Leftover-bread salad (before tomato fattoush) Period COrigin theory CVerified

Before the tomato-laden fattoush of today came a stale-bread salad without tomato. The two often travel under the same name, yet they are best read as separate stages.

The star is old khubz, the flat wheat bread of the Levant. It was a long-established local staple, on rural tables from early on, and the dish begins with the plainest of impulses: not throwing that bread away. Using up bread that had gone hard was part of everyday household thrift, and it is from that thrift that this dish grew.

No special equipment is needed. The hardened bread is toasted or dry-roasted and broken up, given a sour edge with sumac (a tart red spice) or lemon, and tossed with whatever greens were close at hand: cucumber, onion, mint, purslane. All of it is handwork done at the ordinary hearth.

Nor does it belong to any court. This is a food of Levantine farming households, made by ordinary people in the course of everyday frugality. It sits at the opposite pole from lavish banqueting: a dish built on the wisdom of making the most of leftovers.

Two stages live inside the single word fattoush: an older layer, the tomato-free stale-bread salad, and the familiar modern form that settled once tomato was in hand. This dish belongs to the former.

That a tomato-free stale-bread salad was long present in the Levant can now be treated as scholarly consensus. In her translation and commentary, Annals of the Caliphs' Kitchens (Brill, 2007), the historian Nawal Nasrallah points to a resemblance between an older form of fattoush and the tharid (dried bread with cucumber, herbs, and oil) recorded by the tenth-century Ibn Sayyar al-Warraq. In the late nineteenth century, the Swedish orientalist Herman Almkvist set down a fettush in his record of vocabulary gathered from the mouths of people in Syria and Egypt, published on page 392 of the proceedings of the Eighth International Congress of Orientalists (Brill, 1891; the congress itself met in 1889). The entry reads: old, dry bread is laid in water, and once it has softened and the water has been pressed out, it is eaten with finely cut cucumber (or onion), mint, purslane, olives, salt, vinegar, and oil. A scholarly reading and a late-nineteenth-century record taken down by ear, two sources of different provenance, point to the same shape, and the antiquity of this dish as part of the fattat family of leftover-bread cookery is no longer in doubt. Almkvist's entry contains no tomato. His vocabulary, though, was collected in Syria and Egypt, and the entry carries no mark of which place this way of making the dish came from. Nor can this single entry tell us whether a tomato version already existed at the time.

There is, meanwhile, a further view: that folding today's common tomato fattoush directly into this pre-tomato stale-bread salad goes too far. In the written record, New World tomato appears in the Levant in 1756 (in the first edition of Alexander Russell's The Natural History of Aleppo; 1694 at the earliest), and it took root as an everyday local food only in the nineteenth century. A tomato version could only have formed after that arrival. On this point views still divide, between reading the two as a break and reading them as continuous.

Split along the right axis, the two views do not collide. The antiquity of the stale-bread salad as a genre and the fact that a tomato version could only arise after tomato's arrival run on different clocks. The pre-history dish treated here is the stage that needed no tomato at all, standing on local bread and a handful of nearby greens.