Merguez
Small red sausage of lamb and beef, spiced with cumin and harissa. Its spread in France has reached volumes comparable to those of some regional sausages. It has become a fixture of barbecues, couscous and sandwiches.
| Lean lamb shoulder | 500 g |
| Lean beef (chuck) | 300 g |
| Lamb or beef fat | 200 g |
| Fine salt | 20 g |
| Harissa | 25 g |
| Ground cumin | 8 g |
| Sweet paprika | 15 g |
| Red chilli powder | 5 g |
| Fresh garlic, crushed | 12 g |
| Ground coriander | 3 g |
| Ground caraway | 2 g |
| Ground fennel | 2 g |
| Iced water | 50 ml |
| Fine sheep casing (Ø 20–24 mm) | — |
- Preparation: Cut the meat and the fat into cubes. Chill hard to −2 °C. The meat must be very cold for a good mince.
- Mincing: Mince finely through the 4 to 5 mm plate. The fine texture is characteristic of the merguez.
- Preparing the spices: Dilute the harissa in the iced water. Mix all the dry spices.
- Seasoning: Add the diluted harissa, the spices and the garlic into the meats. Knead vigorously for 3 to 4 minutes until the forcemeat is well bound and homogeneous.
- Resting: Refrigerate for 12 to 24 hours. This rest is essential for the flavours to develop.
- Stuffing: Stuff into the fine sheep casings. Form sausages 12 to 15 cm long, twisting.
- Cooking: Grill over high heat for 8 to 10 minutes, turning regularly. The skin should be well grilled.
The merguez is the North African sausage that has spread most widely beyond its zone of origin. Born in the Maghreb, it is today one of the most consumed sausages in France, with the chipolata and the saucisse de Toulouse, and appears on the grills of Berlin, London and Montreal.
Its etymology is debated. The strongest lead traces back to the Arabic mirqaz or marqaz, a term for a spiced sausage mentioned in medieval Arab culinary manuscripts from Andalusia and the Maghreb. Other linguists attach it to Amazigh (the Berber language), which would suggest an origin prior to the Arab invasions of the seventh century. The merguez belongs to a long North African charcuterie tradition that uses mutton and lamb, the central meats of the Maghreb’s pastoral economy, where European charcuterie favours pork.
Harissa structures the taste of the merguez. This paste of dried red chillies, garlic, caraway, and coriander, sometimes completed with cumin, depending on family and region, comes from Tunisia, according to the most widespread tradition. Its present form probably dates from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the American chilli, introduced to the Maghreb by Hispano-Ottoman trade, was grafted onto an earlier aromatic base: caraway, present in medieval Arab-Andalusian cooking and well attested in the Iberian culinary treatises of the thirteenth century, already belonged to the Maghrebi repertoire before the chilli’s arrival. In the Saharan and semi-arid regions where this sausage was born, the chilli also plays a preservative role: its capsaicin slows bacterial growth in a climate hostile to keeping meat fresh.
The merguez, as Europe knows it, is largely a creation of the Algerian migration to France of the 1950s and 1960s. The first Algerian butchers who settled in the industrial suburbs (Saint-Denis, Aubervilliers, Roubaix) produced a merguez adapted to the locally available sheep casings, the spices imported from North Africa, and the tastes of a working-class clientele seeking the flavours of home. This diaspora merguez, slightly different from the Tunisian or Moroccan versions, is the one that established itself as the reference in Europe.
Its rise in France follows a precise path: first confined to halal butchers and neighbourhood markets in the 1960s and 1970s, it progressively won over traditional butchers and supermarkets in the 1980s. It is today folded into everyday French cooking, served in stadiums, campsites and village fêtes, while remaining, for millions of French people of Maghrebi origin, a link to a family cuisine and a collective memory.
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