North African food is frequently discussed as if it were a single cuisine — couscous and tagine and ras el hanout, the Moroccan register that has come to represent the entire Maghreb in international food culture. This flattening does considerable injustice to the distinct food traditions of Algeria, Libya, and Tunisia, each of which has a culinary identity shaped by different histories, different agricultural geographies, and different relationships to the Arabic, Berber, Ottoman, and European influences that formed them. Tunisia’s food is the most easily distinguished from the rest: it is significantly spicier than Moroccan food, uses olive oil rather than argan oil as its foundational fat (Tunisia is one of the world’s largest olive oil producers, its olive trees sometimes a thousand years old), and is built on a flavour foundation that has no equivalent in the cuisines to its east or west — the harissa that is Tunisia’s most important culinary export and that, in its home country, exists in a range of varieties, preparations, and applications that the single international product sold in a tube cannot begin to represent. Harissa is not simply a hot sauce. It is a paste of dried Baklouti and other local pepper varieties, blended with garlic, caraway, coriander, and olive oil, and used in Tunisia as a condiment, a cooking base, a marinade, and a flavouring in quantities and with a confidence that reflects a chilli culture as deeply embedded in the national kitchen as the chilli culture of Mexico or Korea. Tunisia also has a specific relationship with the sea — the Tunisian coastline runs for 1,300 kilometres along the Mediterranean, and the seafood tradition of the coastal towns from Tunis to Djerba reflects this geography in a food culture of grilled fish and seafood couscous and the fried fish sandwiches of the Tunis medina that deserve considerably more international attention than they receive.

Harissa: Not a Hot Sauce, a Cuisine

The word harissa comes from the Arabic harasa, to pound or crush, and the preparation method — pounding together the dried Baklouti peppers (a variety specific to the town of Nabeul in the Cap Bon peninsula, the primary harissa pepper of Tunisia) with garlic, caraway, coriander seed, salt, and good olive oil into a smooth, deep-red paste — is both the defining activity of Tunisian kitchen preparation and the product that every Tunisian household produces in quantity and considers an essential pantry staple. The internationally available harissa — the tube or tin of paste that appears in European and American supermarkets — is a functional product that conveys the approximate flavour without the variety, the texture, or the specific regional character that Tunisian harissa production actually involves. In Tunisia, harissa varies significantly by region and by maker: the harissa of the Nabeul area (the Cap Bon peninsula, the primary pepper-growing region) is the sweetest and the most aromatic; the harissa of the south (the Medenine area near the Libyan border) is hotter and drier; the harissa of the Tunis medina spice markets is wet and smooth, sold by weight from the large clay pots that the market vendors fill from their own production. It is used in Tunisia in every application: stirred into the broth of the couscous before it is poured over the grain, mixed with olive oil and served alongside bread as the table condiment that arrives before the meal, stirred into the egg of a chakchouka (the North African spiced tomato and egg dish that Tunisia makes with more harissa and more fire than its Moroccan cousin), spread inside the brik before frying, and added to the Lablabi (the white bean soup that is the Tunisian winter breakfast) at a level of heat that the uninitiated should approach with caution. Harissa is not the supporting player in Tunisian cooking. It is the lead instrument, and everything else in the cuisine is built around it.

Brik, Chakchouka, and the Dishes That Define Tunisia

Brik is the dish that most immediately distinguishes Tunisian food from Moroccan or Algerian: a triangular pastry of paper-thin malsouka dough (similar to the Moroccan warka but even thinner, almost translucent when uncooked), filled with a whole raw egg, tuna, capers, and sometimes a small amount of harissa or a fresh herb, then folded and deep-fried at high heat until the pastry is golden and blistered and the egg inside is cooked to a yolk that is set at the outside and still liquid at the centre. The correct method of eating a brik is the source of much Tunisian amusement at tourists who do not know it: you hold the brik at both ends, bite a small hole at one corner to release the steam, tilt the whole thing toward your mouth, and eat it in as few bites as possible while managing the running yolk that will escape from any breach in the pastry. It is impossible to eat a brik with any dignity. It is entirely worth it. Chakchouka is the other essential preparation: a Tunisian interpretation of the North African spiced tomato sauce in which peppers, tomatoes, garlic, and harissa are cooked together until thick and deeply flavoured, into which eggs are cracked and poached directly in the sauce, the white set and the yolk still running, served in the pan with a generous drizzle of olive oil and eaten with bread. The Tunisian version is significantly hotter than the Israeli shakshuka that has become the international reference point for this dish, and it is served for breakfast, lunch, and dinner with equal conviction, because Tunisians do not consider harissa a morning-inappropriate condiment. Lablabi — the white bean soup eaten for breakfast at the outdoor breakfast stalls of the Tunis medina, into which the eater adds a raw egg, capers, pickled lemon, bread torn into pieces, and as much harissa and cumin as seems appropriate — is the Tunisian street breakfast that most surprises visitors and most rewards the willingness to sit at a plastic table at 7am and eat something that looks nothing like what breakfast is supposed to look like.

