Cumin scents the Maghrebi merguez, the Lebanese makanek and the Turkish sucuk. That is no accident: the northern, southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean shared the same sea routes for millennia, and the spices travelled with the merchants. The Middle East and the Persian Gulf extend this circulation towards Asia. It was by way of the Levant, the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf that the Indian spices, turmeric, cinnamon, and cardamom, reached the Mediterranean kitchens, and by the same routes that Western culinary techniques gradually made their way east.

It is in this zone that dietary constraint has most directly shaped charcuterie. The prohibition of pork, common to the Islamic and Jewish traditions and shared by the majority of the region’s populations, shifted production towards lamb and beef, with clear aromatic consequences: cumin, cinnamon and citrus balance the density of ruminant fats and compose profiles proper to the region. The constraint is not uniform, however. The Christian communities of Lebanon, Syria and Greece maintained, in parallel, a pork charcuterie, and the Cypriot sheftalia, like the Greek loukaniko, includes it in its composition. The Iranian sosis bandari adds a further nuance: in a country where Islamic law proscribes pork, a street sausage of chicken and beef, scented with turmeric and the spices of the Gulf, has become a popular dish. The religious rule directs the composition without preventing the rise of a charcuterie tradition.

The sucuk is a good example of diffusion at a regional scale. A dried beef sausage, spiced with cumin, chilli and garlic. Its flattened section is obtained by pressing after drying. Dried sausages of this type were known among the Turkic peoples of Central Asia well before the Ottoman expansion; what is established is that the preparation predates the Ottoman Empire. Its expansion then carried it towards the Balkans, the Caucasus and the Levant, making the sucuk one of the few sausages in this book whose journey can be traced from the steppes of Central Asia to the markets of Beirut, Sofia and Yerevan.

The rice-stuffed containers form another family, present from the Maghreb to Anatolia. The Tunisian osban, made in the sheep’s paunch, the Egyptian mombar, and the Turkish mumbar dolması, stuffed into a beef or sheep casing, share one logic: an envelope filled with a mixture of rice, chopped offal, and spices, poached in a broth, then grilled to brown the casing. These preparations do not necessarily derive from one another; they testify to a common technique, developed in parallel by cultures sharing the same dietary constraints, the same raw materials and the same trade routes. The documentation of this zone remains more fragmentary than that of the European sections: the medieval Arabic sources are less accessible, and geographical protections of the PGI type are absent, thereby complicating historical traceability.

The exchanges today run in both directions. Spread throughout Western Europe by North African immigration from the 1960s, the merguez is now produced industrially in France, Belgium and the Netherlands, and sold to diaspora communities as far as Australia and Canada. In the opposite direction, sausages of the Frankfurter type, made locally from poultry or beef to respect halal requirements, have entered the retail channels of Turkey, Iran and the Gulf countries since the 1990s. The halal constraint has thus imposed adaptations on Western industrial products and given rise to local variants that, in turn, constitute traditions in the making.