Lablabi (Chickpea Broth over Stale Bread)

Variations

• Hergma: the traditional version made with cow's trotters, which gives the broth a gelatine body. It is one of the few routes by which fat enters this dish at all.
• Bizerte lablabi: the sandwich version from northern Tunisia — the same mixture stuffed into a baguette. The bread has moved outside the bowl.
• Iraqi lablabi: a much plainer dish of chickpeas in their broth and little else.
• Vegetarian: leave the tuna out and be generous with capers and pickled peppers. The broth itself never had anything animal in it.
• Late at night: it began as a winter breakfast and is now eaten at any hour, including as the thing you queue for on the way home.

Tips

• The broth is the water the chickpeas cooked in. No stock is made and none is added. Starch and protein leach out of the pulses into the water and thicken it slightly, and that is the entire body of the dish — there is no fat in the pan at all. Pour that water away and there is no lablabi left to make. Crushing a ladle of the chickpeas back in at the end is the same idea: thickness taken from inside the pot rather than added to it (thickening a sauce).
• Why the lemon and the harissa never go in the pan. Soaking is explicit that vinegar, tomato and lemon set pectin firm, so in bean dishes the acid waits until the pulses are tender — it names chana masala and Red Red as its worked examples. Lablabi keeps that rule not as a cooking order but as a serving order. The acid goes into the bowl, never the pan.
• The bread is the body of the dish, and it has to be stale. Fattoush does the exact opposite in the same part of the world: that page says its bread "is here to resist, not to drink", and names gazpacho and umm ali as the dishes that use bread as a body a liquid is built onto. Lablabi is on that second side. Fresh bread collapses into paste the moment the broth hits it.
• Everything else is added in the bowl. None of the harissa, oil, egg, tuna, capers or lemon goes into the pan. One pot becomes one dish per person, which is why somebody who cannot take heat and somebody who lives on it can eat from the same broth.
• Cumin goes in twice, and the two are nearly different ingredients. Once into the broth and once over the bowl. Ground spice opens up in about thirty seconds of heat and only burns after that (blooming spices), so what is in the broth is a cooked aroma and what is dusted on top is a raw one.
• Poach the eggs at broth temperature, not at a boil. White sets from about 62°C and yolk from about 68°C (cooking eggs). At a rolling boil the white shreds; drop the heat until the surface barely trembles and four minutes is enough.
• Salt in the soaking water is fine. Sodium displaces the calcium in the skins' pectin and softens them. The rule that beans must never meet salt while soaking is the rule about acid, misremembered.