Saida Fish Sandwich

Tahini seizes the moment lemon juice touches it. The smooth sesame paste clenches into a stiff, pale clay, and the cook has to beat water in a spoonful at a time until it loosens again into a cream that pours. That sauce is tarator, tahini, lemon, water, crushed garlic and salt, and along the Lebanese coast it is what fish gets. In Saida, the southern port city the maps also call Sidon, it meets the morning's smallest catch: fish fried whole a few steps from the boats, folded hot into khubz with pickles and herbs, the tarator spooned on before the fry has stopped hissing.

The port decides what goes in. Saida's boats work close water and come back early, and the catch is sold at the harbour's edge while the town is still waking. The big fish leave first, for restaurant kitchens and for sayadieh, the fisherman's rice. The middling fish go to the grill. What stays is the small end of the net: sultan ibrahim the length of a hand, finger-sized bream, sardines, and in their season the tiny silver bizri sold by the scoop. Small fish suit a sandwich. They fry through in a couple of minutes, they cost less than anything else landed that morning, and a crisp one asks for nothing but sauce, bread and somewhere to stand.

The frying is plain on purpose. Gutted, salted, rolled through flour, into deep oil until the fins stiffen and the flesh barely sets: no batter, no spice the fish has to argue with. It goes straight into khubz lined with tarator, then pickled turnip, rings of raw onion dragged through sumac, parsley, sometimes a few fries wedged in to stretch the price. The failures are the ordinary ones of hot oil and thin bread. Fish fried ahead of the rush steams itself soft inside the wrap. A batch lifted out wet soaks the crumb until the fold tears at the first bite. Tahini mixed too thick sits on the fish like plaster, which is why the sauce is let down until it runs off the spoon.

At the stalls along the harbour road the oil barely cools between batches. A tray of floured fish goes in with a flat roar, the smell of the fry carries over the seafront wall, and the gulls move closer. The sandwich is built on a square of paper: bread, sauce, fish, pickle, a long squeeze of lemon over the open wrap before it is rolled shut. The first bite of a whole fried sultan ibrahim is mostly crackle, the tail and fins gone brittle as salted glass, then warm flesh flaking off the spine, the cold snap of turnip, and the garlic in the tarator turning up underneath everything. Rolled tight, it drips on the paper and not on the shirt.

The fish keep their market names inside the sandwich. Sultan ibrahim, the small red mullet, is the prestige catch even at this size, and a stall will say so when the wrap is handed over. Bizri are too small for names at all: floured in fistfuls, fried until they can be eaten whole, bones and all, a paper cone of them doing the sandwich's job as often as the bread does. The sauce never changes. The tarator on the fish is the same tahini the falafel counters ladle, thinned a little further so it runs into the seams of a fried fish, sometimes packed with chopped parsley until it turns green. Khubz is the bread because khubz is the bread of everything here; a stall that runs out borrows whatever flat loaf the bakery two lanes back can spare.

Its relatives sort by geography. Samke harra, the chili and walnut fish that Tripoli claims as its own, is a platter that occasionally gets folded into bread but lives on the table. Sayadieh is rice under fish, a plate by definition. Down the coast at Akko the same port habit runs through a different set of sauces, amba and chopped salad where the tahini would be, and far to the north Istanbul lays grilled mackerel into half a loaf and calls it balık ekmek. The closest thing of all is not a separate dish: the restaurant plate of fried sultan ibrahim with fries and tarator on the side is this sandwich unrolled onto china, and the wrap simply puts it back in the hand, eaten standing where the fish came ashore.

Purple, silk and the morning catch

Saida has been selling sea-catch off the same harbour for most of recorded Mediterranean time. Phoenician Sidon worked glass and the murex purple that clothed emperors, and the dye trade left a physical receipt: Murex Hill, on the south side of the old town, is an artificial mound raised from centuries of crushed shells out of the dyers' vats. The islet at the harbour mouth carried a temple to Melqart before the sea castle went up on its stones in 1228. Against all of that the fried-fish sandwich is young, undated and likely to stay that way; frying the small catch at the water's edge is the kind of cooking no port writes down.

The souk that feeds it customers is the record of the port's second act. The Khan el-Franj, the Inn of the Franks, stands a few steps from the water; most accounts date it to around 1600, when the emir Fakhr al-Din II made Sidon his window to Europe and filled the khan with the French merchants who bought Lebanese silk. The emir ran that trade until the Ottomans executed him in 1635, and the khan still stands. The vaulted lanes between it and the harbour hold the bakeries, the fryers and the fishmongers' slabs, and the boats still hand their catch up the same stone lip of quay each morning.

Under the purple and the silk sits the name. In Arabic the city is Ṣaydā, built on the root ṣ-y-d, which the language still uses for the hunt and the catch: a sayyad is a fisherman, and sayadieh is what he cooks. The Phoenician name it descends from is usually read the same way, as something close to 'fishery' or 'fishing town'. That gloss is older than anything now cooking on the harbour: rulers of Sidon were signing the name to letters bound for Egypt in the Late Bronze Age, more than three thousand years before anyone wrapped the morning's fry in khubz.