Vegetarian recipes from Algeria

Meatless Algerian cooking rests on three supports: durum wheat, worked into semolina or flatbread, dried pulses, and olive oil from the north of the country. The wheat changes with the milling: cracked and roasted it becomes the frik of chorba frik, a tomato and chickpea soup scented with dried mint and coriander; as fine semolina it becomes the stretched and folded dough of mahjouba, filled with a tomato and onion compote. The base seasonings are few and recur everywhere: garlic, cumin, caraway, paprika, fresh coriander. They are enough to tell one dish from another without the ingredient list growing longer.

Pulses are not a side dish, they are the dish. Cherchem combines whole wheat with chickpeas or broad beans in a long cooking, a winter and harvest festival plate. Kabyle amekfoul steams semolina and serves it with seasonal vegetables and herbs. On the coast, karantika shows another use of pulses: chickpea flour whisked with water and baked until it sets like a custard, sold by the slice and eaten with bread and cumin. None of these dishes was adapted to do without meat: they were built this way, around what the field and the mill provided.