Couscous, Merguez, and the Tunisian Main Table

Couscous in Tunisia is the Friday dish — the communal midday meal of the Islamic week, when families gather and the couscous is made from scratch by the women of the household (steaming the semolina in a couscoussière over a broth of meat and vegetables for three successive steamings until the grains are perfectly light and separate) and served on a large communal platter with the broth poured over and the meat and vegetables arranged on top. Tunisian couscous broth is seasoned with harissa, which gives it a reddish colour and a heat that Moroccan couscous does not have, and the accompaniments — the broth served separately for ladling over the grain, the harissa passed at the table for those who want more — reflect a cooking philosophy that is simultaneously communal and individual in its heat tolerance. Merguez — the spiced lamb and beef sausage that is the street meat of Tunisia, its deep red colour from the harissa in the sausage mix, its flavour intensely savoury and hot — is the other preparation that most completely expresses the Tunisian flavour philosophy in a single ingredient: the sausage is made with harissa mixed directly into the ground meat, so the heat is in the meat rather than applied at the table. Grilled over charcoal and eaten in a sandwich with more harissa and pickled vegetables, merguez in a Tunis medina sandwich shop is the lunch that rewards the willingness to eat standing up with both hands occupied. The seafood tradition of the Tunisian coast — the grilled fish of Carthage and Sidi Bou Said, the seafood couscous of the Djerba fishing communities, the tuna that the Mediterranean has been providing to Tunisian tables since the Phoenicians built Carthage — is the gentler, less aggressively spiced dimension of the cuisine, the olive oil and the sea balancing the harissa of the interior.

Olive Oil, Dates, and the Ingredients That Define a Landscape

Tunisia is the world’s fourth largest olive oil producer and the country with the highest olive oil consumption per capita — Tunisians use approximately 12 litres per person per year, a figure that reflects the centrality of the olive to the agricultural landscape and the kitchen in a way that no other statistic can convey. The olive trees of central Tunisia (the Sfax region and the area around Sousse and Kairouan) are among the oldest cultivated trees in the world — trees with trunks wide enough to shelter a family exist that date to Roman occupation — and the oil they produce is the base of everything in Tunisian cooking: the harissa is made with olive oil, the salads are dressed with olive oil, the bread is eaten with olive oil, and the tuna (the other great Tunisian pantry staple, preserved in olive oil in tins that Tunisia produces in significant quantities for both domestic consumption and export) is packed in the oil that the surrounding landscape provides. The dates of Deglet Nour variety from the Tozeur region of southern Tunisia are the finest dates produced in the Arab world and arguably in the world: the “finger of light” date (the name translates as such) is semi-transparent, honey-sweet, with a delicate texture and a flavour that is significantly more nuanced than the Medjool dates that dominate the international market. Eating fresh Deglet Nour dates in Tozeur in October, when the harvest is just in and the dates are at their most fragrant and yielding, is the simple food experience that most completely expresses the Tunisian desert landscape and its most extraordinary agricultural product. The combination of the spice and fire of the harissa culture with the sweetness and luxury of the Deglet Nour date is Tunisia in a single meal: a cuisine of extremes — the fiercest chilli paste in North Africa alongside the most delicate date in the Arab world — that is one of the most interesting and most underappreciated food cultures in the Mediterranean.

Tunisian food is the food of a country that has been at the crossroads of the Mediterranean for three thousand years — Phoenician Carthage, Roman Africa, Arab Ifriqiya, Ottoman Tunisia, French Protectorate — and that has absorbed from each of these occupations something that it made its own. The harissa came with the chilli routes from the New World via the Ottoman Empire. The couscous is Berber in origin, older than any of the conquests. The merguez is the Ottoman butcher tradition adapted to the North African palate. The olive oil is as old as the landscape. The result is a cuisine of more depth and more fire than its international reputation suggests, and the international reputation is still catching up to what the food actually is. Find a Tunisian restaurant. Order the brik first. Ask for more harissa than they give you. And understand that you are eating the cuisine of the country that put Rome on notice for a century and fed the Arab caliphate for four, and that knew what it was doing in the kitchen for all of that time.