Freekeh Period BOrigin theory CVerified

Freekeh is a grain made from unripe green durum wheat, roasted over fire, then rubbed to strip away the scorched chaff and straw. The Arabic word behind its name, farik, means "to rub," and that one step gives the grain its toasty aroma and its keeping quality. Durum wheat has long been grown in the Levant, and harvesting it green and roasting it was part of the everyday fare of village life.

In the written record, the name of the ingredient comes first. A cookbook compiled by al-Warraq in tenth-century Baghdad, in its directions for a simmered wheat dish (hintiyya), notes that green wheat (qamh akhdar farik) may be used in place of white wheat. That cookbook says nothing about how the green wheat is roasted or rubbed. The roasting-and-rubbing method first appears in writing in the cookbook of al-Tujibi, compiled in thirteenth-century Tunis; Nawal Nasrallah, who translated al-Warraq into English, draws on that passage to explain farik in her glossary. An early-thirteenth-century Baghdad cookbook also names a dish called farikiyya, though the food historian Clifford A. Wright notes that it is not certain the dish was made with green wheat.

The heart of its range lies across the Levant, in Syria, Palestine, and Jordan, and it extends into North Africa as well. Cutting wheat early and passing it through fire is a simple practice, and it has long been handed down in these dry lands as a way of preparing grain.

Stories are told about how freekeh began. The one most often told is of accidental discovery: a village grain store, a silo, burns in war or by mishap, and rather than throw out the scorched unripe wheat, people rub it clean and eat it, find it good, and the method takes hold. Another account traces it to farming know-how, cutting part of the crop while still green and roasting it to store, so that drought or a plague of locusts cannot wipe out the whole harvest before it is gathered. The logic that roasting improves keeping and deepens aroma fits this early-harvest account well.

Neither story has a contemporary record to stand on. Among the dated records, al-Warraq's tenth-century cookbook (in Nawal Nasrallah's translation, Annals of the Caliphs' Kitchens) lists green wheat, farik, as an ingredient for a simmered wheat dish, and al-Tujibi's thirteenth-century cookbook describes roasting and rubbing green wheat. Neither cookbook says anything about how it all began. Whether it started with a chance find from a burnt store or with a deliberate early cut against drought cannot be determined, and both remain origin legends.

How long the method was practised before anyone wrote it down, and what that first step actually was, remain open questions.