Cuisine

Algerian

Chorba is a weekday soup with a long list of cousins across the Maghreb, and the Algerian pot has its own sour-spice pitch. Lamb or chicken, tomato, chickpeas or broken noodles, and a handful of herbs go into a broth that should taste of cumin and coriander, not of a generic stock cube. Lemon or a fermented flavour can sharpen it. The soup is a meal with bread, not a starter you finish before the 'real' food. Algeria's kitchen also runs to couscous, slow lamb, and pastries that share a family with Moroccan and Tunisian tables without copying them.

Amazigh, Arab, Ottoman-adjacent and French-period layers sit in the same city. Chorba — the word simply means soup in much of the region — is cooked from Algiers to Constantine with local noodle shapes and spice. French bakeries left baguettes that now scoop the soup. The cooking is Maghrebi, which means it shares cumin, tomato, lamb and steamed grain with Morocco and Tunisia. It is not a flavour variant of Moroccan restaurant tagine. Treating Algeria as a blank on a North African map is how chorba gets filed under someone else's cuisine.

Tomato, lamb, chickpeas, vermicelli or freekeh, mint and coriander appear often. Harissa may sit on the table rather than in the pot. Bread is a utensil. Chorba should be soupy, not a stew that forgot to reduce. Spice is bloomed in oil with onion before the liquid goes in. Related tagines and couscous belong in the wider Maghrebi entry; chorba is the plate this catalog actually cooks.