COUSCOUS : A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Noodle

The story of couscous is one of elegance, innovation--and laziness.

Of course, most worthwhile inventions serve laziness (or “save time and energy,” as we prefer to say). In the case of couscous, a lazy way of doing things accidentally opened the door to a whole new aesthetic realm: a way of cooking grain into something incomparably light and delicate.

It looks as if couscous was invented in the 11th or 12th Century in northern Morocco or Algeria, or maybe even in Spain, which in those days was culturally and politically part of North Africa. Originally it was a hurry-up way of making noodles without kneading the dough.

We knead noodle dough in order to “awaken” or “develop” gluten. Unlike the other proteins in wheat, gluten forms long, springy structures in well-kneaded dough. If you try to make noodles from under-kneaded wheat dough, however, they won’t have gluten’s resilience and they’ll turn into mush when you boil them.

So will pasta made from most other grains, because they lack gluten (an exception being the Chinese “cellophane” noodles that are made from glutinous rice). This is why cooks around the world usually deal with grains other than wheat either by boiling them or making them into unleavened flat-breads, which are more or less porridge dried out by baking.

Unlike noodle dough, couscous isn’t kneaded one tiny bit. The traditional way of making it is to put a big bowl full of flour in your lap, sprinkle it with lightly salted water and then run your fingers around the bowl in circles and figure-eights until little granules form. From time to time, you sieve the flour to get the granules out. You segregate them by size and dry them until you’re ready to use them.

Since the granules haven’t been kneaded and the gluten is still “sleeping,” the only thing holding them together is the shorter strands of other proteins, which don’t have to be “developed.” Naturally, if you boil couscous (especially hand-made couscous) like pasta, it turns into a porridgy mess. If you steam it, though, it fluffs up into something completely lacking the chewy quality of gluten--something amazingly tender, practically ethereal.

At the time couscous was invented, the Moors were making several kinds of noodles, mostly little orzo- like soup noodles, rather than linguine-like strands of pasta. The noodle recipes in two 13th-Century cookbooks from Moorish Spain say to knead dough and then “twist” it into tiny lumps described as looking like small garbanzos ( hummais ), wheat grains or peppercorns.

The 13th-Century cookbooks already knew the couscous technique, however. One of them, entitled “The Superfluity of the Table,” gives a recipe called zabzin , said to be a dish from the Spanish quarter of the city of Fez, Morocco. It uses the couscous technique of sprinkling water on flour and running the fingers through it. The recipe says to make granules “like small garbanzos.”

Another recipe in the same book describes making the usual sort of Moorish soup noodle out of kneaded dough, “twisted” into balls the size of peppercorns. However, it casually mentions that these dough balls might also be “spun in the kneading trough like zabzin , for him who wants to accomplish it quickly.” The name of this noodle-or-couscous deal is muhammas --which means “made like garbanzos,” echoing zabzin ‘s small-garbanzo size, even though muhammas itself is in the peppercorn league.

The dual nature of muhammas lives on. Even today, mhammas or mhammsa (the modern Arabic form) or timhemmezt (the Berber form) is a noodle in some parts of North Africa and a largish couscous in others.

The word couscous itself has the same dual nature in a 13th-Century cookbook from Syria. “The Link to the Beloved” gives two couscous recipes: kuskusu , a small kneaded soup noodle, and “ kuskusu of the North Africans,” which is proper couscous, made by rolling and steaming. So we can’t be certain whether couscous or muhammas came first.

And it’s anybody’s guess how the idea of steaming came about. If the first people to stir up a bunch of couscous granules had tried to boil them, the result would have been disappointing, and couscous might never have become popular. Maybe the first workable procedure was the one spelled out on American couscous boxes (and despised by North African couscous connoisseurs): Pour boiling water over the granules and cover them until the grain smells cooked.

Sooner or later, though, whether by accident or experiment, somebody steamed couscous. The results clearly impressed people, and cooks went wild for the idea of steaming. Even today, Moroccans often steam regular noodles instead of boiling them. Both the 13th-Century Moorish cookbooks actually give recipes for steaming bread crumbs like couscous, complete with the process of taking the contents out of the steamer several times during the steaming and buttering it and raking with the fingers to keep the steamed product light and fluffy.

