fine couscous: on the left before adding water to fluff it & on the right after adding the water but before the first steaming. It will fluff up even more after the 1st steaming, adding more water, then the second steaming

The last guest post by my lovely friend Charles Perry on when camel meat was fashionable was such a success that I asked him if he would do another one and I asked if he would write about how far back in history he can trace couscous. I reckoned that it would very interesting to know given how popular couscous is and what a global ingredient it has become. So, here is Charles’ post, followed by two recipes, one for how to steam couscous, and another for the seven vegetable broth to serve with it. I like to make mine without meat and I often use baby vegetables for a nicer presentation but you may not find these easily.

“Look up the word for couscous in a couple of dozen Berber dictionaries and you’ll be surprised how many ways there are of pronouncing the basic Berber name for it, seksu. (If you’re a linguist, you’ll also wonder exactly how seksu could have become the Arabic kuskusu.)

Couscous is the North African staple food, of course. In some places the word for it is just the local word for food in general, utshu or tt’am. A larger variety of couscous is called by the Berber name berkukes, which has a prefix meaning “large,” or by the Arabic word muhammas, which means “made to resemble chickpeas.”

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