Merguez Period BOrigin theory BVerified

Merguez is a sausage of ground lamb, sometimes mixed with beef, packed into casing with spices and marked by a vivid red color and strong heat. It comes from the Maghreb, Morocco included, and has long been grilled over street braziers and at home.

Among the things that make up this sausage, lamb is a long-established local meat, on everyday tables from early on, and the craft of stuffing casings is itself old in North Africa. But the red and the heat that define today's merguez come from chili and from harissa, the paste made from it. Chili is native to the New World, and it took root in the Maghreb only in the sixteenth century. Once chili reached the region's kitchens and joined the local sausage, the red, fiery merguez we know began to be grilled. This red-and-hot form cannot be pushed back before that turning point; it arose around the middle of the sixteenth century, near 1540.

The lineage of the sausage itself runs much deeper. An anonymous Andalusian cookbook of the thirteenth century records a lamb sausage called mirkās, seasoned with pepper, coriander, and cinnamon; the word merguez traces back to this mirkās. Before chili, that warm-spiced sausage wore a different face, neither red nor hot. The medieval lineage and the present red-hot style are continuous, yet between them lies the turning point of a single ingredient's arrival.

In the twentieth century the sausage spread beyond the Maghreb. Migrants and repatriates from Algeria brought it to France, and it is now a familiar sight at stalls and markets across Europe.

Merguez is often imagined as an unbroken tradition reaching from the Middle Ages straight to today's red, spicy sausage. The lineage of the sausage is indeed old. The thirteenth-century anonymous Andalusian cookbook records the lamb sausage mirkās, and the name merguez goes back to it. But that medieval sausage was a warm-spiced one, seasoned with pepper, coriander, and cinnamon, with no chili. It was neither red nor hot.

The color and heat of today's merguez come from chili and harissa. Chili is a New World crop, and it took root in the Maghreb in the sixteenth century. Following the food-history work that traced the global spread of chilies (Halikowski Smith 2015), the red, spicy merguez can only have arisen after chili reached the region. Old as the sausage may be as a genre, its present form reaches back no further than around 1540.

Seen this way, merguez has two layers: an old layer of medieval Berber spiced sausage, and the present layer, reborn red and hot with the arrival of chili. The name is old; the face we know is new. To grant the antiquity of the lineage while not equating the present style with the Middle Ages is the crux of how this sausage came to be.