Hasu – A Spicy Soup of the Algerian Jews

Bread bakers set aside a portion of yeasted dough to act as a starter for the next batch of bread. This starter is called a sponge, poolish, levain de boulanger in French, and biga in Italian. But in this medieval soup of the Jews of North Africa it is the foundation to a soup. The ethnologist Joëlle Bahloul tells us that this soup called hasū, although eaten by the population at large, was especially notable as a soup made by the Jews of Ain Beyda of the eastern Algerian steppe who made it during the winter, often in the morning in place of coffee when it is very cold or snowing. Hasū is rare, unknown by outsiders, and nearly forgotten among Jews of North African extraction themselves except for the elderly. It is a kind of piquant velouté, a soup made from semolina bread starter and spicy with harīsa, cayenne pepper, and caraway. Some of the starter is mixed with ground coriander seed and spoon-dropped into hot olive oil. These tiny fried beignets are used as a garnish. They are a little larger than hazelnuts and are called thumniyya or they are made as one makes the little pasta balls known as the couscous called muhammas.

There is an old history to hasū as we know from the descriptions left by the great twelfth-century Arab geographer al-Idrīsī who seems to indicate that hasū means very soft boiled eggs that are almost liquid. It’s possible that eggs were once a prominent part of the dish or it might mean that the dish should resemble thickly beaten eggs. Another meaning to the word hasū derives from the word “to sip,” so we know it’s a soup. There is a recipe for hasū (or hasa) in the thirteenth-century Hispano-Muslim cookbook probably written in the Spanish province of Murcia by Ibn Razīn al-Tujībī called the Kitāb fadālat al-khiwān fī tayyibāt al-tcam wa’l-alwān which translates roughly as “The excellent table composed of the best foods and the best dishes.” But in that recipe, there is no egg. Even though this soup has many steps and is complex, the resulting taste is very much worth the effort. A recipe for the harīsa can be found here.