Harira Period BOrigin theory CVerified

Harira is a home dish of Morocco and the wider Maghreb, the western reaches of North Africa. On Ramadan nights, when the day's fast breaks at sunset, custom calls for easing the stomach first with a warm soup, and harira has long held the centre of that table. In Moroccan Jewish homes the same soup is served to break the fast of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.

The foundation of this soup is old. Chickpeas and lentils, thickened with flour and simmered slowly, belong to the Arab cookery that flourished in the medieval Maghreb and in al-Andalus, southern Iberia. The thirteenth-century cookbook of Ibn Razin, Fudalat al-khiwan (Tunis, around 1260), records chapters on chickpeas and lentils and a thickened pottage of pulses, evidence that such bean soups were indeed present in the Middle Ages. The name is said to come from Arabic harir, "silk," after the soup's smooth texture. The idea of a thick soup built around pulses is an old lineage, handed down over centuries.

Today's harira, though — the soup keyed to the red and the tartness of tomato — is not that old lineage itself. The tomato is a New World crop, and it took hold in the fields and markets of Morocco only in the nineteenth century. Until this fruit crossed the sea and spread through the Maghreb, a tomato-based harira had no way of coming into being. The earlier bean soups most likely leaned on other sources of tartness and body: fermented milk, perhaps, or the thickening of grain.

So two spans of time are folded into harira. There is the old backbone of a bean soup carried down from the Middle Ages, and there is the form we know today, which took shape in the nineteenth century once it had taken on the tomato. It is a long-transmitted dish, yet its present face is newer than one might think.

Harira is often lumped together as "an old Moroccan soup." The food historian Gil Marks, in his encyclopedia, likewise gives harira a Moroccan origin and derives the name from the Arabic word for "silk." Judged by its skeleton — pulses thickened and simmered — that antiquity is not in doubt.

But laying that antiquity directly onto today's tomato-red harira throws things off. One issue is the ingredient. The tomato was not originally a North African crop; it came into Morocco through Mediterranean trade. The earliest record to show tomatoes settled in the country is the travel account of the German explorer Gerhard Rohlfs, published in 1874, from journeys that began when he entered Morocco in 1861 and took him across the Draa and Tafilalt in 1864. Writing of the food of Fez, he noted that the nearby Sebou river yielded excellent fish, always to be had at the market ready prepared in oil sauce, peppered and coloured red with tomatoes. South of the Atlas, in the gardens of the Draa oases, he listed the tomato growing alongside cabbage, turnip, carrot, onion, melon, chilli, and garlic. By the middle of the nineteenth century, then, in the markets of an inland city and in the pre-Saharan oases alike, the tomato was already an everyday vegetable and the base of a red sauce. No record of tomatoes in use in Morocco before that has yet surfaced. To treat the tomato-based harira of today as "unchanged since the Middle Ages" is to mistake the era.

The other issue is the name. It is sometimes claimed that "a thick dish called harira appears in a thirteenth-century Andalusi cookbook," but this cannot be confirmed in the original. Tracing the oldest surviving Maghrebi and Andalusi cookbooks, what is recorded is the genre of tharida, a thickened pottage of pulses; the name harira itself does not turn up in those texts. What is old is this kind of soup as a genre, not a dish bearing the name harira that is equally old.

It makes sense, then, to see the single dish as two. There is the old lineage of a bean soup rooted in the medieval Maghreb and al-Andalus, and there is the form assembled after the tomato spread through the region. This is not to doubt the old lineage. What is new is the tomato-based harira now set on the table. A dish with a long history was, at a certain point, recomposed into a different face by a single ingredient that had come from outside, and harira is a quiet instance of exactly that.