Iraqi Jewish confectionery are a window into a bygone era

Five days a week, 78-year-old Tzvi (Sabah) David rises at 4:35 a.m. and dons an all-white baker’s outfit before heading out to open up Konditorei David, the last-of-its-kind Iraqi pastry shop in Petah Tikva that was opened by his father David Tsalah. 

Three days before the Purim holiday, David is getting ready for one of the busiest times of the year as multiple generations of Iraqi customers will soon stop by to purchase sweets that have been synonymous with Purim for Iraqi Jews for centuries, if not millennia. 

“I love the work. It is a very tiring and difficult job and I am not 18 anymore, but I feel young in the morning when I get up,” David tells Eliyahu Freedman of The Times of Israel on a recent visit to the small shop, which doubles as a window into the pre-modern world of Middle-Eastern pastries. 

His first item of business today is making a fresh batch of baba qadrasi, also known in Arabic as “mann el-sama” or “manna from heaven,” named after the legendary food that God miraculously delivered from the sky to feed the Israelites in the Exodus story. 

If not truly the biblical food itself, an early recipe for baba qadrasi was found in a 10th-century Abbasid cookbook.