Couscous

Couscous is a staple of North African cooking made from small granules of durum wheat semolina, rolled by hand and steamed. It is usually served with a stew of vegetables and meat, and it is part of everyday meals and celebrations in Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Mauritania and Libya. In 2020 it was added to UNESCO's list of intangible cultural heritage.

History

The origin of couscous is unclear, and there is no agreement on when or where it was first prepared. Food historians usually associate it with the Berber peoples of North Africa. In southern Mauritania, objects that may have been couscoussiers have been found, dated to between about 700 and 400 BCE, in a setting where millet was grown and perhaps turned into couscous, although their interpretation remains open. The food historian Lucie Bolens believes the dish is millennia old and links it to the reign of the Numidian king Masinissa, but that attribution rests more on reasoning than on direct documentation.

The first written evidence is Arabic. By the thirteenth century, cookbooks from the Maghreb and al-Andalus describe its preparation, including anonymous treatises and works by Andalusian authors such as Ibn Razin al-Tujibi. In the fourteenth century the traveller Ibn Battuta noted a version made with fonio in the Niger valley. In the Maghreb the dish was also called taam, simply meaning 'food', a sign of how central it was to the everyday table.

Couscous had a notable presence on the Iberian Peninsula, where it appears in medieval Spanish as alcuzcuz or cuzcuz and was associated with Moors and Moriscos. The name turns up in Francisco Delicado's novel El retrato de la lozana andaluza, published in Venice in 1528, and Cervantes alludes to the dish indirectly in Don Quixote. After the expulsion of the Moriscos it disappeared from traditional Spanish and Portuguese cooking, although its name left traces in the vocabulary, such as the metaphorical forms formigos and hormiguillos.

Its arrival in Europe was late and largely colonial. A traveller described a similar food in Toulon in 1630, and a reference from Brittany dates from the late seventeenth century. It entered French cooking only at the start of the twentieth century, carried by the French colonial empire and the Pieds-Noirs, the French settlers born in Algeria. Today it is widely eaten in France, where it was voted the third most popular dish in a 2011 survey. Ligurian families who settled in Carloforte, on Sardinia, brought it there in the eighteenth century, and in Trapani, Sicily, it is still made following a medieval recipe.

Culture

Couscous is, above all, a dish for sharing. In Morocco it is traditionally linked to Friday, after the midday prayer, and it is served on a large communal clay platter called a gsaa. The seven-vegetable version, with a broth of beef, lamb or chicken and carrots, turnips, pumpkin, courgette, cabbage and chickpeas, is perhaps the most recognisable from the country. There is also couscous tfaya, sweet and savoury at once, with slow-cooked onions, raisins, cinnamon and toasted almonds.

Preparation has a communal side too. In the traditional method, groups of people came together over several days to make large batches by hand, which were then dried in the sun and kept for months. Today most production is mechanised and sold worldwide, yet in many homes handmade couscous remains tied to family memory. Commercial couscous is usually pre-steamed and ready in a few minutes with hot water or stock.

Regional variations are numerous. In Algeria the dish has different names depending on the area: seksu in Kabylia, kseksou in Algiers, aberbuc or barbucha in the Aurès and northern Constantine, and uccu in the Mzab. In Tunisia it is usually spicy, made with harissa, and often served with fish or seafood; its dessert form is called masfuf. In Libya it is mostly served with lamb, and in Morocco with vegetables and broth. In Mauritania the grain is coarser and darker, and it is accompanied by dhen, the local clarified butter.

Outside the Maghreb the dish has taken on its own forms. In Egypt it is prepared as a sweet, with butter, hot water, sugar, cinnamon, grated coconut and nuts, and eaten at breakfast, as a light supper or as dessert. In Malta, kusksu is a small round pasta cooked with broad beans and ġbejniet, a local cheese. In the Sahel, millet or sorghum couscous is a staple, sometimes with okra or baobab leaves. In Brazil, the cuscuz of the Northeast, made from cornmeal, is a distant relative, eaten hot with meat or cold with milk.

Its current presence is reflected in international recognition. In December 2020, UNESCO inscribed the knowledge and practices linked to couscous, submitted jointly by Algeria, Mauritania, Morocco and Tunisia, which the organisation described as an example of international cooperation. It should be distinguished from similar foods: Israeli couscous is an extruded, toasted pasta that shares neither ingredients nor method with North African couscous.

Trivia