I didn’t know what shakshuka was until my partner moved to Boston and convinced me to try a bite during brunch one weekend when I was visiting town. Suddenly, I felt like I was seeing it everywhere- from Harvard students huddling in tiny cafés searching for the best skillet in the city to popular chain restaurants selling T-shirts that said “Let’s Shakshuka”, it raised a question for me: how did a North African one-pan meal end up with such a strong cultural presence in a city like Boston?
To answer that, it helped to stop thinking about shakshuka as just a dish, but rather to see it as part of a much larger story about African food culture, movement, and adaptation.
One of the most important insights from African food scholarship is that cuisine is not static. Rather than rigid recipes, many African dishes are better understood as flexible systems of cooking, shaped by environment, trade, and daily life (Chastanet, 2016). Historians of African foodways emphasize three key ideas in their writings:
- Adaptation to available ingredients
- Influence of trade and migration
- Communal methods of preparation and eating
Shakshuka specifically reflects all three. It is built from simple, accessible ingredients to make a base of tomatoes, peppers, spices, and eggs and cooked in a single pan meant for sharing. But shakshuka can contain anything from spicy sausage, fresh jalepeños, beets, carrots, or feta cheese, depending on what is available at the time based on what traders bring to the area. Interestingly, even its core ingredient, the tomato, is not indigenous to Africa, but arrived through this global trade after the Columbian Exchange. In this sense, shakshuka is not an “unchanged tradition,” but a product of historical exchange and adaptation (Chastanet, 2016).
Scholars argue that this kind of flexibility isn’t purely circumstational, it is foundational. Food evolves alongside people, responding to shifting environments and cultural influences.
In many African culinary traditions, food is not defined solely by ingredients, but by how it is prepared and consumed. Communal eating, or sharing from a single vessel and using bread as a utensil, is central to the experience (Mintz & Du Bois, 2002).
Shakshuka also fits this pattern. It is typically served in the same pan it is cooked in, with sourdough bread used to scoop the sauce and eggs. This style of eating reinforces social connection, emphasizing food as a shared activity rather than an individual one, which is paramount to relationship-building and social structure in Africa.
The spread of shakshuka beyond North Africa follows patterns that scholars identify in diasporic food systems. When North African communities migrated, they brought their food traditions with them. In these new contexts, dishes often change. Food studies research shows that migrant communities adapt recipes based on new ingredients, social settings, and cultural expectations. Shakshuka’s transformation into a café and brunch dish reflects this process of cultural negotiation and identity preservation (Gabaccia, 1998).
Beyond its cultural significance, shakshuka also aligns with the growing interest in health-conscious eating, particularly through its tomato-based foundation. Tomatoes are rich in lycopene, a carotenoid antioxidant associated with anti-inflammatory and cardiovascular benefits (Collins et al., 2022). Research suggests that regular consumption of tomato products may contribute to reduced risk of heart disease, lower blood pressure, and protection against oxidative stress due to the antioxidant properties of lycopene and related compounds . Importantly, cooked tomato dishes, like shakshuka, may provide even more available lycopene than raw tomatoes because heating tomatoes increases lycopene absorption in your body. This connection between traditional food practices and contemporary nutritional science helps explain why shakshuka fits naturally into modern food trends.
By the time shakshuka arrived in the United States specifically, it had already undergone multiple transformations. Its popularity in cities like Boston reflects what scholars describe as the global circulation of food, where dishes move across borders and are reinterpreted to fit new cultural frameworks (Appadurai, 1988).
In the United States, shakshuka aligns with existing trends of brunch foods centered around eggs, interest in Mediterranean and plant-forward diets, and desire for foods with cultural narratives. Boston provides a particularly strong environment for this kind of culinary adoption, in which large academic institutions scattered around the city house students from many different nations and cultures. Studies show that such environments accelerate the spread of diasporic foods (Mintz & Du Bois, 2002).
What makes shakshuka compelling is that its journey to Boston is not necessarily an uncommon story, it is representative. African foodways have long been shaped by movement, trade, and adaptation, even if those histories are often underrepresented in mainstream narratives (Chastanet, 2016). Seen this way, shakshuka is not a fad, it’s a part of a much larger system of cultural exchange.
And for me, it started with a simple question: why is everyone here so obsessed with this dish? The answer lies not only in the fact that it is very tasty, but in the history and cultural systems that made it possible.
References
Appadurai, A. (1988). How to make a national cuisine: Cookbooks in contemporary India. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 30(1), 3–24. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417500015024
Chastanet, M. (2016). Towards a history of foodways in Africa. Afriques, 7. https://doi.org/10.4000/afriques.1857
Collins, E. J., Bowyer, C., Tsouza, A., & Chopra, M. (2022). Tomatoes: An extensive review of the associated health impacts of tomatoes and factors that can affect their cultivation. Biology, 11(2), 239. https://doi.org/10.3390/biology11020239
Gabaccia, D. R. (1998). We are what we eat: Ethnic food and the making of Americans. Harvard University Press.
Mintz, S. W., & Du Bois, C. M. (2002). The anthropology of food and eating. Annual Review of Anthropology, 31, 99–119. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.32.032702.131011