Harees (hrisseh)

Cracked wheat and meat go into the same pot and cook for hours. The mixture is beaten with a wooden handle until the grain breaks down, and what is left sits between a porridge and a thick soup, eaten with a spoon. Melted butter goes over the top and cinnamon over that. In Syria the usual name is hrisseh, and in Aleppo and on the coast it appears both at iftar and at Easter.

How it is cooked

The ingredients are few: wheat, meat, water, salt. The work is in the time and the arm. It is stirred and pounded until the meat shreds and the grain dissolves, which is why it is usually made in a large pot for a crowd rather than for one household. A fork is useless here. The butter goes on last and is not stirred in; it stays on the surface.

Not the sweet of the same name

In Syria the name harees covers two different things, and this record is one of them. The other is a semolina cake soaked in syrup, which this site carries under the name namoura. The dish on this page is not sweet: it is wheat and meat, salted and heavy. Say which one you mean when ordering, or dessert will arrive.

When it comes to the table

In Ramadan it is among the first plates at iftar, filling and soft after a long day. It is also cooked on the day of Ashura. In the Armenian communities of Aleppo and the coast it belongs to the Easter table, where it is called harisa or korkot — the same pot under another name. One dish, three different calendars.

Three states of one grain

The other two states of this grain are already on the site. Freekeh is wheat cut green and burned in the field; bulgur is wheat boiled, dried and cracked; harees is cracked grain cooked until it dissolves in water. The written trail goes back a long way: a recipe appears in the Baghdad cookbook of Ibn Sayyar al-Warraq, written in the 10th century.