ABOUT COUSCOUS

"Couscous is a North African staple as far east a Tripoli, and particularly in Morocco and Algeria, where the local name for it is sometimes identical to the word for food' in general. It is also widely known in neighbouring African countries from Chad to Senegal and has footholds in Europe...Syria-Palestine...and somewhat surprisingly in Brazil, where it is made from maize...Algerian folklore has it that cousous was invented by the Djinn. Certainly its early history is obscure, but the evidence does not suggest that it dates from remote antiquity. In the 1940s, H. Peres published in the Bulletin des Etudes Arabs a compilation of the earliest literary mentions of couscous then known, and all were from the fifteenth century or later. The only citation that even claimed to be earlier was a fourteenth-century anecdote related in the seventeenth-century book Nafh al-Tib, which told how the mysterious illness of a North African visitor to Damascus was cured by making couscous for him. Since the forties we have become aware of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Arabic cookery books which contain couscous recipes. But altogether, the suspicious silence about couscous in sources from before the thirteenth century, coupled with the evident Berber origin of the Arabic word kishusu, suggest that couscous arose among the period between the eleventh-century collapse of the Zirid Kingdom and the trimumph of the Almohads in the thirteenth. A peculiaritiy of the way couscous is descrived in the thirteenth-century cookery books also argues that it was a relatively recent invention, if we see in it an explanation for how the unique process of creating the couscous granules originated...The simplest explanation for this that kuskusu was originally a small noodle, and the peculiar stirring technique a hasty was of making a noodle. Its unique lightness when steamed, and perhaps its resistance to staling, would have been discovered later."

---Medieval Arab Cookery, Maxime Rodinson, A. J. Arberry & Charles Perry [Prospect Books:Devon] 2001 "Couscous and its Cousins," Charles Perry (p. 235-8)

"Couscous is a staple food in the Maghrib that requires very little in the way of utensils for its preparation. It is an ideal food for both nomadic and agricultural peoples. The preparation of couscous is one that symbolizes "happiness and abundance,"...One of the first written references to couscous is in the anonymous thirteenth-century Hispano-Muslim cooker book "Kitab al-tabikh fi al-Maghrib wa'l-Andalus...The fact that the name is given with the Arabic article "al" is a flag to the linguist that the original couscous perparation probably was not an Arab dish, but a Berber dish, because the Arabic words siksu, kuskus, and kuski, which all mean "couscous" do not take the article...very early references to couscous show that either it is not unique to the Maghrib or it spread with great rapidity to the Mashraq (the eastern Arab world)...Although the word couscous might derive from the Arabic word kaskasa, to pound small," it is generally thought to derive from one of the Berber dialects. It has also been suggested that the word derives from the Arabic name for the perforated earthenware steamer pot used to steam the couscous, called a kiskis...while another theory attributes the word couscous to the onomatopoeic--the sound of the steam rising in the coucousiere, the most unlikely explanation."

---A Mediterranean Feast, Clifford A. Wright [Morrow:New York] 1999 (p. 659-660)

"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 from months or years...The wide spread of couscous has been influenced also by economic and aesthetic reasons...Couscous has continued to spread beyond the S. And E. Mediterranean. At some point it entered Sicilian cuisine...Couscous is now a common dish in France and increasingly elsewhere in Europe and N. America..."

---The Oxford Companion to Food, Alan Davidson [Oxford University Press:Oxford] 1999 (p. 220)

        In: http://www.foodtimeline.org/

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