Lablabi is a dish that sounds like an accident until you taste it. You take a bowl of torn stale bread, ladle over a garlicky chickpea broth, then keep going: a spoonful of harissa, a scatter of cumin, a squeeze of lemon, a generous slug of olive oil, and somewhere in there an egg. It is breakfast in Tunisia, ladled out in small cafes from around six in the morning, and it is one of the most genuinely restorative things you can eat on a damp British morning.

A Breakfast Soup With a Kick

Lablabi belongs to the category of food that knows exactly what it is for. It is cheap, it is fast once the chickpeas are cooked, and it wakes you up in a way that porridge simply cannot. In Tunis, Sousse or Sfax you will find it sold in modest places with a pot of chickpeas simmering on the hob, a stack of day-old bread, and bowls of harissa and cumin on every table so you can adjust your own bowl to your own tolerance.

It is a working breakfast, which is why it has spread beyond Tunisia's borders and into the repertoires of home cooks who simply like the idea of a savoury, spicy, bread-thickened soup first thing. The dish is endlessly adaptable, but the structure never really changes: bread, chickpeas, heat, acid, fat. Get those right and you are most of the way there.

What Goes Into the Bowl

The constants are few, and they are all assertive. Nothing here is background flavour.

• Chickpeas, cooked until soft, with plenty of their cooking liquid kept back to make the broth.
• Garlic, crushed and cooked with the chickpeas rather than added raw at the end.
• Cumin, ground, and lots of it — this is the spice that makes lablabi taste like lablabi.
• Harissa, loosened with a little hot broth so it mixes through instead of sitting in a lump.
• Olive oil, a proper glug of the good stuff, added at the table.
• Lemon juice, to cut through the oil and the chilli.
• Stale bread, torn rather than sliced.

Everything else is a variation: a poached or fried egg, tinned tuna, black olives, capers, preserved lemon, a spoonful of yoghurt, grated cheese, a handful of chopped coriander. In Tunisia you will often find tuna and olives, because they are pantry staples, but a plain bowl with just harissa, cumin and lemon is a perfectly legitimate thing.

The Bread Is Not an Afterthought

Fresh bread is the wrong bread here. Lablabi is built to use up yesterday's loaf, and the staling is the point — the bread needs to hold its shape long enough to soak up the broth without disintegrating into paste. A day-old baguette works, as does sourdough or a decent white bloomer. If you can get Tunisian semolina bread, so much the better.

Tear it by hand into rough, thumb-sized pieces and line the bottom of a deep bowl. Ladle the hot broth over and let it sit for two minutes before eating. That brief pause is what turns bread into something halfway between dumpling and soup. If you add the bread too early it goes mushy; too late and it stays crunchy and pointless.

Cooking the Chickpeas — Dried or Tinned

Dried chickpeas are worth the effort, because the cooking liquid becomes your broth. Soak 250g overnight with a pinch of bicarbonate of soda, drain, then simmer with a halved onion, four or five crushed garlic cloves and a bay leaf for 60 to 90 minutes, until the chickpeas squash easily between your fingers. Keep the water — that is your stock, and it should taste of garlic slowly.

If you are using tinned chickpeas, use two 400g tins with their liquid plus about 500ml of water, and simmer for 15 minutes with the same aromatics so the broth has time to take on flavour. Either way, mash a ladleful of chickpeas against the side of the pan and stir it back in. That small step is what gives lablabi its body.

Building the Bowl, Layer by Layer

• Tear the stale bread into a deep bowl and set it aside.
• Loosen two teaspoons of harissa with a ladle of hot broth in a small bowl, then stir it back into the pan.
• Ladle the chickpeas and broth over the bread and wait two minutes.
• Crack an egg into the simmering pan and poach it for three minutes, then slide it on top — or fry it in olive oil and set it on the surface.
• Finish with cumin, lemon juice, a good olive oil, and salt to taste.
• Add tuna, olives, capers or coriander if you like, and eat it immediately with a spoon.

Serve it in deep bowls, and put the harissa, cumin and oil on the table so people can push their own bowl in the direction they want. That is how it is eaten in Tunisia, and it is half the pleasure.

Where Lablabi Sits in North African Food Culture

North African cooking, and Tunisian cooking in particular, is built on a few brilliant ideas: bread as a utensil and an ingredient, pulses cooked slowly with aromatics, and a fermented chilli paste that does the work of a whole spice rack. Harissa — red chillies pounded with garlic, caraway, coriander and salt — is the backbone of the Tunisian kitchen, and lablabi is one of its purest expressions.

The wider Maghreb has its own answers to the same problem. Morocco has bissara, a velvety fava bean soup eaten with bread and olive oil for breakfast; Algeria and Libya have their own chickpea and lamb broths spiced with cumin and paprika. The threads run back through Berber, Arab, Andalusian and Ottoman cooking, layered over centuries and stitched together with French and Italian influences along the coast.

What ties it together is hospitality and thrift: nothing wasted, everything shared, and a belief that a proper breakfast should carry you through the day. Lablabi does exactly that. Make a pot on a Sunday, keep the chickpeas in the fridge, and you have four or five mornings of something far more interesting than toast.