Any thoughts on this couscous recipe?
You take two liters of white flour, add to it half a liter of sieved whole wheat/coarsely ground flour, and put it all in a wide tray or kneading trough. Have a jar of tepid salted water and a sprinkler. Throw small sprays over the flour and with the hand extended, drag it gently, then spray again and putting your hand in the flour turn the upper layers under until it has all formed little grains and no flour is left. Then you sieve it so that the flour passes through and not the grains. And do this so that you end up sieving it over clean cloths and let it dry. Then put it in a pot which has a web of straws over a hole . . . Put this over another, larger pot already on the fire half filled with boiling water. Cover the top pot with a top so that it does not evaporate. When it is cooked, turn it out on a board and stir it very well so that all the grains are separate.
I’d be curious what the couscous experts think about this recipe. It looks to me pretty standard. But I would like to get thoughts on it before I talk about its provenance.
- Achieving communal self-sufficiency in food. Come. On.
- Alcuscuz de trigo (Wheat couscous) in Nineteenth Century Mexico
It looks like a recipe for a version of maftoul (couscous with a bulghur center and a flour coating).
Reads like a very standard couscous recipe. Doesn’t seem to be from the Portuguese/West African tradition, with the emphasis on seperate grains, so like like to be based on North African standard technique.
Similar instructions for making couscous like this would be found in North Africa, Turkey, Greece, Sicily, Sardinia, Italy and in the Jewish tradition.
Will be interested to see the source of this recipe and the name.
The basic directions would more or less work from durum semolina flour couscous. However, the descriptions for the flours are too vague for a modern cook. A contemporary person would most likely assume that the “white flour” called for is something like AP flour and “whole wheat” to mean bread flour. You’d end up with a stringy mess and little balls of half wet flour.
Do you know how fine THE white flour has been ground?
I can’t help but think THE grains could be pasty. Have you
asked Farid?
the only recipe I know that uses plain white flour is an Israeli Moroccan one. I think they used that only because durum flour was not available once (it is now but that habit stuck with some old Moroccans). The best couscous I ever made was using Paula Wolfert’s recipe- using fine duram wheat and semolina flour (coarse)
Thanks, Sarah. These fine details make such a huge difference in food history.
It’s really hard to find what kinds of wheat were available in colonial Mexico. I’ve never seen any mention of one that looks like durum but that may just be because no one has looked.