Harissa: Armenian Wheat and Meat Porridge
If you know harissa from Tunisia, you expect a jar of red paste - one sniff and your mouth is busy for the next hour. In Armenia the same name gets you a plate of beige porridge with a well of butter in the middle, and there isn't a trace of heat in it. Both names grew out of a single Arabic verb meaning to pound or to crush - it's just that in Tunis they pounded chilies and in Armenia meat with wheat, a good few centuries before chili ever sailed into the Mediterranean.
Harissa (Armenian: հարիսա) is a thick porridge of hulled, coarsely cracked wheat and meat, most often chicken, simmered for hours with constant stirring until the meat falls apart into threads and merges with the grain; before serving it is drizzled with melted butter, and Armenian cuisine treats it as the national dish.
Stir or Crush: Where Harissa Gets Its Name
Armenian folk tradition has it that the dish was born in Vagharshapat, where St. Gregory the Illuminator had meat and grain cooked for the poor in huge cauldrons and told the cooks hareq zsa, stir it; the verb harel means to stir, and that was the name. Linguists offer a more sober version: the word came from Arabic, where harasa means to crush, and it is the same root that gives the Tunisian paste its name.
The principle itself, wheat and meat cooked so long that the two of them end up as one substance, is not an Armenian invention. It is cooked across the whole belt from the Caucasus to the Persian Gulf: Turkish cuisine calls it keşkek and has had it on the UNESCO list since 2011; Iranian cuisine cooks halim for the Ramadan iftar, and Iraqi cuisine its hareesa for Ashura. The oldest written recipe comes from a 10th-century Baghdad cookbook. What is Armenian about harissa is the stories told around it, and there is more of that than around any neighboring pot.
Forty Days on Musa Dagh
In 1915 several thousand Armenians from the villages below Musa Dagh, in what is now Turkey, refused to be deported and held out on the summit for more than forty days under siege, until French ships took them off. Up there they had wheat and goats, so they cooked the one dish those two make - harissa. That is where the dish gets its weight today: in the village of Musaler near Yerevan, where some of the survivors settled, it is cooked in huge cauldrons every year on the anniversary of the defense and handed out to anyone who shows up; Armenian radio says eighteen symbolic cauldrons are set up nowadays, one for each of the eighteen defenders who died. Nobody puts an exact number of hours on the stirring; the sources agree only that it is long and that it runs through the night.
A Wooden Spoon, a Chicken and a Well for Butter
Three things go into the pot, plus one helping of patience. The wheat is called korkot: hulled and coarsely cracked, but unlike bulgur it has never been steamed, so in the pot it still has to soften all the way down. Chicken, lamb or beef simmers with it until the meat stops being a piece and becomes a thread; the wooden spoon that keeps the pot stirred without a break counts as an ingredient, because without it the porridge scorches or stays two dishes in one pot. The butter comes only once it is on the plate, into a well in the middle, the same well my grandmother used to press into semolina porridge with a spoon.
It is eaten hot, with lavash to scoop it up, and no sauce or salad belongs anywhere near it. Traditionally it is a dish for Easter morning and for weddings, cooked for a whole village out of a single cauldron, but Yerevan restaurants now keep it on the menu year-round as a main course. Order it exactly that way, as a main course and the only one, because a portion that looks modest on the plate is anything but modest in calories. Anyone who adds khorovats on top of it had better have a nap penciled in for the afternoon.
A Plate with a Well of Butter in Yerevan
I ate chicken harissa in Yerevan, at the Lavash restaurant (see Where to Eat in Yerevan). The flavor was mild, like chicken broth someone had thickened with grain; the meat showed up not in pieces but in threads. The dish cost 1,300 AMD (3.20 EUR), and it really was very hearty food that kept me going for a long time. I did not eat anything else in Yerevan for the rest of the day.
