Where Does Falafel Come From? Egypt, Sometime After 1882

Falafel comes from Egypt, and it is much younger than its reputation. In Egyptian writing it shows up only after the British occupation of 1882. The writers Paul Balta and Farouk Mardam Bey made that finding, and the Hebrew University historian Shaul Stampfer reached the same date. The likeliest birthplace is Alexandria. Anything older is guesswork.

That is an awkward result for a dish that four or five nations claim as ancestral property. The fritter at the center of one of the Middle East's longest food arguments is roughly the same age as the telephone.

Where does falafel come from, if not the pharaohs?

The most common answer online is "ancient Egypt." The historian Alexander Lee, writing in History Today in January 2019, put it flatly: there are no references to anything resembling falafel in pharaonic texts. The beans were there. The frying was not.

Deep frying a ball of ground beans takes a lot of oil, and for most of history oil cost too much to waste on a cheap snack. Lee makes that point. Stampfer made it to Haaretz in 2015, and the paper summed up his case in one line: there is no ancient record of falafel, and "the technology just wasn't there."

The second popular story credits the Coptic Christians of Egypt. Copts go without meat for long stretches of the church year, and they are said to have invented falafel as a Lenten substitute, in some versions as early as the 4th century. Lee says there is "not a shred of evidence" for this, and adds that "falafel" is not a Coptic word.

Stampfer expected the opposite when he started. "I was very surprised because when I started working I thought that this was an old, old Middle Eastern food," he told Haaretz. "When I started trying to track this down for the footnotes, it wasn't there."

The case for leaving the door open

Not everyone is so firm. Nawal Nasrallah, a food historian who translates medieval Arabic cookbooks, told Arab News that there is no "concrete evidence, in the form of recipes or mention of it in ancient written records," for where falafel began. Even so, she said, "a credible claim for Egypt can still be made." She also argues that Copts, with so many meatless fast days, must have developed countless bean dishes for Lent.

Both sides agree on Egypt. Lee and Stampfer go with what the documents show, and Nasrallah leaves room for what the documents might have missed. On the evidence we have, the modern date is the better supported.

Copts do eat a lot of falafel now, and reference books such as the Oxford Companion to Food list it as a Lenten dish among the region's Christians. That is a fact about the 20th century. It says nothing about the 4th.

Who invented falafel? A guess involving British officers

Balta and Mardam Bey did more than date the dish. They also guessed at why it appeared when it did. After 1882 Egypt was full of British officers, and many had served in India, where they had grown fond of fried vegetable fritters. Perhaps, the two writers suggested, those officers asked their Egyptian cooks for something similar made from local ingredients.

Lee is careful with this. "There is no proof of this; but it is not implausible," he wrote, pointing to Indian fritters such as vada and bonda that are made the same way. Stampfer has a more specific candidate. In the late 19th century the Jews of Kerala and Calcutta often made fried balls of split green peas called parippu vada or filowri, which, in Lee's summary, Stampfer found "strikingly similar to falafel."

Nobody has found a document that proves the Indian link. What it has going for it is timing: the dish appears in Egyptian writing in the same years the officers arrived. The British carried Indian tastes to plenty of other places too, as the story of how curry spread around the world shows.

Alexandria is the most likely starting point. It was Egypt's main port and home to the largest concentration of British and European troops. Fava beans grew in quantity nearby, and under the Muhammad Ali dynasty they had become a staple of the Egyptian diet. From the coast the fritter spread through the rest of the country.

What does falafel mean, and why do Egyptians say taameya?

Here the sources split. Lee thinks the dish was so tied to its bean that it took its name from ful, the Arabic for fava. The dictionaries look elsewhere. Dictionary.com traces falafel to falafil, the plural of the Arabic filfil, "pepper." The American Heritage Dictionary prefers the Aramaic pilpal, "small round thing," from a verb meaning "to be round, roll." Nasrallah, in Arab News, points to an even older root, the Akkadian pillu, "fruit" or "seed."

None of these is settled. A small round fried thing is at least a fair description of the food.

Most Egyptians do not use the word anyway. In Egypt and Sudan the fritter is taameya (ta'miyya), built on ta'am, "food." Lee translates it as "a bite of food." So the falafel vs taameya question has a short answer: same dish, two names, and in Egypt it is made with fava beans. Chickpeas came later, further north.

English dictionaries disagree on when the word reached English. Dictionary.com says the early 1950s, while the Oxford English Dictionary is reported to have an example from 1936.

Mustafa Sahyoun's cart in Beirut, 1933

Falafel's route out of Egypt is hard to trace in detail. Shortly after the First World War it had reached what is now Lebanon. In 1933 Mustafa Sahyoun started selling falafel from a street cart on Beshara Khoury Street in downtown Beirut, according to Arab News. (Lee describes it as a shop, and Sahyoun did later open one.)

Around the same time the dish moved down the Red Sea coast toward Yemen, north to Turkey and west into Libya. Each place adjusted it to what grew there. In Mersa Matruh, on Egypt's Mediterranean coast, cooks used hyacinth beans instead of fava and added a little beef.

