Falafel Period BOrigin theory CVerified

Falafel is a small fritter made by soaking and grinding chickpeas, mixing in herbs and spices, shaping the paste into balls, and frying them crisp in hot oil. It arose across the region from the Levant to Egypt and took root as a cheap street food sold from market stalls. Cheap, quick, and filling without meat, it became a workers' lunch and a dish for meatless days.

Both the chickpea of the dish and the fava bean of its Egyptian counterpart are legumes long native to the eastern Mediterranean, grown in the fields and eaten at the table since ancient times. Because these beans were plentiful and close at hand, the handwork of grinding them at the stone mill, shaping them, and frying them in ample oil was repeated at the stalls of busy markets and streets.

Falafel in its present form spread across the Levant during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In an age of growing cities that wanted a cheap protein to eat on the street, the freshly fried bean fritter was ideal. The word falafel first appears in English only in 1936. Egypt's ta'amia, which uses fava beans instead, belongs to the same family of fried bean fritters but is made from a different legume, a sister dish of sorts.

Falafel comes with a much-told origin story. Coptic Christians, it is said, devised the fried fava fritter as a substitute for meat during Lent, and the very name "falafel" is supposed to come from a Coptic word for "food."

But not a single early record supports this story. Copts do eat these fritters during their fasts, but that is a present-day custom, not proof that the dish was born among them. As for the name, the Coptic derivation is a later guess built on a chance resemblance of sounds—the source of a word is not the source of a dish. The Oxford English Dictionary traces falafel to the Arabic filfil, "pepper," and the Coptic story loses its footing.

So where was it really born? The honest answer is that this is not clear. Many scholars hold that Egypt's fava-based ta'amia is the original, and that as the dish traveled to the Levant the fava was replaced by the chickpea. Others argue that the chickpea version arose independently in the Levant. This latter claim has been pressed hardest within the tug-of-war between Israelis and Palestinians, each wishing to call the dish their own. Yael Raviv's Falafel Nation describes how falafel came to be made into a symbol of national identity.

The chief reason the question stays unsettled is that falafel in its present form appears clearly in the records only from the nineteenth century, in documents after the British occupation of Egypt in 1882, and cannot be traced back continuously before that. The practice of frying beans is surely ancient, but when "the falafel we eat today" took shape is a separate matter. One invented origin set aside, the question of who first made it remains open, and that is the honest present state of falafel.