Before being a pile of tiny golden balls accompanied by tasty toppings, couscous is a grain preparation made from semolina. Its journey and multiplicity are all the more astonishing as the familiarity of the dish eclipses its history. A small transcultural exploration in the South of France, where the ties to the great Berber-origin specialty are ancestral.
At Fémina in Marseille, Mustapha Kachetel has a beloved recipe: mountain barley couscous with dried vegetables, which is hearty. This renowned establishment, one of the oldest family-run restaurants still in operation in the Phocaean city, was founded in 1921 by Mustapha's great-grandfather, who came to France with his brothers from the highlands of Kabylie where winters are harsh. The beautiful story, already spanning four generations, testifies to the centuries-old bond that unites Provence and couscous. Every year since 2018, the Kouss.Kouss festival has called out in all neighborhoods of Marseille l’Africaine[1], inviting the great Mediterranean port to celebrate the specialty inscribed in UNESCO's intangible cultural heritage.
It is in La Cuisinière provençale, a bestseller whose initial edition dates back to 1897, that the first couscous recipe in France was published at the very beginning of the 20th century[2]. “Although this dish is essentially Arab, Provence is too closely connected with the North African regions for us to resist the request that has been made to us many times to include this exotic dish in our book”, wrote Jean-Baptiste Reboul, before reproducing the recipe of a Marseille cook who went to Algeria and himself authored several works. This text, present in all subsequent editions of the bible of regional cuisine, explains how to roll the grain with semolina, far from the fanciful digressions of other 19th century writers.
Did you say couscous?
For the word “ couscous ” primarily refers to an original grain preparation commonly called “ grain ”. Charged with rites and symbols, it is made by agglutinating moistened semolina and rolling it between the skilled hands of women or, in its industrial version, mechanically. It is by metonymy (to make an image) that couscous has taken on the more common meaning today of a complete dish built around the grain. This is steamed and accompanied by various elements.
This rolling technique, likely born in the Middle Ages in rural communities of North Africa[3], originally concerned mainly durum wheat and barley, two staple grains around the Mediterranean. For the Fémina, Mustapha Kachetel sources the barley grain from his native Algeria. It can also be found from the Moroccan manufacturer Dari under the name belboula. However, durum wheat has become widely predominant, without completely erasing the diversity developed over the centuries. The manufacturing process is, in fact, transposable to all kinds of local resources: a semolina or a flour, and roll away!
The Kouss.Kouss festival precisely honors this plurality. The founding legend of Marseille, whose port was described as the “ meeting place of the whole world ” by Alexandre Dumas, does it not recount the union, sealed by a banquet, between a beautiful local woman and a navigator from another shore of the Mediterranean?
Back to the roots
In the Maghreb cradle, several ancestral, regional, or seasonal couscous varieties are experiencing a resurgence of interest. They are made with other grains or raw materials (rye, corn, millet, sorghum, chestnut, acorn, carob…), used as complementary ingredients or substitutes. They can also be supplemented with wild plants or dried herbs (nettles, oregano, thyme, lavender…), or even prepared according to specific techniques, like the Algerian “ couscous noir ” fermented in underground granaries.
Industrial producers have jumped on the bandwagon, like Dari which offers several grains, including a baddaz of corn from an old Moroccan tradition. In Provence, the family business Carret Munos, whose origins date back to the 1960s in Casablanca, produces a wide range of grains that are particularly light on the palate thanks to a semi-artisanal couscous machine: durum wheat, barley, spelt, chestnut, hemp, sesame, buckwheat, chickpeas, lentils, split peas… Old recipes and contemporary creations coexist flexibly.
Beyond the desert and the seas
The cultural restaurant Les grandes Tables, the origin of Kouss.Kouss, also carries the cooperation project “African cuisines,” and the festival does not forget to celebrate the couscous from Sub-Saharan Africa, numerous and just as traditional as in the north of the continent[4]. “In Senegal, among the Peuls, one enjoys a renowned couscous, the thiéré, prepared with millet or corn flour […], specify Hadjira Mouhoub and Claudine Rabaa in Les aventures du couscous[5]. In Côte d'Ivoire, the couscous dish is called attiéké, made with grated cassava, fermented for several days in water and served with fried fish. In Niger, couscous is made from rice seasoned with a peanut paste, and in Benin, wassa-wassa is cooked, made with yam flour.”
This north-south journey results, for historian Mohamed Oubahli, from significant trans-Saharan exchanges between the 11th and 14th centuries[6]. The Sahara thus also serves as a link between regions and peoples, like the Mediterranean and even the Atlantic Ocean: if couscous has long been present in the Near East, Sicily, or Portugal, it is also common in Brazil, where it arrived via the Iberian Peninsula and through the transatlantic slave trade. There, it is most often rolled with corn flour, sometimes cassava or rice, and is subject to various preparations. Tell the journeys of couscous to a “ platiste ”, and they can only observe how round the earth is!
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[1] Pascal Blanchard, Marseille porte Sud. Un siècle d'histoire coloniale et d'immigration, La Découverte and Jeanne Laffitte, 2005.
[2] Mohamed Oubahli, “ A history of pasta in Western Mediterranean. Arab-Berber pastas and their diffusion in Latin Europe in the Middle Ages, Horizons maghrébins no. 55, 2006.
[3] Hélène Franconie, Monique Chastanet, and François Sigaut (eds.), Couscous, boulgour et polenta. Transforming and consuming grains around the world, Karthala, 2010.
[4] Monique Chastanet. “ Couscous "à la sahélienne" (Senegal, Mali, Mauritania) ”, in Couscous, boulgour et polenta. Transforming and consuming grains around the world, Karthala, 2010.
[5] Hadjira Mouhoub, Claudine Rabaa, The adventures of couscous, Actes Sud, 2003.
[6] Mohamed Oubahli, “ The gestures of wheat: transforming grains ”, Le Grand Mezzé, Actes Sud/MUCEM, 2021.
Mayalen Zubillaga, a culinary author, grew up on the shores of the Berre pond surrounded by fava beans, mullets, and petrochemical scents. Falling into a pot of meatballs when she was little, she cooks and writes in all directions, exploring both pan-bagnat, salted anchovies, and the ecumenical magic of chickpeas.
Cover Photo: vecstock on Freepik