Cuisine

Tunisian

Harissa is a working paste in Tunisia, not a jar you open for colour. Dried chilli, garlic, caraway and coriander are pounded with oil into something you cook with and put on the table. Brik is a thin pastry envelope — warqa — folded around an egg, often with tuna, capers and parsley, then fried so the white sets and the yolk stays runny. You eat it with your hands and accept that it drips. The wider Tunisian table is Maghrebi: couscous, lamb, tomato, and a hotter chilli register than many Moroccan restaurant plates. Ojja, lablabi and grilled salads sit around the same harissa.

Amazigh, Arab, Andalusian and Ottoman-adjacent cooking, plus a long Mediterranean tuna-and-olive pantry, shaped the table. Brik is related to börek and to Algerian and Moroccan fried pastries; the runny-egg tuna version is the Tunisian café plate people remember. Harissa as a named paste is especially associated with Tunisia and then travelled. French-period bakeries left baguettes that still accompany soups. The cooking is Maghrebi. It is not Algerian chorba with a different name, and it is not Levantine mezze with extra chilli.

Heat is harissa and dried chilli, often with caraway. Olive oil carries the paste. Brik pastry must be thin; a thick spring-roll wrapper is a different crunch. The egg is the test: white just set, yolk spilling into the tuna. Lemon and parsley cut the fryer fat. Tunisian food shares couscous and lamb with the rest of the Maghreb and then turns the chilli up.