Pre-tomato chickpea-and-lentil thickened soup (Harira precursor) Period COrigin theory CVerified

For most people, harira means a thick, tomato-reddened legume soup. As the first thing eaten to break the fast during Ramadan, it is woven deep into Moroccan homes. But that red appearance is, in the history of harira, relatively new.

The tomato is a crop that traveled from the New World to the Old, and it took root as a common cooking ingredient on North African tables only in the nineteenth century. Before that, in the medieval Maghreb and al-Andalus (spanning today's Morocco through southern Spain), a different legume soup was simmered without any knowledge of the tomato at all.

That soup was made of chickpeas and lentils, cooked soft and thickened. Both chickpeas and lentils are long-established legumes of this land, on everyday tables from early on. The craft of breaking down the pulses and giving the broth its body (tharida) was likewise something the region's Arab cookery had long possessed. A cookbook said to have been compiled in Tunis in the mid-thirteenth century sets out a chapter for chickpeas and a chapter for lentils and records a thick legume pottage. It carried neither the red of the tomato nor the sting of hot spices, a bowl made of the savor of the pulses themselves.

Like the harira of today, this old soup was a warming everyday pottage. But it is best tasted as a separate bowl from a separate age, one that lacked the tomato as its defining element. Rather than a straight single road leading to today's tomato-based harira, it is better thought of as an older layer of the legume soups that once flowed through the same land.

Harira is sometimes introduced as "an ancient Amazigh (Berber) dish going back 2,200 years." A soup the desert peoples have simmered since the distant past: put that way, it is a grand and captivating story.

But the foundation under that grandeur turns out to be thin. The claim traces back to something a chef is said to have recounted by word of mouth, and no independent source or material evidence reaching back to antiquity can be found. More decisive still: even reading the English translations of the oldest surviving Maghrebi and Andalusi cookbooks, the anonymous Andalusi cookbook (around 1223) and Ibn Razin's cookbook (around 1260), the word "harira" itself appears nowhere. What these books set down is tharida, the genre of thickened legume stews, not a single dish bearing the name harira. "Harira" as a named dish appears in print only in the nineteenth century, with a record from around 1885 serving as the earliest handle we have.

So the billing of "a 2,200-year-old Amazigh dish" is best set aside, honestly, as an origin legend that lacks documentary support.

Yet this is not to say harira has no old background. What is old is not the name but the genre. The lineage of soups made by simmering chickpeas and lentils to a silky thickness did indeed exist in the medieval Maghreb and al-Andalus. And that genre stands at a different stage from today's tomato-reddened harira. The tomato took root in this region's cooking only in the nineteenth century, and the medieval bowl, knowing nothing of it, was rounded out with other sources of tartness or the thickening of grains. The old thick legume soup and today's red harira: the lineage may connect, but they are not the same bowl.