Katzutz: Israeli Salad of Finely Diced Cucumbers and Tomatoes
The only country where you can't order an Israeli salad is Israel. On a menu in Jerusalem it's simply salat, in conversation katzutz, in some places even salat aravi, Arab salad, and nobody there sees any contradiction in that. The plate earned the "Israeli" label only in New York delis and in cookbooks written for foreigners.
Katzutz (Hebrew: סלט קצוץ) is a salad of cucumbers, tomatoes and onion cut into the smallest dice possible, with parsley, lemon and olive oil, and in Israeli cooking it sits on the table with almost every meal - from breakfast to the evening falafel.
What Katzutz Means and Who the Salad Belongs To
Hebrew named the salad after what you do to it. Katzutz is the passive participle of the verb "to chop", so it means "chopped", and the same root gives you ktzitza, a patty - another dish defined by the knife rather than by its ingredients. It's pronounced "ka-TSOOTS"; the spelling katzutz is the English transliteration that has spread all over the internet, and it's the one you'll find here too, simply because that's what people search for.
Don't read too much into the label. The diced cucumber-and-tomato salad is chopped all across the former Ottoman lands; in Palestine and elsewhere in the Arab world they just call it Arab salad. Its closest relative lives in Turkey: çoban salatası differs mainly by a splash of vinegar. Bulgarians grated sirene cheese over the same base and got Shopska salad, the Greeks cut the vegetables coarsely, lay a slab of feta on top and call it horiatiki. The Israeli version differs from its cousins in degree, not in origin: no cheese, plenty of parsley, and dice as small as the knife allows.
The Kibbutz That Didn't Invent the Salad
Guidebooks tell of kibbutzniks who chopped the first Israeli salad from their own harvest one morning. Half of that holds up. The kibbutzim of the 1920s didn't invent the salad, they just put it on the breakfast table - in Arab households vegetables weren't served with the morning meal, while in the dining halls of the collective settlements they became the morning standard. And at first the vegetables didn't even arrive chopped: they lay there whole and everyone diced their own portion. When the kibbutz breakfast moved into hotels in the 1950s, nobody took the diced salad off it. And you can't push the story back any further: the tomato has been a Levantine ingredient for roughly two centuries, and before that there was nothing of the kind to chop here. So no, this is not Israel's most famous national dish. In the Hebrew press that title is shared by falafel and hummus; the salad is just on every plate next to them.
The Knife Decides: Ingredients, Variations and How Katzutz Is Eaten
There's nothing to get wrong with the ingredients: cucumber and tomato give it body, onion gives it bite, parsley gives it color, and lemon with olive oil holds the whole thing together. The art is in the hand holding the knife. The one thing you can't buy is the knack for cutting tiny dice, and that's exactly what a cook in Israel is judged on; videos of fine knife technique get shared there the way soccer highlights do back home. Immigrant communities are said to have brought their own touches: Jews from India are credited with grated ginger and green chili, North African Jews with preserved lemon.
It's eaten with everything and at any hour. In the morning it sits next to eggs and bread, at noon next to meat and rice, at a street stand it gets stuffed into a pita with falafel or shawarma, and at a hummus joint it comes as the side dish nobody ordered and everybody eats.
A Plate of Parsley at Ben-Sira
The best katzutz I've had was in Jerusalem, at Ben-Sira Hummus (see Where to Eat in Jerusalem), where it came on a white plate so generously buried under parsley and freshly ground pepper that you had to dig the vegetables out first. The dice were tiny, as the craft demands: the cucumber crunched, the tomato released juice that the lemon nudged toward sour, and the onion only spoke up at the finish, sharp and brief. There was so much parsley it worked as a fourth vegetable. The plate cost 23 ILS (6.40 EUR).
