Vavilov’s throwaway remarks led me to seek more on the history of couscous, in which I promised to return to his note that “fermented wheat is sold at every market in Tunisia and Algeria under the name of ‘cous-cous’”. I turned to Charles Perry, scholar, historian, and all around good egg. He said:
The Arabs do know of sprouting, but it’s uncommon and in my experience applied exclusively to pulses such as fava beans. I’ve never heard of interrupting the sprouting process and I can’t find a native Arabic word for malt. The entry in The Oxford English-Arabic Dictionary begins by explaining what (barley) malt is and then offers “al-malt” as the translation.
Is Vavilov confusing couscous with bulgur wheat, which he surely came across elsewhere in his travels? It seems unlikely. My feeling is that he would have included a phrase such as, which elsewhere they call bulgur. Has an error of translation rendered as “fermentation” some other words. I cannot say, [1] but given that the grains are soaked and left for up to two days, I can’t imagine that anything else is going on. Perry kindly asked a North African chef friend his view. His reply:
Yes, some of the whole grain wheat is processed this way. They wet it and dry it. I don’t know about it being steamed for couscous, though. But such a grain boiled for making into a gruel or porridge would still be called couscous.These days it would be a food for the poor. In the 1920s or earlier “the poor” and desperate would have been just about everyone in Algeria and Tunisia. Today wheat treated this way is still made into a porridge, but I don’t know how widespread it is anymore. Algeria is now one of the world’s largest grain importers.
Which I suspect is as far as we can go with this. Unless you know more …
Notes:
- And in passing note that not being able to read Russian makes me somewhat ill equipped to give Vavilov his voice in the internet age. [↩]