In the Levant, chickpeas replaced fava. That is why the falafel most of the world knows is a Levantine version of an Egyptian original. In Beirut it sat beside an older stock of Ottoman street food.

Is falafel Egyptian or Israeli?

It is Egyptian by origin. Israel's claim is to a later version, and to what the dish came to mean.

Stampfer says falafel became popular in Beirut and Mandate Palestine in the mid-1930s. According to Lee, the earliest Jewish settlers, the halutzim, picked it up readily from their neighbours and never asked whether it was "Arab" food. The Eastern European Jews of the Fifth Aliyah, the immigration wave of 1929 to 1939, were less keen. They shunned it as "alien," Lee writes, even "unclean."

Stampfer suspects the sandwich itself, fritters in a pita with salad, was a local invention. "The eating of falafel in a sandwich was very possibly an innovation of Jews living in Jaffa or Jerusalem," he wrote. He points out that the pocket pita depends on European baking methods only about 100 years old. Tomatoes, a New World plant, reached the region only at the end of the 19th century.

Rationing, Yemeni stalls and a 1958 song

Two things made falafel Israeli after 1948. The first was austerity. In 1949 the new state brought in a rationing program called tzena that limited meat, and a cheap fritter of beans or chickpeas filled the gap.

The second was immigration. Lee counts 100,690 arrivals from Yemen, Turkey and North Africa in 1949, 41 per cent of that year's immigrants, up from 12,517 the year before. These newcomers had eaten falafel at home and saw nothing foreign in it. Many Yemenis opened falafel stalls. The government, keen to separate Israeli culture from its neighbours', promoted the idea that falafel had come from Yemen, not Egypt. Lee calls this "a patent falsehood, but it served its purpose."

In 1958 came Dan Almagor's song "Ve-Lanu Yesh Falafel" ("And we have falafel"). It runs through Italian macaroni and Viennese schnitzel before claiming the fritter for Israel. By the 1960s El Al was serving falafel on long-haul flights.

Palestinians, for whom falafel had been ordinary Arab food for a generation, saw all this as theft, and many still do. Stampfer's answer is that falafel is too recent to have been appropriated by anyone. He also notes that for some Palestinians it has become a national dish, "in a sense, a mirror image of the process among Jewish Israelis." Food has done this kind of work in many places, as our piece on how food shaped cultural identity shows.

The 2008 food fight and the Sahyoun brothers

The dispute turned commercial in October 2008. Fadi Abboud, president of the Lebanese Industrialists' Association, said Lebanon would seek European Union protected-origin status for 25 dishes, citing the 2002 ruling that only Greek-made cheese could be called feta. Hummus and tabbouleh were his best hopes. Abboud admitted falafel would be hard to claim, since Egyptians and Syrians wanted it too.

The Beirut street was not convinced. "He's plain wrong. Falafel is originally Turkish," Rabea Abdullah, the chief falafel fryer at the King of Potatoes in Hamra, told The Age. Rami Zurayk, an agriculture professor at the American University of Beirut, took the regional view: "Foods like falafel are not Lebanese but they're certainly not Israeli either. How can they be when Israel is only 60 years old?" Neither man mentioned Alexandria.

By then falafel had long since spread with migrants. Turkish stalls were selling it in Germany by the early 1970s, and in the United States it stayed in immigrant neighbourhoods through the 1960s and 1970s, part of the pattern that immigration built into American food.

Back in Beirut, Mustafa Sahyoun's business passed to his sons Zoheir and Fouad, who ended up running rival falafel shops next door to each other on Beshara Khoury Street. Anthony Bourdain visited both in 2010 for his show "No Reservations." Fouad's shop closed in 2021, hit by Lebanon's economic crisis, 88 years after his father started selling from a cart.

Questions people ask

Is falafel Egyptian or Israeli?

Falafel is Egyptian by origin, first appearing in Egyptian writing after the British occupation of 1882. Israel's claim rests on a later version: the pita sandwich, which Shaul Stampfer thinks was possibly invented by Jews in Jaffa or Jerusalem, and the dish's place in the national cuisine after 1948.

What is the difference between falafel and taameya?

They are the same fried bean fritter under two names. In Egypt and Sudan it is called taameya, from the Arabic ta'am, "food," and it is made with fava beans. In the Levant the dish is usually called falafel and chickpeas replaced the fava, which is the version most of the world knows.

What does the word falafel mean?

Sources disagree. Dictionary.com traces falafel to falafil, the plural of the Arabic filfil, "pepper." The American Heritage Dictionary prefers the Aramaic pilpal, "small round thing." Alexander Lee thinks it comes from ful, the Arabic word for fava beans. None of these origins is settled.

Did ancient Egyptians or Coptic Christians invent falafel?

No evidence supports either story. Alexander Lee found no reference to anything like falafel in pharaonic texts, and says there is "not a shred of evidence" for the Coptic Lenten origin. Nawal Nasrallah argues a Coptic claim is still credible, but the earliest Egyptian writing about falafel dates from after 1882.

Filed under Origin Stories, Cultural Identity