Once people found how appealing couscous was, it became a necessity of life to North Africans. A 16th-Century Arabic book entitled “The Breath of Scent” recounts an anecdote from the early 14th Century:

“ ‘A North African stayed with me and fell sick,’ recalled an old man, ‘and the sickness lasted so long that I begged God to comfort both him and me with either death or health. In a dream I saw the Prophet, prayers and peace be upon him, and he said, “Feed him couscous.” ’ “

As you’d expect in an anecdote of this kind, the couscous totally cured the mysterious ailment.

The anthropologist Sophie Ferchiou has speculated that couscous is a way of preserving flour. Whole grain doesn’t spoil; the germ is protected from the air by the seed coat (bran). Once the grain is ground into flour, though, the oils in the germ start to go rancid.

Traditionally, couscous is made from freshly ground whole-grain flour, which is much better for the purpose than refined flour, because the bits of bran and germ gather the smaller starch particles around them, serving as the nuclei for couscous granules, much as grains of sand form pearls. Ferchiou points out that this process protects the oxidizable part of the grain by surrounding it with a coat of starch. Not everybody accepts her theory, but it is interesting that North African travelers always used to take the largest size of couscous with them on journeys, and presumably the larger the variety, the better protected it is from staling.

Probably the real reason for the popularity of couscous is aesthetic. In many parts of North Africa, wheat is difficult to raise, and people mostly eat gluten-less grains such as millet, barley or corn. Couscous doesn’t depend on gluten, though, so you don’t need wheat to make it. If it weren’t for couscous, grain cookery in many parts of North Africa would just about begin and end with porridge.

You don’t even have to use grain at all. In the Kabyle Mountains of Algeria, ahethut is a sort of couscous made from a mixture of barley flour, bran and ground acorns. The Teda, who live around the Tibesti Mountains deep in the Sahara, sometimes use the seeds of a variety of goosefoot weed, which makes a black couscous. (Restaurants questing for novel colors in food might want to think twice--the Teda only make black couscous in time of famine.)

Our word couscous comes from the Arabic term kuskusu , but the Arabs clearly borrowed it from one of the indigenous Berber languages of North Africa. Inconveniently, no Berber language uses exactly that word; in Morocco and Algeria, where most present-day Berbers live, they usually call it seksu .

Kuskusu / seksu refers to a middling-sized granule. The medieval recipes also mention larger couscous in the “tiny garbanzo” range, such as zabzin . The recipe in “The Superfluity of the Table” also refers to zabzin as barkus , which is clearly the same word as berkukes , the usual North African word for a larger size of couscous. Berkukes seems to be something like the word couscous with the Berber prefix ber -, meaning large.

The medieval books sometimes refer to a smaller size too, which they compare to peppercorns or ants. It must be the ancestor of seffa or mesfuf , the smallest modern grade of couscous. Traditionally mesfuf is steamed over water and then flavored with butter, rather than being steamed over stew and served with the stew as a sauce.

Mesfuf appears to be an Arabic word, like muhammas , which suggests that the development of couscous took place in both the Arabic- and Berber-speaking populations. Another evidence is the fact that the Berbers (who now are primarily found the mountains of Morocco and Algeria, the Touareg territory of the Sahara and scattered villages and oases) include several Arabic words in their couscous vocabulary.

The Berbers have a couple of unique terms of their own. Originally abelbul may have meant a large or coarse sort of couscous, as it still does in northern Morocco, but today it’s a barley couscous in Algeria and corn couscous in the Atlas Mountains. Morocco has special Berber names for couscous dressed with sour milk: sikuk in the north, ihellehen in the Atlas Mountains. (In the north, a suspiciously similar-looking word, ahelhul , means corn couscous.)

On the other hand, in the Berber heartland, the Atlas Mountains of Morocco, many dialects call couscous by the Arabic for “food” ( ta’am ), or by a word derived from the Arabic word meaning “to twist.” For that matter, North African Arabs often call couscous ta’am.

It’s only in North Africa that couscous is an essential part of life. Still, couscous has been known in Egypt, Syria and Lebanon for hundreds of years. It’s also traditional in Sicily and Brazil. In Africa it has spread to Chad, Mali, Senegal and Nigeria. And it’s still spreading.

For instance, it reached the Touareg of the Sahara only in this century, but now the words keskesu and tikhammezin are common in their oases and camps. Forty or 50 years ago, a visitor among the Touaregs could look forward to nothing but millet porridge, perhaps baked in sand. These days, though, when a Touareg says howdy, you can expect to feast on couscous.

It’s a little more work than millet porridge, but it’s worth it. And when you think about it, it’s not that much work.