Brik Period COrigin theory CVerified

Brik is a savory snack made in Tunisian homes and at street stalls. An ultra-thin sheet of wheat pastry called malsouka (also warqa) is wrapped around egg, tuna, harissa, and chopped parsley, then fried until crisp. Best known is the brik à l'oeuf—the egg brik—in which a whole egg is cracked into the center of the sheet; bite into it fresh from the oil and the soft yolk spills out. It remains a beloved fixture of the Ramadan table.

Underlying the dish is the thin-pastry culture rooted in the Maghreb. The handwork of rolling wheat dough out until it is almost translucent, then wrapping and baking or frying it, has been shared widely from North Africa to the eastern shore of the Mediterranean. Turkish yufka and börek, Moroccan briouat, and Tunisian malsouka and brik all sit within this lineage. The egg and tuna that go inside are familiar ingredients long present in the region, always on hand in the kitchen. The hard part is rather the pastry: rolling the ultra-thin dough out evenly without tearing it, wrapping the filling, and frying it in hot oil. Only once this pastry-making handwork was mastered did the present form of brik take shape.

The technique of wrapping in thin pastry and frying has a long history. The craft of the yufka, rolling dough thin with a pin, developed over the medieval period, and by the fifteenth century it had taken root as a settled technique reaching into palace kitchens. Tunisia lay for a long time under Ottoman rule, within the reach of trade and human traffic spanning the Mediterranean. In a place where the Turkish thin-pastry technique met the culinary customs of the Mediterranean and the Maghreb, the hands of the stall and the home kitchen developed the local gesture of cracking in an egg and folding into a triangle.

Two views have long been told side by side about the origins of brik, and the sources are far too thin to award the palm to either.

One holds that it descends from the Turkish börek carried westward. As the Ottoman Empire ruled North Africa from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, the technique of the börek—wrapping and baking in thin pastry—moved west along the Mediterranean coast and took root here, and what took root became the prototype of brik. Indeed, the name brik goes back through the Maghrebi Arabic bourek to the Ottoman börek, and in Ottoman dictionaries the word börek is recorded from the late seventeenth century onward (Meninski, 1680). The thin-pastry technique leading to börek likewise carries a long backing from the medieval period onward, from the craft of rolling out yufka to records of palace kitchens. Placing brik within this lineage is a reading supported by scholarship on Ottoman cuisine (Işın, Bountiful Empire).

The other view sees the present brik as a distinctly southern Tunisian innovation. Even if the word and the technique came from outside, the features that define brik today—the ultra-thin malsouka, the crisply folded triangle, and the whole egg cracked into the center, the 'egg brik'—are held to have diverged on their own in southern Tunisia. In particular it is spoken of as belonging to the Jewish Tunisian community of the island of Djerba; its craft and its taste, it is argued, can hardly be called Turkish, and the very idea of cracking in an egg is what makes the dish something else (Gil Marks, Encyclopedia of Jewish Food).

The phrase 'at least five hundred years old' clings to brik. At first hearing it sounds like an origin story dressed up with age, but a reach of five hundred years overlaps easily with the sixteenth century, when the Ottomans arrived in this land, and it is not a groundless invention. That said, it does not point to a precise first year either. Was it the localization of a technique that came from outside, or an independent innovation in southern Tunisia? No firm source separates the two for now, and the origin of brik remains with the two views standing side by side. What is certain is that the gesture of rolling out thin pastry, cracking in an egg, and folding into a triangle put down roots as a dish in this land.