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The Tel Aviv Port Market will, for the first time, honor the king of local pastries: jachnun. For two consecutive weekends—January 19-20 and January 26-27—the plaza outside the market will be filled with stands selling the fresh, handmade treats. Jachnun is primarily known as a Jewish-Yemenite dish, but—along with malawach, another Jewish-Yemenite pastry—it has been a mainstream Israeli fast-food favorite for decades. They are both perfect comfort foods. Let’s start with jachnun. It is warm and mildly sweet, and gives you a fuzzy feeling. It could be mistaken for a dessert, but it’s traditionally a Shabbat breakfast food, served in Israel with an oven-baked egg, fresh grated tomato, and zhug (Yemenite hot sauce), which gives it an extra kick. These days jachnun is consumed all day long—everywhere and anywhere. No Israeli hotel breakfast buffet or school picnic is complete without the commercial version of this log-shaped goodie. Since the rise of foodie culture, some Israelis have recently started making jachnun at home, but for many years, only Yemenite grandmothers would make it from scratch. If the rest of us wanted to consume it at home, we would either buy it frozen or order it as take-out. You can eat jachnun at most rest stops and many cafes. And on the weekend, jachnun is sold everywhere in Israel: Convenience stores keep a metal container that holds warm jachnun, and kiosks hold a pot of jachnun for clubbers to grab a bite in the early morning hours after a long night out. While traveling across the country it’s not uncommon to see DIY signs, written in a felt-tip pen, informing passersby that jachnun is sold at stands on the side of the road. Jews in every corner of the world found their own solution for feeding their family on Shabbat while considering religious prohibitions and local supplies. Yemenite Jews from different areas came up with different solutions. Jachnun was the solution of the Jews of the port city of Aden in southern Yemen, where the Jewish community flourished until a deadly pogrom in 1947, which was the beginning of the end of this community. ...

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