Harissa Period BOrigin theory CVerified

Harissa is Tunisia's signature hot condiment: sun-dried chilies pounded in a mortar and worked together with garlic, coriander, salt, and olive oil. It is stirred into soups, spread over meat and fish, and served alongside couscous. In Tunisian homes and markets it is an indispensable pantry staple, and from there it has spread across the whole of the Maghreb. In 2022 the craft and its attendant food culture were inscribed on UNESCO's list of Intangible Cultural Heritage, publicly confirming that harissa is Tunisian in origin and woven into Tunisian society.

The story of this taste is inseparable from the journey of a single ingredient: the chili. The chili is a South American plant, and until Europeans crossed to the New World it was unknown to the Mediterranean world. The seeds Columbus carried back to Spain reached North Africa within about half a century, following the trade routes of the Mediterranean. So it was that, from the sixteenth century onward, a heat the Maghreb had never known arrived on its shores.

The name itself speaks of the handwork behind the condiment. The word harissa belongs to the Arabic root harasa, 'to pound.' Dried chilies pounded in a mortar and worked into a thick paste: that motion of the hand is inscribed in the dish's name. The newly arrived chili was taken up by the region's old craft of pounding and turned into a Tunisian taste.

That harissa is a condiment born in Tunisia is scarcely disputed. The name, however, holds a trap. The word harissa already appears in the oldest surviving Arabic cookbook, the tenth-century Kitab al-Tabikh of Ibn Sayyar al-Warraq, compiled in Baghdad. But the harīsa written of there was a porridge of pounded wheat and meat. It is a dish that shares the same root, 'to pound,' and the same name, yet it is a different food from the red chili paste. The name may be traced back far earlier, but that does not date the harissa we know today. The red paste is a taste that belongs to the time after the chili reached this land.

Just when, and by whose hand, that chili took root in Tunisia is a question on which the accounts divide in two. One looks to the Spanish occupation of the sixteenth century. During the years when Tunisia lay for a time under Spanish rule, the chili that had crossed from the New World may likewise have been carried here through Spanish hands. The other looks to the people driven out of Spain a little earlier. On this view, the Muslims and Jews who left Andalusia between the end of the fifteenth and the seventeenth century brought New World seeds with them, chilies, squash, and beans, and settled along the Tunisian coast; around Nabeul on the Cap Bon peninsula, where the climate resembles southern Spain, chili cultivation took hold, and by the early seventeenth century the area had become a center of harissa-making.

The two are not related as right and wrong. They differ only in where they place the emphasis, on who brought the chili and on when it took root. Was it carried by occupiers or by refugees? Had it arrived by the sixteenth century, or did it settle in the seventeenth? For now, there is not the material to decide firmly for one over the other. What does not change is that today's red harissa arose only in the era after the chili had crossed the Atlantic. That single point is the fixed ground the two accounts share.