🇩🇿 The cattle breeds of Algeria

Cattle keep a modest place in Algeria's kitchen. Beef is eaten, often simmered into couscous sauces or tucked into stuffed rolls, but mutton is the meat the country eats most, and milk turns up mainly as fermented milk with couscous and butter in pastries.

• Mutton is the most eaten meat in Algeria; beef and poultry are common too.
• Beef or lamb go into the sauce of couscous, the national dish.
• Bourek annabi, from Annaba, is a big fried roll filled with minced beef.
• Dry masfouf couscous is traditionally eaten with fermented milk.
• Pork is forbidden to Muslims in Algeria under Islamic dietary law.

Cattle in Algeria

Algerian cooking grows from Berber, Arab, Turkish and European roots, and it leans on cereals, bread, olive oil and vegetables more than on any single meat. Where cattle enter the story, they do so quietly. Beef is named beside poultry as a meat used in the kitchen, while mutton, from sheep, is the meat Algerians eat most. Because pork is forbidden to Muslims under Islamic dietary law, the red meat on a plate comes from sheep or cattle. Beef simmers in the sauce of couscous, the national dish, and fills the large stuffed rolls of Annaba. The south adds camel meat, and game birds or venison count as treats, so the range of meats runs well beyond cattle. Dairy leaves only a light trace: fermented milk with dry couscous, butter in pastries.

Milk, butter and beef

Beef is the main gift of cattle to the Algerian table. It is cooked into the sauce of couscous with courgettes, carrots and chickpeas, minced into the stuffed fried rolls known as bourek annabi, and placed with lamb and poultry among the meats that reach nearly every dish. Dairy is quieter. A dry couscous called masfouf, or thameqfoult in Kabyle, is eaten traditionally with fermented milk, and butter goes into tamina, a semolina and honey paste served after a birth, and onto morning bread. Milk also appears at breakfast in coffee taken with bread or sweets.