Harisa

the Armenian wheat and chicken porridge beaten for hours into a single smooth mass, served with melted butter and cumin

Origin: Musa Ler, Yerevan & Armenia

From the journey of Wheat.

Harisa is wheat and chicken and nothing else, cooked together for six or seven hours and then beaten until the two stop being separate things. Skinned wheat berries are simmered until they burst; the meat is pulled from the bone and returned; and then the pot is worked with a wooden paddle, hard and repeatedly, until the mass turns glossy, elastic, and pulls away from the sides in threads. Melted butter and cumin go over the top. That is the entire dish, and its whole quality lies in the beating. The name collides with two others and the atlas keeps them apart. Moroccan harissa is a chilli paste and has nothing to do with this. Gulf Arabic harees is a genuine relative, the same wheat-and-meat construction under a cognate name, and the two share an ancestor in the medieval Arabic harīsa, from a root meaning to crush or pound. Armenian harisa is its own dish with its own occasion, and it is written separately here for the same reason a Tongan lū pulu is written apart from a Samoan palusami. The occasion is what gives it weight. Harisa is the dish of the Musa Ler pilgrimage, held each September at the village of Musaler outside Yerevan by the descendants of the villagers who held out on Musa Dagh for fifty-three days in 1915 before being taken off the mountain by French warships. Enormous cauldrons are set up and the harisa is beaten in public, in shifts, and distributed to everyone who comes. Franz Werfel's novel made the siege internationally famous in 1933; the dish is how the descendants mark it themselves. It is also a Christmas and Easter dish across Armenia, and one of those foods a village makes collectively rather than a household making alone, because nobody can beat a cauldron of it by themselves.

Ingredients

Harisa

  • 500 g skinned whole wheat berries (dzavar or pearled wheat), soaked overnight
  • 1.4 kg chicken, whole, or lamb shoulder on the bone
  • 3.5 litres water
  • 2.5 tsp salt, or to taste

To finish

  • 120 g butter
  • 2 tsp ground cumin
  • 1 tsp freshly ground black pepper

Method

  1. Soak the wheat overnight in plenty of cold water, then drain it.
  2. Put the chicken and the water in a very large heavy pot, bring to the boil, and skim the foam carefully as it rises.
  3. Simmer for an hour and a half until the bird is falling apart, then lift it out and let it cool enough to handle.
  4. Pull all the meat from the bones, discarding skin and bone, and shred it finely with your fingers. Return the meat to the pot.
  5. Add the drained wheat and the salt. Bring back to a bare simmer.
  6. Cook uncovered for four to five hours over the lowest heat you can hold, stirring every twenty minutes and scraping the base so nothing catches.
  7. Top up with hot water whenever it thickens too far. It should stay loose enough to stir throughout.
  8. The wheat is ready when the grains have burst completely and lost their shape. Do not begin beating before that point.
  9. Now beat it. Use a sturdy wooden spoon or paddle and work the mass hard against the side of the pot, in one direction, for twenty to thirty minutes.
  10. It will change under the spoon: first thickening, then turning glossy, then pulling away from the sides and stretching in threads when you lift the paddle. That thread is the finish.
  11. Season to taste. It should be well salted, since the only other seasoning arrives on top.
  12. Melt the butter with the cumin and pepper, spoon it over the surface of each bowl, and serve very hot.

Notes

The beating is the dish and nothing else will substitute for it: a blender gives a smooth paste with none of the elastic pull that a paddle develops, and stopping early leaves a coarse porridge. Skinned whole wheat, sold as dzavar, korkot, or harees wheat by Armenian and Middle Eastern grocers, is the correct grain; pearl barley is the usual substitute and cooks faster. The pot must be heavy or the base will catch during the long simmer, and it must be stirred more often than feels necessary. Harisa thickens hard as it cools and is loosened with hot water when reheated. Traditionally it is unspiced in the pot, with everything arriving in the butter at the end.

The Gastrographer

The Gastrographer

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