Koshari Period BOrigin theory CVerified

Koshari is a Cairo street dish built on cooked rice and lentils, layered with short-cut macaroni and chickpeas and crowned with a sharp tomato sauce and crisp fried onions. Its character shows in that very stacking—several grains and pulses piled into one bowl to fill you quickly and cheaply.

The rice-and-lentil base itself was an old way of eating in Egypt. Lentils are a native crop grown here since remote antiquity, and rice had taken root in the country by the Islamic period. Cooking the two together goes back at least to the medieval era, and in 1853 the traveller Richard Burton, passing through Suez, recorded a breakfast of lentils and rice with butter, onions and pickled lemons. There was as yet no macaroni and no tomato sauce—a different dish from today's koshari.

The pasta and tomato that give koshari its present-day character were a newer layer, added in the later nineteenth century. Wheat pasta carried from the far shore of the Mediterranean, and the tomato—New World in origin and spreading through the Middle East and North Africa around the same time—came to rest on the old rice and lentils. These reached the city's tables toward the close of the nineteenth century, and it was around then that koshari came to be sold in its present form on the street.

The stage for its emergence was the world of working people in Cairo and its surroundings, where the digging of the canal and the swelling of the city sent people and goods rushing past one another. Cheap grain and pulses took up the noodles and sauces that newcomers brought, and settled into a filling street food.

Trace koshari back to its origin and you do not arrive at a single birthplace or inventor; instead two streams, coming by separate routes, join together. Neither can be singled out as the true one, and both stand as strong accounts side by side.

One line ties the dish's name and its rice-and-lentil base to India. The Egyptian name koshari, and the frame of cooking rice and lentils together, are thought to connect to the Indian rice-and-lentil dish khichdi. The food historian Sami Zubaida argued that Indian pilgrims passing through Suez on their way to Mecca, and soldiers who came from India in the nineteenth century, carried this way of eating into Egypt. The plain rice-and-lentil breakfast Burton set down at Suez in 1853 preserves the older form, before pasta and tomato were added.

The other line ties the macaroni and tomato sauce that mark today's koshari to Italian settlers. Labourers who worked on building the Suez Canal, and Italian immigrants, are said to have brought the pasta-and-tomato habit of their homeland, which then laid itself over the native rice and lentils to make the present dish. That koshari's pasta is Mediterranean in origin, and that the tomato likewise settled in only in the nineteenth century, support this account. That neither pasta nor tomato appears in Burton's 1853 breakfast fits with the present form having come together only afterward.

The two streams do not so much contradict each other as correspond to different layers of the dish. The old rice-and-lentil base can be traced to the Indian way of eating, and the pasta and tomato laid on later to Mediterranean migrants. Rather than fixing on any single point as the birth, the most untroubled reading is that both routes met within one bowl.