Ivory-hued tahina (also spelled tahini) is everywhere. Red tahina is not.

I first encountered the brickish-red tahina in the fascinating cookbook, The Gaza Kitchen, a gift from a Palestinian friend, who referred to it as “the very great Gaza specialty.” In Gaza, where a unique twist of Arab cuisine includes fresh dill and chilies, it is red tahina that lubricates many of their most noteworthy recipes. It’s a key ingredient in the area’s most famous dish – sumagiyya, a stew made with beef or lamb with sumac, chard, chickpeas, dill, and chilies. And it’s an important flavor in salata maliha, which translates as “beautiful salad,” a toss of old bread, tomatoes and cucumbers, and in Gaza-style potato salad, where red tahina is drizzled over boiled and fried potatoes tossed with a garlic and lemon dressing.

With dishes like these to entice me, is it any wonder that on a recent trip to Israel I felt compelled to search for red tahina, determined to carry home this highly valued ingredient found almost exclusively in Gaza. Given the burgeoning fascination in the U.S. with Israel’s Arabic-inflected cuisine, I could taste its destiny in our ever-expanding global pantries. Tahina, made from raw, steamed sesame seeds, is a critical component of hummus, which Americans are consuming in stratospheric quantities, so red tahina, I surmised, was something we should know about.

Try finding it in New York City, where we think we can get anything in the world. You cannot. You’ll even have epic difficulty finding it in Jerusalem. My food-obsessed Israeli friends had never even heard of it.

To acquire red tahina, you must know someone who knows someone. It took an hour of explaining, cajoling, pointing, and sweating through the fragrant, serpentine maze of cubbyhole shops that crowd the Old City’s souk to identify someone who might sell the stuff. Then we got a lead – a friendly spice merchant at a far corner of the marketplace wrote a note in Arabic describing the location of an obscure vendor. There was no GPS for the souk, and we ran past his shadowed stall twice before guessing we were there.

Feeling like Indiana Jones, my comrades and I slipped the note to the proprietor, whereupon he disappeared into the back of his shop and silently rematerialized with a jug that looked as if it might contain a genie – or something more exciting than sesame paste. He gave us several tastes, then poured a lava-like substance into white plastic jars. These would be gifts to friends in Tel Aviv who doubted the stuff’s very existence.

The note looked like this:

More ruddy than red, this tahina is fashioned from pounded and pulverized sesame seeds that have been dry-roasted in small batches over direct fire, then processed into an oozing stream of intriguing, earthy complexity. The roasting imparts red tahina with its deep terracotta color and nutty, caramel flavor, in contrast to the more one dimensional flavor of the familiar cream-colored tahina, or black tahina, made from nigella seeds and known in the Arab world as an aphrodisiac.

Hummus is even more seductive when made with this stuff. (Interestingly, Gaza is also known for its rich red clay, which looks a lot like their brick-red tahina.) But since you won’t find red tahina at your local specialty store, you can approximate its taste --but not its unique color, texture, or its rich history – by using Chinese sesame paste (also made from roasted sesame seeds), or by adding ½ teaspoon of dark Asian sesame oil to the more ubiquitous tahina that appears to be everywhere.

It was with an open mind and a touch of sadness that I read the riveting, and sometimes provocative, new cookbook, The Gaza Kitchen, written by Laila El-Haddad and Maggie Schmitt. I had the pleasure of meeting Ms. El-Haddad at her book party launch last month in New York at the sublime restaurant ilili - whose Lebanese cuisine is a distant cousin to the flavors, aromas, and politics found in the Gazan kitchen. Ms. El-Haddad, who is a social activist, blogger and author of Gaza Mom: Palestine, Politics, Parenting, and Everything In Between, felt like an old friend. After all, there was a time, long ago, when it was possible for Jews to have Palestinian friendships in the Old City of Jerusalem and share meals, and the culinary history, which has existed between us for thousands of years. Now there is a wall, both literal and metaphoric, that shields us from the realities of everyday existence in Gaza, where home kitchens are prey to the exigencies of conflict and deprivation: sporadic electricity, unaffordable ingredients that were once kitchen staples, and the rationing of food and fuel. While I know the food of Israel well, having served as the unofficial spokesperson for Israel's food and wine industry for years, and also as one of a delegation of "Four Women Chefs for Peace" on a culinary mission to Israel in 1996, I was fascinated to learn about the cuisine of Gaza, a tiny strip of land (25 miles long and 2-1/2 to 5 miles wide) sandwiched between the desert and the sea. What immediately jumped out was the presence of fresh dill and dried dill seed, the use of fiery hot chilies, and a totally new ingredient to me "red tahina."

Red tahina, made from roasted sesame seeds, is to Gaza what pesto is to Genoa. It is virtually impossible to get it anywhere and I have asked a friend from Israel to try to find some and bring it to me when she comes to New York at the end of the month. How to use it if you can't find it? The authors suggest adding a bit of dark sesame oil to the more familiar blond tahina to approximate the taste in several of the book's recipes.

The cuisine of Gaza is Palestinian (home to 2 million people) "with its own sense of regional diversity," according to author and historian, Nancy Harmon Jenkins, who wrote the forward to the book. In Gaza, she points out, stuffed grape leaves are uniquely flavored with allspice, cardamom, nutmeg and black pepper, and that chopped chilies, both red and green, and verdant fresh dill make Gazan falafel both personal and unusual.

Food there, no less than here, is a passionate subject. The cooks at home are always women while the cooks in restaurants and outdoor stalls are always men. But it is the zibdiya that unites them in the preparation of their lusty cuisine. According to the authors, "a zibdiya is the most precious kitchen item in every household in Gaza, rich or poor." It is simply a heavy unglazed clay bowl accompanied by a lemonwood pestle used for mashing, crushing, pounding and grinding. Made from the rich red clay of Gaza, in larger forms they are also used as cooking vessels.

Their cuisine may lie at the intersection of history, geography and economy, but in The Gaza Kitchen, one is made acutely aware of how geo-political struggles find themselves revealed in a single dish. It's hard not to swoon over the description of the "signature" dish of Gaza called sumagiyya, a sumac-enhanced meat stew cooked with green chard, chickpeas, dill, chilies, and red tahina, or not to be curious about fattit ajir, a spicy roasted watermelon salad tossed with tomatoes, torn bits of tasted Arab bread, and a lashing of hot chilies and yes, fresh dill. It is a repertoire of dishes that feel like a secret...but no longer.

Now only if there was a recipe for peace. One can always hope.