Feseekh Period COrigin theory CVerified

Fesikh is a preserved fish made from mullet caught in the Mediterranean and the Nile, dried in the sun and then preserved in salt. The mullet is native to these waters, and like the salt used to preserve it, it has long been close at hand. The method is passed down from father to son within certain families, and the trade is known as fasakhani.

Today it belongs to Sham el-Nessim, the festival that welcomes the spring. Preserving fish by salting and sun-drying is old in this land; Herodotus described it in the fifth century BC. The name fesikh, however, comes from Arabic, so it cannot be older than the Arab conquest of the seventh century. The name first turns up in writing in Edward William Lane's account of daily life in early nineteenth-century Cairo, where it appears as a salted fish eaten at the feast that ends the Ramadan fast. Between the ancient know-how of preserving fish and the present process, name, and tie to the spring festival lies a long stretch of time that no record fills.

Fesikh is dogged by a familiar telling: "the same dish has been eaten without interruption since the age of the pharaohs." Temple reliefs showing fish being dried and salted, and Herodotus's account of Egyptians eating salt-cured and sun-dried fish, are cited to declare the dish on the table a four-thousand-year-old ritual food.

That ancient Egyptians preserved fish by salting and sun-drying is not in doubt. Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BC, reports in Histories II.77 that Egyptians dried some of their fish in the sun and ate them without cooking, and ate others cured in brine. The lineage of salt-cured fish reaches back at least that far.

But the age of the genre and the claim that the fesikh eaten today is the "same dish" as the ancient one are two different matters, and the name itself is the first clue. The word fesikh (فسيخ) belongs to the Arabic root f-s-kh, meaning to break apart or dissolve. Arabic spread through Egypt with the seventh-century Arab conquest, so the name can be no older than that, and it cannot be a word from the age of the pharaohs. The classical and medieval Arabic dictionaries have no entry for it as a fish; it enters a dictionary as "small salted fish" only in Reinhart Dozy's supplement of 1881, which cites Lane and other nineteenth-century ethnographers.

The festival tells a similar story. Edward William Lane, who recorded Egyptian life in close detail, wrote of the Cairo he saw between 1833 and 1835 that on the days of the feast ending the Ramadan fast "most of the people of Cairo eat 'feseekh' (or salted fish)." The passage stands in the third edition of 1842 at the latest. In the same book, his section on the spring festival, Sham el-Nessim, describes people smelling onions and going out into the open air beyond the city, but says nothing of salted fish. In Lane's record, fesikh is food for the end of the fast. Its present strong bond with the spring festival may have taken shape more recently.

Fesikh does belong to the old lineage of salt-cured fish, but the age of that lineage is not the age of the dish as it is made and eaten now. The name can be no older than Arabic in Egypt, its written record begins with Lane in the early nineteenth century, and its tie to the spring festival may be more recent still. The story of continuity, "we have gone on eating the same thing since antiquity," joins a fifth-century-BC habit of preserving fish to a dish recorded in the nineteenth century, and passes over the long blank between them.