The history of Egypt’s most popular dish – an enticing mixture of lentils, macaroni, rice, chickpeas and a spicy tomato sauce, topped with crispy fried onions and laced with a vinegar-garlic dressing called da’a – remains obscure: an etymological as much as a culinary mystery. The word “koshari” is not Arabic, and of its ingredients, only lentils and onions are native to Egypt. Beyond that, though, speculation outweighs documentation when it comes to explaining how this iconic meal first came to the country and how it became popular there.

It is not possible to trace written accounts of koshari back further than a century. Some of its ingredients have been available in Egypt for millennia – it has been suggested that rice first appeared in the country as early as 1000 BCE, probably via pre-Achaemenid Persia’s trading links with ancient China, while the earliest known traces of domestic chickpeas come from Neolithic Turkey. Several equally vital constituents of koshari are far more recent arrivals, though. Tomatoes were introduced to the eastern Mediterranean from the Americas some time after 1540, chili (another Mesoamerican food) via India a century or more later, and pasta not until the arrival of Italian cuisine in Egypt in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Most writers on the subject believe that koshari is an adaptation of an Indian meal brought to Egypt by the British in the early 1900s. From an etymological point of view, this is an attractive theory. The Hindi word khichri describes a dish of rice and lentils that was certainly served as a street food on the Subcontinent in the nineteenth century. The word appears to share its origins with kedgeree, the quintessentially Anglo-Indian breakfast dish of split pulses, onions, eggs, boiled rice and reheated fish, but it makes its earliest printed appearance in a German travelogue, Mandelso’s Travels in Western India, AD 1638-1639. This book describes Gujarat and the Mughal capital, Agra, during the reign of Shah Jahan, and observes: “The ordinary Diet being only Kitsery, which they make of Beans pounded, and rice, while they boile together… they put thereto a little butter melted.” The same dish is also mentioned in John Fryer’s A New Account of East India and Persia, published in 1698: “Their delighfullest Food being only Cutchery, a sort of Pulse and Rice mixed together.” The “pulse” described here is surely lentils. Hamilton’s New Account of the East Indies, dating to 1727, says: “Some Doll and Rice, being mingled together and boyled, make Kitcheree,” and here “doll” is clearly the Hindi daal, that still-familiar lentil staple of the modern Indian restaurant.

Explaining how this Indian dish made its way to Egypt – and was significantly developed there – means understanding something of the history of the British relations with Egypt and of the First World War period in particular. The British empire in India dates to the seventeenth century, and Indian troops served in Egypt as units of the British army as early as the Napoleonic period (see Sir James MacGregor’s Medical sketches of the expedition to Egypt from India [1804]). The construction of the Suez Canal during the 1860s renewed British interest in the region. The canal opened up a much shorter route between Europe and India – before this date, shipping had had to round Africa, a journey that in the days of sail took at least six months, and sometimes, thanks to contrary winds in the Indian Ocean, as much as a year and a half. Since India was the richest of all British colonies, imperial interests made it vital to ensure control of the canal. The 1878 proto-nationalist revolt of Arabi Pasha against the Ottoman Turkish rule of the Khedive of Egypt was perceived as a threat to this control, and after the 1882 bombardment of Alexandria by the Royal Navy, British troops arrived in Egypt to restore the Khedive, remaining until 1922. The invasion force mustered in 1882 included six regiments drawn from India, three of them comprised of native infantry from the Punjab, Rajputana and Mumbai.

It is possible that koshari arrived in Egypt in the form of rations supplied to Indian troops in 1798 or 1882, but the most sustained Indian presence in Egypt dates to 1914-18. With the outbreak of the First World War, British regiments stationed in the country were mostly ordered back to Europe and the Western Front, and their place was taken by units of the Indian Army whose rations included the cheap, sustaining and nourishing khichri.

The British Army’s supply service was noted for its ability to cater for the tastes of Indian troops, but the cost of shipping bulky supplies all the way from India would have been prohibitive; rice and lentils, at least, would soon have been sourced locally and Egyptian acquaintance with the mysteries of khichri may have begun in this way. Certainly more sustained and intimate acquaintance with Indian troops probably ­ensured that awareness of the dish spread into the suburbs of Cairo, where there had long been an Italian merchant quarter. It was probably here that macaroni and tomato sauce were first added. Koshari’s characteristic spiciness, on the other hand, most likely made its way into the dish from the east, again arriving from India – this time in the form of chutney (Hindi chatni, “sauce”), which is typically made from a base of chili and vinegar.

It is not hard to understand the popularity of an affordable and filling dish based on healthy carbohydrates, but one additional reason for the enduring popularity of koshari may be more strictly local. Egypt’s Coptic Christians, who still accounts for around 10 percent of the population, are required to eschew meat for the 40 days of Lent, and turn during this period to vegetarian foods. From an historical perspective, though, meat has always been relatively expensive, and there is no reason to suppose that koshari – the most flavoursome available vegetarian dish – was not just as popular among Cairo’s Islamic working class.

Whatever the truth – and no matter how long the journeys that koshari’s ingredients had to make to arrive in Egypt – it was only there that they were combined, refined, and finally perfected. Koshari may be an early example of “fusion” – the cuisine of many different countries – but it also undeniably, magnificently Egyptian.