Muhammara Period BOrigin theory CVerified

Muhammara is an appetizer, or meze, said to originate in the food culture of Aleppo in northern Syria: a paste of red chili and walnuts ground together with breadcrumbs. Its name, Arabic for 'the reddened one,' says plainly both the color of the dish and the ingredient that gives that color.

What produces this red is the chili pepper, originally a crop of the Americas. After crops began moving between the continents, it passed by way of the Ottoman Empire to reach the eastern Mediterranean in the sixteenth century. Near Aleppo, the local Aleppo pepper took root over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Until the chili had crossed the sea and reached this land, neither the red nor the heat of this dish had any way of coming into being. The walnuts and breadcrumbs it is paired with were long-established local foods, on the everyday kitchen's shelves from early on.

The making itself is not difficult. The chili is roasted and ground, then worked together with walnuts and breadcrumbs; no special equipment is needed. This dish found its place at the family table and within the meze culture of setting out many small plates to share. Amid the bustle of the food of the city of Aleppo, it settled in as one of those plates.

Muhammara's beginning has a part that is firm and a part that is unsettled.

What is firm is the lower line, the point after which the dish could exist. The chili that gives it its red crossed from the Americas, passed through the Ottoman Empire to reach the eastern Mediterranean in the sixteenth century, and the Aleppo pepper took root thereafter. So muhammara cannot be pushed back earlier than that. This one point does not move.

Just short of it, one telling circulates widely. 'Muhammara has been eaten since the eighteenth century, or before,' food articles and blogs repeat. Yet no record from that time is ever attached to show such age. The sources cited are always from the twentieth century, and not one cookbook or document from before the eighteenth century that set the dish down comes forward. That it could have been made in the eighteenth century, given the chili's arrival, is not denied, but grounds for saying it was actually eaten then are not to be found for now.

Then when is the earliest firmly recorded account? It is the entry in an encyclopedia that gathered together the things of Aleppo. The book came out in 1981, but its author wrote it in the mid-1950s and had already completed the manuscript. So by the middle of the twentieth century at the latest, muhammara was firmly established as part of Aleppo's food heritage. Yet contemporary records from before that still do not turn up.

What is unsettled is where it was born. One view holds that it arose from the food culture and meze tradition of the city of Aleppo, and food historians largely support this. But since the firmly recorded account of the dish comes down only to the mid-twentieth century, one cannot say from contemporary documents that it was born in Aleppo in the early modern period.

The other view does not see muhammara as the invention of a single city but as a dish that grew up together across the Levant. The food region that shares red chili, walnuts, and pomegranate molasses stretches from the eastern Mediterranean to southeastern Anatolia. Turkey has a similar dish called acuka, it is found in western Armenia as well, and in recent years the southeastern Anatolian city of Gaziantep obtained a geographical indication. That the same dish lives across so wide a range under changing names is recorded in food-history scholarship too. Rather than spreading from a single birthplace, it reads as something that arose side by side across a region sharing the same ingredients.

Though it is clear after when the dish could exist, when and where it took hold is not settled. The received view of an Aleppo origin is appealing, but the early-modern record that would fix it as the sole origin has not yet been found.