopped salad cold and crunching against the heat, the chili arriving late and low. A wedge of lemon and a dish of pickles sit alongside for the eater to keep sharpening it. This is the opposite end of the register from the plain salt-and-onion fish roll: a sandwich where the sauces are half the argument.

The dressing is also where the old city shows itself, because the cupboard is a mixed one. Amba, the pickled-mango sauce, is an Iraqi-Jewish import; tahina and the chopped salad are pan-Levantine; s'chug is Yemeni; the fish and the fire are the Arab fishing town's own. The same catch turns up around Akko in fuller sit-down forms, fried whole under a tomato-and-pepper relish or dressed with tahina sauce and fried onions, and those are recognisable dishes in their own right rather than a footnote here. The sandwich is the walking version of all of it, one port fish and a handful of the city's sauces folded into bread.

A port town and a borrowed cupboard

The honest position is that this is folk food with no fixed recipe and no documented origin, and the interesting facts sit underneath it rather than in a founding story. There is no inventor and no first Akko fish sandwich; it is the obvious thing a fishing town does with the morning's catch and whatever sauces are on the counter, and the build shifts stall to stall and day to day. What can be documented is the setting and the cupboard, both of which are firmer than any recipe.

The setting is one of the oldest working harbours on the coast. Akko's port served the Phoenicians, Rome, and the Crusaders, who from 1104 made it the main gate to the Holy Land; after the Ottoman conquest its great-power role faded and it settled into the small fishing harbour it remains, the boats tied up beneath eighteenth-century ramparts raised under Ahmed al-Jazzar.

The walled old city, still home to a substantial Arab population that works those boats, was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2001, the catch landing under the same walls the listing protects.

The cupboard carries the harder dates. Amba, the sauce that most marks the sandwich, was created by Iraqi-Jewish merchants who shipped Indian mangoes pickled in vinegar back to Basra and Baghdad, and it reached Israel with Iraqi-Jewish immigrants in the 1950s, where it spread far past its origin onto fish, falafel and shawarma across the country. So a sandwich with no record of its own sits on two that are solid: a port the Crusaders fought over nine centuries ago, and a mango pickle that travelled from Bombay to Baghdad to a fried fish on the Akko quay.