Iraqi Chicken, Potato and Herb Patties Recipe

An homage to my grandmother’s aruk.

By Vered Guttman | January 4, 2024

My Grandmother Rachel’s Friday lunch spread served as a magnet for the whole family. On the small formica table in her kitchen you could find all the classics of Iraqi Jewish cuisine: a plate of thin, dark, fried slices of eggplant; a large bowl of freshly chopped Israeli salad with a lot of lemon juice and black pepper; a jar of pickled turnips; hard-boiled eggs; and a glass plate filled with fried chicken, herb and onion patties.

Those were the appetizers.

Kubbeh soups, stuffed onions and tomatoes, and rice with vermicelli noodles followed.

I did not know at the time, but those chicken and herb patties called aruk (or uruk) are Iraqi staples that can be found in many Jewish Iraqi homes in Israel and elsewhere. Some make a vegetarian version, adding more potato and omitting the chicken.

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I’m fascinated by how many dishes my grandmother could make out of one chicken. She’d start the day at around 5 a.m. making chicken broth with a few cuts of the chicken. Then she would use that broth to cook the rice with toasted vermicelli noodles and for the kubbeh sauce. No wonder it was so good.

Sometimes my grandmother would use the chicken skin, with only the wings still attached, for t’beet, an Iraqi Shabbat stew. She stuffed the skin with rice mixed with chicken innards, placed it in a large pot, covered it with more rice, and placed a few whole eggs on top. The t’beet was then cooked overnight and served for lunch on Shabbat.

And then she’d grind the chicken breast to make the aruk.

Similar fritters are popular around the Middle East. Ejeh is a type of omelet from the Levant made with eggs and a lot of parsley and mint; kuku sabzi is an Iranian green frittata that’s filled with chopped herbs, like parsley, cilantro, dill and fenugreek; Moroccan maakouda are potato fritters made with turmeric that are sold as street food in the markets.

Today, “aruk” is the most common name for chicken patties among Iraqi Israeli Jews. However, I found few mentions of aruk in earlier Iraqi cookbooks, and I suspect the word may have previously been a catch-all term for fritters, or even for kubbeh.

There’s an interesting recipe for “uruk,” for instance, in an Iraqi cookbook named “The Baghdad Kitchen,” where the fritters are made of yeasted dough mixed with ground meat. The Israeli Iraqi cookbook “Ashtidaq” (meaning “bless your hands” in Jewish-Iraqi, a common blessing to the cook) has a recipe for arouk b’laham (meaning “aruk in meat” in Arabic), which are actually kubbeh dumplings made with a rice shell. Linda Dangoor’s Jewish Iraqi cookbook “Flavours of Babylon” includes a recipe very similar to my grandmother’s, for thin patties made with chicken, potato, herb and eggs, but she calls it beth b’laham.

I miss these simple yet elaborate Friday lunches at my grandmother’s home. Her cooking was her way of bringing us together. And it worked.

Notes:

You can substitute the flour for matzah meal to make these Passover-friendly.
The aruk will keep in a covered container in the fridge for up to four days.