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Recettes Tunisia
Parcourez les archives par pays, par plat et par temps de cuisson.
Couscous royale is a plate of fluffy couscous piled with grilled meats and a saffron-scented chickpea and vegetable stew, and it is celebration food. Meatball skewers, lamb chops, chicken skewers and merguez sausage all appear on the same plate, which is what the royale in the name is describing.
Couscous itself is Amazigh in origin. It is a staple across Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco and Libya, and it is Tunisia's official national dish. The food historian Charles Perry places its origin among the Berbers of Algeria and Morocco somewhere between the end of the 11th-century Zirid dynasty and the rise of the 13th-century Almohad Caliphate. The precise origin is not known, and since couscous is made from ground wheat it is unlikely to predate about 6000 BC.
The word names both the semolina grain and the dish built around it. Traditionally the grain is steamed in a couscoussier, a two-tier pot with a steamer sitting above the broth, and it is removed, rolled between the hands to separate the grains, and returned to the steamer four or five times. Pre-steamed couscous has made that unnecessary for everyday cooking. Couscous royale is not everyday cooking: it takes roughly two hours of preparation before the chickpeas are even accounted for.
A fricassé is a small oval roll of enriched dough, deep-fried and then split and packed with tuna, potato, olives, egg and harissa. It is Tunisian street food, and it is one of the country's most recognisable things to eat.
The word does not mean what it means elsewhere. In French, a fricassée is a braise of meat in a white sauce; in Tunisia and its diaspora it means this sandwich and nothing else. That divergence is complete enough that searching the French term will not find you the Tunisian food.
The filling is the point and it is fixed by convention rather than by recipe: tuna in olive oil, cooked potato, black olives, egg and harissa, with slata méchouia, the grilled pepper and tomato salad, very often alongside. Capers and preserved lemon appear in some versions. What matters is that the bread is fried rather than baked, which gives a rich, slightly greasy roll that stands up to a wet filling.
**A significant gap in the source.** Its ingredient list contains only the dough, yeast, water, flour, egg, oil, salt. Not one of the filling ingredients it spends its article describing appears in it. The filling below has been reconstructed from that description and flagged.
**It contains eggs and fish.**