More on Couscous
The internet is a godsend to anyone seeking information on anything - from the mundane to the serious to the most casual things…to couscous. Wikipedia alone gave me a wealth of information on this foodstuff.
Featuring it in my last blog entry made me more curious about its origins. Although, I knew somehow couscous has its origins in the Arab world, probably Northern Africa, I really didn’t know much about this grain, pasta…whatever!
Here’s what I found out about Couscous….
It did start out as a grain…the bigger particles that escaped the old-fashioned millstones during grinding that is. So the original couscous grains are actually broken bits of grain, whether wheat, barley, millet, rice or sorghum.
In the Philippines, this is what we call “binlid” - which was collected from rice mills all over the country and sold as animal feed. If you brought in your rice to be milled, the miller gave it back to you in a separate sack.
We always had “binlid” in?my parent’s first house in Quezon City. My grandmother always kept 2-3 school tuition-intended pigs in a pen at the farthest end of our backyard and she mixed the “binlid” with the rice bran called “darak” for their feed. I’m amazed….”binlid” is all that couscous is! And I always thought it was some exotic, gourmet food item, which it still is, I suppose.
In the US, Couscous is more known as a pasta. Sicilian immigrants brought this pasta made with nothing more than flour and water to the US. I’ve seen Lidia Bastianich on her PBS cooking show do this once. I didn’t even connect it to couscous because I always thought couscous was a certain grain.
The couscous we know today does start out as broken bits of grain, and then processed with nothing but water, semolina flour and a sieve to make bigger particles. Of course, production has become mechanized and they don’t do it all by hand anymore. This way, couscous has become readily available in many parts of the world and people are discovering this ancient Western African foodstuff.
