It is traditional to serve rfissa to a woman who has just given birth, as fenugreek is purported to be beneficial for women that are recovering from childbirth.[4]
Rfissa is derived from tharid (ثريد), a traditional Arab dish said to have been the Prophet Muhammad's favorite dish.[4]
This dish did not appear in Moroccan cookbooks until the 1990s.[4] The cultural historian Anny Gaul suggests that this might be due to the fact that rfissa is related to rural culinary traditions, whereas the people writing cookbooks for a long time were mostly Fessi elites.[5]