Recipe: Spicy harissa adds zing to chickpea soup

In Tunisia, partiers and laborers line up during the pre-dawn hours for the same thing — steaming bowls of lablabi, a hearty soup of chickpeas and stale baguette that tastes so much better than it sounds.

For an older generation, lablabi is hot breakfast. For a younger, it is late-night, after-club grub. Like so many of the world’s soups, it was born to use the bits and scraps a kitchen naturally produces.

But unlike the long, low simmers so often used to draw such ingredients together, lablabi is built in the moment. And as a composed, rather than long-simmered soup, its flavors and textures remain pleasantly distinct — and perfect for our book, “Milk Street Tuesday Nights,” which limits recipes to 45 minutes or less.

Our version of this brothy-bready soup gets punches of flavor from garlic, tomato paste and toasted cumin, but a defining ingredient is harissa. The North