For 3 Weeks, Eating Like Jews of Baghdad

Katherine Needles Kubbeh in a pumpkin puree with dried apricot and roasted pumpkin seeds.

Katherine Needles Naama Shefi, right, creator of the Kubbeh Project, and its chef, Itamar Lewensohn.

Naama Shefi says Bubbeh’s brisket is only a sliver of the spectrum of Jewish cuisine.

“When you talk about Jewish food, it’s much more cmplicated and diverse than matzo balls and deli food,” she said.

So starting tonight, as a three-week pop-up project at a bakery in the East Village, Ms. Shefi, a Kibbutz-born Israeli expatriate, will offer New Yorkers a taste of the little-known and fading cuisine of Iraqi Jews.

Iraqi Jews - most of the ones living in Iraq emigrated to the newborn state of Israel after 1947 - have a sprawling menu of rice dishes. But Ms. Shefi is focused on kubbeh, a seasoned beef meatball enveloped in a semolina-based dough. It serves as a vehicle for a long list of savory soups and sauces. The chewy exterior of the kubbeh absorbs the flavors of its stew.

Ms. Shefi, in partnership with a chef from Tel Aviv, Itamar Lewensohn, will offer three versions of the Baghdadian staple at the Kubbeh Project at Zucker Bakery on East Ninth Street: a deep red ! beet soup, a vegetarian pumpkin purée with dried apricot and roasted pumpkin seeds, and a palate-challenging tart option called hamusta that uses lemons, Swiss chard and zucchini as its base.

The kubbehs arrive in their respective sauces with a side of rice and turshi, a lightly spicy, curry-infused pickle.

There are no Iraqi Jewish restaurants in New York City, though there is a caterer on Long Island that specializes in Iraqi Jewish cuisine.

Ms. Shefi is of Polish, not Iraqi, descent, but she said, “Israel is a not just a melting pot, it’s a pressure cooker, so a Polish girl like me considered kubbeh as my own.”

The experiment is part of what Ms. Shefi, a former employee of the Israeli Consulate in New York, hopes will be a larger project to save dying Jewish recipes.

“These recipes are about to leave the world if no one will document them,” Ms. Shefi said. “It’s hard to find really well-written recipes. So manyhome cooks will add a pinch of this, a pinch of that, but not really put down their recipes.”

To begin the rescue mission, she dispatched Mr. Lewensohn to the kitchens of grandmothers around Israel to fine-tune his kubbeh craft.

Each night of the Kubbeh Project, Ms. Shefi will unfurl lengths of denim to decorate the bakery after hours, hoping to evoke the workaday food stalls of Jerusalem’s Mahane Yehuda Market, where kubbeh and other comfort food simmer in vats.

“We wanted to evoke something from Israel â€" the idea of sharing a meal around the table,” Ms. Shefi said. “To somehow translate these blue-collar restaurants, these hole-in-the walls, to New York.”

The Kubbeh Project runs each night through March 21, from 6 p.m. until food runs out, at Zucker Bakery, 433 East Ninth Street. Reservations required on Fridays but not other days.