In one of my first posts on this blog I declared my love for harissa, the spicy North African red pepper spread. Since then I have strayed a bit: our jar of harissa run out, I began to flirt with other spicy red pastes – I was not immune the the trendy allure of sriracha. But when Martha made hlelem recently, I was reminded of my former love. With sausage on the brain lately, a freshly-opened jar of harissa had me thinking one thing: merguez.

A sausage popular in North Africa and Europe, merguez is usually made with lamb. This makes sense — there are a lot of pastoralists raising flocks of sheep in North Africa most of whom are Muslim — pork is neither practical nor permitted. But since I’m free of religious obligations or cultural sensitivity, pork was definitely an option and one too delicious to ignore. The argument could be made that a pork sausage is not really merguez, but I say as long as there’s harissa I’ll not worry about fine distinctions.

As I was searching the Internet for recipes, I was disappointed to see that many contain only a small amount of harissa: 3 tablespoons per 3# of meat, for example. To make up for this deficiency most recipes add other spices (cayenne, coriander, cumin, sumac, etc.). This might be traditional, but I didn’t see how adding additional spices would help; the flavor of the harissa ought to be flavor enough. My final recipe was:

• 1# 5 oz boneless pork shoulder
• 10 g garlic (3 cloves)
• 50 g harissa
• 15 g salt

If harissa is the only thing a sausage has to lean on in terms of flavor, the success of the recipe obviously depends on the quality of the harissa. Someday I will make my own harissa (and you can be sure you’ll be hearing about it here), but with a jar already open I used Mustapha’s. This is, after all, the harissa I fell in love with; I haven’t sampled other brands very widely.

I served the sausage with a cous cous-based taboulli.

Despite the impression you might get from reading this blog, sometimes I don’t feel like cooking. Luckily, I have a lot of options: I can go out or Martha might cook. Or hot dogs.

Hot dogs are not all that exciting, but that is no reason not to try a beer pairing—in fact it’s a great reason to try a beer pairing! Beer is such a great beverage because is that it is fit for the feasts of kings and peasants alike.

A trip to Trader Joe’s yielded the night’s beer: Samuel Smith’s Old Brewery Pale Ale. Since I had just finished the chapter in The Brewmaster’s Table on British beers it was the perfect bottle to try.

Here are Garret Oliver’s notes on this particular brew:

…a copper-colored beer with a big fluffy head. There’s that Yorkshire nose—hay, apples, butterscotch, and hops. The beer hits the palate with a mineral tang, then softens and rounds out to a dry biscuity malt enter. The finish is clean and flinty. This beer is big enough for steak, juicy enough for roast beef, and subtle enough for lamb. I also enjoy it with terrine en croûte, as do the British, though terrine en croûte sounds a lot better than “pork pie.”

Copper color, fluffy head, check.

Pork pie, huh? That’s basically a hot dog. Actually, the hot dogs are all beef, but it sounds like this beer is up for anything. Even harissa? I slathered some on my bun along with  some of the excellent Trader Joe’s Dijon and then sprinkled on some relish and raw onions because, after all, this was a hot dog.

The pairing worked pretty well. The affinity was mostly due to the beer’s carbonation’s ability to break through the spicy harissa. I also thought the smokiness of the hotdogs was pleasant when contrasted with the slight fruitiness of the ale. I was pretty surprised after finishing my hot dog that as I was drinking the last of my beer I noticed a very strong taste of licorice. I’m not sure if it would have helped the hot dog at all but I was excited to be able to actually identify this very specific flavor on the beer.

I forgot to mention (as Sue pointed out in her comment), that Reisenthel baskets make great gifts. More than just gifts, they make great gift baskets. For example, here’s a photo from Tom’s birthday present from a couple of years ago.

If you look closely at the contents, you’ll notice this basket is how Tom came to know harissa. 1.5 years later, we’re still going strong on this jar.

The gift focused around Claudia Roden’s The New Book of Middle Eastern Food. In the section on “Flavorings, Aromatics, Condiments, and Oils,” Roden discusses and defines many ingredients that are key to Middle Eastern cooking but perhaps not typical in the average US kitchen:

Harissa. This very hot chili-pepper past flavored with garlic and spices is much used in North African cooking. It can be bought ready-made in tubes and cans but it will not have the special perfume of the homemade variety. To make your own, see page 464.

I pulled items from this list and filled the basket with them, knowing that a lack of hard-to-find ingredients might inhibit Tom’s creativity when looking through the book for inspiration.

If you’re purchasing a new cookbook for a friend, consider throwing in some key ingredients when you give the gift. I remember the hunt for all of these items being a lot of fun, especially once I discovered a gold mine in Yasmeen’s Mediterranean Foods in Saginaw, Michigan. They don’t appear to have a website, but you can reach them by phone at (989) 791-3082 or visit their location at 3545 Bay Rd in Saginaw, MI if you’re in the area. If nothing else, pick up a bag of dried limes and make yourself a pot of Chai Hamidh, as Roden says, “made by breaking open dried limes [with a hammer] and pouring bowling water over them” (p. 483).

Also in the basket: Bodum’s Assam tea press, a mint plant, roseflower water, dried limes, orange flower water, pomegranate syrup, Mustapha’s Moroccan Harissa and Olives, Gilway Demerara Sugar Cubes, Urban Accents rice, and several large containers of spices including sumac and whole fenugreek and nigella seeds.

While this won’t blow anybody’s mind for  being on the cutting edge of exotic ingredients, I have discovered recently that I have a deep love for harissa. At first I was just using it as it was called for in North African recipes, but I eventually realized that it works in a lot more. It is great on buffalo burgers with brie cheese. On New Years day I discovered that it helped to make a great spicy thousand island dressing. And, this weekend, the greatest revelation of all: as I was searching desperately for something to eat for lunch, I found a can of tuna (in olive oil). I grew up eating tuna mixed with mayo on saltine crackers (with yellow cheese and green olives!). This time, I thew a little harissa in with the tuna and ate the resulting mixture on rye hardtack with spicy pickles. It was good.

So if you need some spice and smoke with a peppery body to hold it up, I recommend getting a jar of harissa. As far as I can tell, it keeps a long time. I have had my jar in the fridge for well over six months, and I haven’t died yet.