a grain product consisting of tiny balls of dough which are steamed and served like rice, mixed with a stew or sauce. It is a staple food throughout N. Africa; in Morocco and Algeria, some of the local names for it are identical to the word for ‘food’ in general. It has become part of the cuisine in neighbouring African countries from Chad to Senegal, in the eastern Arab countries (where it has been known since the 13th century as moghrabiyyeh, ‘the North African dish’), and elsewhere.
In dried form couscous might be mistaken for an exceptionally small soup noodle, but it is made by a wholly different technique that does not involve kneading. Instead, a bowl of flour is sprinkled intermittently with salted water while the fingers of the right hand rake through it in sweeping, circular movements, causing the dough to coagulate in tiny balls. They are also shaped by rubbing with the palm of the hand against the side of the bowl. From time to time the granules are sieved to ensure uniform size. When the process is complete, they are dried.
The usual sort, called seksu in Berber or kuskusu in Arabic, are about 2 mm in diameter. Berkukes or mhammsa has larger granules, 3 mm or larger. An ultrafine couscous called seffa or mesfuf, 1 mm in diameter, is made in Morocco and Algeria.
The granules are steamed in a device which the French call couscoussier. It resembles a double boiler of which the upper part (the keskas or couscoussier proper) has a perforated bottom. This is set over a pot of boiling water, or more often the stew with which the couscous will be served. The swelling granules are removed and worked with the hands one or more times during steaming to ensure that they remain separate.
Berkukes, however, because of the difficulty of steaming the large granules thoroughly, is usually thrown into the stew for a while after steaming. Both berkukes and kuskusu may be steamed over water rather than stew, in which case they are usually sauced with milk or yoghurt. Mesfuf is always steamed over water and served with butter and sugar or raisins.
The stirring and rolling process by which the couscous granules are formed amounts, it has been suggested, to a way of preserving grain. Couscous is traditionally made from freshly ground whole grain, which is much better suited to the purpose than bolted flour, because starch readily accumulates around the larger and harder particles of bran and germ, much as a pearl forms around a grain of sand. The resulting granule is in effect a grain turned inside out, with the part of the flour that can deteriorate protected from the air by an envelope of starch. It can thus be kept without spoiling for months or years. This would explain why Berkukes is the couscous traditionally carried by travellers on long journeys—it has the thickest starch casing.
The wide spread of couscous has been influenced also by economic and aesthetic reasons. One of the attractions of couscous is that, unlike pasta or leavened bread, it is a light and elegant grain food that is held together not by gluten but by the weaker proteins found in all grains, and therefore need not be made with expensive wheat flour.
In many parts of Morocco and N. Algeria, barley couscous (often called abelbul) or maize couscous (abaddaz) is commoner than the wheaten sort. A speciality of the Kabyle Berbers of Algeria is ahethut, made from barley, bran, and ground acorn meal. Particularly in W. Africa couscous is also made from millets (Sorghum bicolor, Pennisetum americanum), the local grain fonio (Digitaria exilis), and minor grains such as Diplotaxis ecris; some of them wild. The Tubu, who inhabit the Sahara east of the Tuareg lands, sometimes harvest a variety of goosefoot, Chenopodium murale et vulvaria, which makes a black couscous. In season, heads of unripe wheat or barley (in Berber, azenbo; in Arabic, frik, see freekeh) may be gathered and dried over the fire so that they can be ground and made into a highly esteemed green couscous.
Other grain products are sometimes steamed like couscous, such as whole or cracked grains, grain-shaped noodles similar to European soup pastas, and even vermicelli. There is a medieval recipe for steaming breadcrumbs like couscous.
Algerian folklore has it that couscous was invented by the Jinn. Whoever the inventor was, there is no evidence for its existence before the 13th century, and the invention probably took place in N. Algeria and Morocco following the 11th-century collapse of the Zirid kingdom. In 13th-century books written in Spain and Syria, both kuskusu and muhammas can mean either couscous or a small soup noodle, and the recipes suggest that the stirring process originated as a hasty noodle method that saved kneading.
Couscous has continued to spread beyond the S. and E. Mediterranean. At some point it entered Sicilian cuisine (cúscusu trapanese). In S. Brazil cuscuz paulista is a steamed mixture of maize meal and vegetables (the cuscuz of N. Brazil, however, is a totally different product, not steamed at all, made by mixing tapioca, coconut meat, milk, and sugar with boiling water). Couscous is now a common dish in France and increasingly elsewhere in Europe and N. America.
Charles Perry, the leading authority on early Arab cookery, has recently published A Baghdad Cookery Book Newly Translated (2005) and a related 13
Morsy, Magali (1996), Le Monde des couscous et recettes de couscous, 2 vols, Aix-en-Provence: Edisud.
