Couscous investigated

Vavilov closes his remarks on collecting in Tunisia by noting that the locals prefer their traditional hard (durum) wheat, as opposed to the French, who like bread made of soft wheat. He describes how they use it:

After threshing the wheat and setting aside a part of it for seeding, the rest is usually preserved in piles. Water is poured over the hard wheat and kept there for one-and-a-half to two days. The grains swell and a fermentation process takes place within the grains, a conversion of starch into sugar. Then the grain is spread out and dried and finally used for making a kind of gruel. Such fermented wheat is sold at every market in Tunisia and Algeria under the name of ‘cous-cous’. This is a very primitive use of grain, a relic of the past, which apparently has some connection to southeastern Asia, where the population mainly nourishes itself on boiled rice. Cous-cous is a kind of ‘wheaten rice.’

That’s a nice thought, which prompted Wilma Lingle to comment:

Vavilov would likely be amazed that couscous (or today’s version of it) is popular around the world. I wonder if his description here is the first account of couscous in western science.

I can’t say whether Vavilov’s is the first account in western science (probably not) but it is clearly of interest even if not the first.

The first thing that struck me is that I have never heard of “fermented wheat” being called cous-cous. In itself that means nothing, of course, but it did prompt me to delve into the history of couscous; nowhere could I find anything about soaking or fermenting the wheat prior to making couscous. More on that next week.

The other striking thing is Vavilov’s insistence that the Mahgreb’s foodways and agriculture are linked to those of southeastern Asia. True there is a line, sometimes called the couscous line, which runs south from the Gulf of Sirte in Libya and separates the couscous-eating Mahgreb to the west from the rice-eating cuisine of Egypt and other Arab states to the East. Is it really fair, though, to call couscous “wheaten rice”? What of the various other ground and pre-prepared cereals that are also effectively a form of quick-cook carbohydrate staple? Are they poor imitations of rice too?

What is couscous anyway? It matters, a bit, because it informs some of the discussion of history. Most modern accounts say that it is a form of semolina, steamed and dried and then steamed once again when it is needed for a meal. Made by hand it is a time-consuming and laborious process, a little like making pasta.

Charles Perry, a food historian who was kind enough to share a copy of his article Couscous and its Cousins, ^[1] prepared for the Oxford Food Symposium 1989, has one of the best descriptions:

[I]t is made by a process of its own that does not involve kneading: A bowl of flour is sprinkled intermittently with salted water as the fingers of the right hand rake through it in sweeping, circular movements, causing balls of dough to coagulate. The granules are also rubbed between the palms or against the side of the bowl to shape them, and when complete they are dried.

The “correct” size for couscous varies a little according to culture and the use to which it will later be put, and repeated sieving is used to ensure uniformity. “The size of an ant’s head” is one cookbook’s advice, and when the grains are ready they are steamed up to three times and then spread out to dry.

While the process is time consuming and laborious, it is also intensely social. The women of an extended family come together for a day or two a few times a year to prepare the couscous, the task leavened with news and gossip, songs and stories, and endless cups of coffee and tea. Each family then takes its share of the couscous home, where well-dried couscous stores almost indefinitely.

Semolina is tricky stuff to get to grips with too. Some sources will tell you it is coarse ground flour from hard wheat, others that it is “husked and crushed, but unground” or “the hard part of the grain of hard-wheat, which resists the grinding of the millstone.” Confused? I was. I think it is simply the endosperm of the wheat seed, what’s left after the coarser bran is sieved out. It can then be ground as fine as you like. Made from durum wheat, it is yellow and called semolina. Made from bread wheat, it is white and called flour. ^[2]

Perry points out that:

Traditionally couscous is made from freshly ground whole grain, which in fact is much better suited to the purpose than bolted flour, because starch readily accumulates around the larger and harder particles of bran and germ, much as a pearl forms around a grain of sand. The resulting granule is, in effect, a grain turned inside out, with the starch on the outside and the germ, the most perishable part of the grain, on the inside, sealed off from the air. Now it can be stored for months or years without danger of staling.

Back to the history of couscous. The word, which refers both to the uncooked grains and the dishes for which they are the foundation — is most likely derived from the Berber word seksu, strong evidence that the food and its preparation predate the Arab conquest of North Africa between 632 and 732. The problem is that, as Vavilov noted, couscous is strongly associated with durum wheat, and that was introduced by the Arabs. Scholars, naturally, are divided.

Some point to pots that resemble primitive couscoussièrs found in Berber tombs dated to 238 to 149 BCE as evidence that the process was a Berber invention, which they adapted to the new crop that the Arabs introduced. Others dismiss the pots, and say that couscous is a Mahgreb invention that spread from there after the arrival of the Arabs, and that “the word is onomatopoetic, an imitation of the rushing, rattling sound that the couscous granules make as they are rolled under the hand”. ^[3] Or maybe the onomatopoeia represents “the sound of the steam rising in the couscoussièr,” which food historian Clifford Wright describes as “the most unlikely explanation”.

Charles Perry concedes that “its early history is obscure” but adduces evidence that couscous does not date “from remote antiquity”. He points out that the earliest written references to couscous date from the 13th and 14th centuries, and that most of them write about the links between couscous and small soup noodles. This, Perry notes, suggests that the technique was relatively recent to those writers. Perry says that “couscous arose among the Berbers of northern Algeria and Morocco during the obscure period between the 11th century collapse of the Zirid Kingdom and the triumph of the Almohads in the 13th”.

The crucial point is that the technique of pre-cooking little balls of starch and then drying them is found right across Africa. The people of the Sahel do it with sorghum and millet, the Berbers do it with barley and even, more recently, maize, which is also the basis for couscous in Brazil. The starch doesn’t even have to be a cereal. Attiéké, a variety of couscous that is a staple food in Côte d’Ivoire and is also known to surrounding areas of West Africa, is made from grated cassava.

Perry says:

[O]ne of the attractions of the couscous technique for an African cook is that is produces a light, elegant grain food which, unlike pasta or leavened bread, is held together not by gluten but by the weaker proteins found in all grains, and so may be made with grains that are otherwise suitable only for porridge or coarse unleavened bread. … It should be noted also that other things than couscous are sometimes steamed in North Africa, such as dshisha (cracked wheat or barley) and the usual Arab noodles reshta (rather like orzo ^[4]) and she‘riya (vermicelli). One medieval Spanish Arab cookbook actually gives a description of steaming breadcrumbs like couscous.

Was couscous invented south of the Sahara, making its way north to the Berbers with trade caravans? Or was it invented in the mountains of North Africa, moving out from there? Or was some clever traveller inspired to invent wheaten rice? I’m not sure we’ll ever know, although it is fun to discuss these things, perhaps even over a couscous.

The different ways that people prepare their harvests to lengthen storage and improve portability are a fascinating topic, with roasting and boiling or steaming among the simplest processes. That still leaves me wondering about Vavilov’s fermented wheat … about which, as I promised, more next week.

Notes:

1. Perry, Charles. “Couscous and Its Cousins.” In Staple Foods, proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 1989: Prospect Books, 1990: pp. 176-178. [↩]
2. Durum wheat is tetraploid, bread wheat hexaploid. “Hard” often refers to protein content, but protein content is not itself a good distinction between durum and bread wheats. [↩]
3. Kitty Morse, Couscous: Past and Presence. [↩]
4. Not barley, but the little pasta that resembles cereal grains. [↩]