A Cook's Tour (16 page)

     I’d frozen in Portugal and Russia, and been cold in Spain. I’d been cold
and wet
in France, so I’d been looking forward to Morocco. I figured desert, right? Burning sands, a relentless sun, me in full mufti. I’d read about the Long Range Desert Group, a collection of British academics, cartographers, geologists, ethnographers, and Arabists who, during World War II, had put aside their Poindexter glasses and their public school mores and spent a few years doing behind-the-lines raids with the SAS, cheerfully slitting throats, poisoning wells, committing acts of sabotage and reconnaissance. In the photos, they looked tan, for God’s sake! OK, that had been Libya. Or Egypt. I wasn’t even in the Middle East. But the desert – the sun, the heat – I’d got that right, right? Morocco, I’d been sure, would be a place where I could warm my bones, brown my skin.

     So far, I could not have been more wrong. It was cold. The best hotel in neighboring Volubilis was yet another damp, chilly, crummy hovel. On the fuzzy television, a male Arab translator did all the voices on
Baywatch
– from Hasselhoff’s to Anderson’s – the original sound recording still there in English, the Arabic just laid over – and louder. An electric heater across the room from the bed threw off enough heat to toast a hand or a foot at a time.

     But no matter. I had not set out to eat my way around the world expecting nothing but 340-thread-count sheets. I knew it wouldn’t all be blender drinks by the pool and chocolates on the pillow. I had fully expected to face extremes of temperature, unusual plumbing arrangements, dodgy food, and the occasional insect on the way to what I was seeking.

     And what I was looking for here, ultimately, was yet another moment of underinformed fantasy. I wanted to sit in the desert with the Blue Men – Tuaregs – a once-fierce tribe of nomadic Berbers who’d drifted back and forth between Yemen and Morocco for centuries, raiding caravans, disemboweling travelers, and eating whole lamb in their desert camps. I wanted to squat in the desert beneath the stars, with nothing but sand from horizon to horizon, eating the fat of the lamb with my fingers. I wanted to smoke hashish under a brightly swollen moon, leaning against my camel. I wanted a previously unattained sense of calm in the stillness of the desert.

     For now, however, I was in a minivan, climbing the hill to Moulay Idriss, with Abdul, a TV crew, and a cluster of very sinister-looking plainclothes detectives in wraparound sunglasses, assigned by the Ministry of Information, in the back. A tall man in a green fez and djellaba was waiting for us in the shabby town square. His name was Sherif. He operated what was as close to an authentic Moroccan restaurant as one is likely to find in Morocco – a country where few natives would even consider eating indigenous cuisine in such an environment. By ‘authentic,’ I mean no belly dancing (not Moroccan), no tableware, no bar (alcohol forbidden), no ‘tagine of monkfish,’ and no women in the dining room. If you and your fraternity brothers are looking for a cool new spot to spend spring break, you can cross Moulay Idriss right off your list.

     After a few
salaam aleikums
, introductions, and gravely reproduced documents and permits in French, English, and Arabic, we followed Sherif through a forbidding archway, squeezed past heavily laden donkeys and men in djellabas, and proceeded up Moulay Idriss’s twisting cobbled streets. Street beggars and urchins began their approach, caught sight of our ‘security escort’, and quickly shrank away. Why the cops were with us, I don’t know. They didn’t talk. Abdul didn’t talk to them. Sherif ignored them. They were just there.

     Halfway up the hill, I smelled something wonderful and paused to take it in. Abdul smiled and ducked into an open doorway. It was a community bakery, dating back to the eleventh century, with a gigantic wood-burning oven, where an old man fed loaves of round, flat Moroccan bread on a long paddle, taking others out, sending them skittering across the bare floor. The smell was fantastic. Hooded, veiled women in long, shapeless robes arrived every few minutes with trays of uncooked dough.

     Abdul explained: ‘See here?’ he said, pointing out three diagonal slashes on the surfaces of one batch waiting for room in the oven. ‘These people – everybody here – every family makes their bread. In the house. Maybe two times a day. They bring here to bake. This mark. These marks, they are so baker can tell which family is the bread.’

     I examined the shelves of coded dough, a few stacks of cooked loaves, fascinated by the nearly imperceptible but very real differences. Most of the loaves I saw had no identifiable markings that I could see.

     ‘Many many no markings,’ said Abdul, smiling. ‘This baker . . . he work many years here. Very long time. For same families coming all the time. He can tell which breads for which families from the shape. He can tell.’

     The setup was medieval: a dark room of bare stone, brick, fire, and wood. Not an electric bulb or a refrigerator in sight.

     ‘Come see,’ said Abdul. He showed me through another opening next door. We stepped down a few crumbling stone steps into near blackness, with only a bright orange flame winking from below. At the bottom of the steps, surrounded on all sides by a deep trench of firewood, a skinny, toothless old man poked long iron tongs into a pit of flame.

     ‘This fire for bakery,’ said Abdul. ‘And for other place. There.’ He indicated beyond a far wall. ‘The
hamam
. Sauna. Where peoples go to wash. For to sweat. Very healthy. We go later. This
hamam
very old. Maybe one thousands of years.’

     Sherif’s place, near the top of the hill, operated for the benefit of ‘enlightened’ tourists, was in what had once been a private home, built – like most of Moulay Idriss – in the eleventh century. It was a three-story structure rising around a small courtyard. The walls were covered with ornate mosaics of blue-and-white tile, lined by low couches covered with pillows and fabrics, a few low tables, and embroidered tuffeted stools. As soon as we entered, we were invited to sit and immediately brought sweet, very hot mint tea.

     The kitchen was on roof level, where a team of white-clad women was at work preparing our meal:
kefta
(a Moulay Idriss specialty), tagine of mutton, and a selection of salads and cold dishes.
Kefta
refers to spicy meatballs of lamb and beef served en brochette (skewered), or, as for that day’s meal, cooked in sauce and finished with beaten egg so it resembles a saucy open-faced meatball-studded omelette. The women cooked tagine, sauce, and meatballs in pressure cookers over an open flame fed by roaring propane tanks. Laid out around the large white-tiled space, open on one side to the sky, the elements of basic Moroccan
mise-en-place
were arranged in seeming disarray: garlic, onion, cilantro, mint, cumin, cinnamon, tomato, salt, and pepper. There were no stoves, only hissing tanks of volatile-looking gas. Food was chopped using the old thumb against blade method, just like grandma used to. There were no cutting boards. There were only paring knives. The restaurant, I was informed, was quite comfortable serving up to three hundred meals out of this kitchen. That day, we were the only guests.

     From the mosque next door came the muezzin’s call to prayer – a haunting chant, beginning with ‘
Allahhh akbarrrrr
’ (God is great), which occurs five times a day all over the Islamic world. The first time you hear it, it’s electrifying – beautiful, nonmelodic, both chilling and strangely comforting. Upon hearing it, you understand – on a cellular level – that you are now ‘somewhere else.’ You are far from home and all the ambient noises of American life. Here it was roosters and the muezzin’s call, the ululating sound of women talking on rooftops.

     Sitting in a tiled dining area on comfortable cushions with Abdul and Sherif, the three silent coppers propped up in a row against a far wall, we were brought a silver tray and water pitcher with which to wash. One at a time, our waiter poured water over our hands, allowed us to scrub with a cake of green soap, then poured water again to rinse.

     Bread arrived in a big cloth-covered basket – the same flat bread I’d seen earlier at the bakery – and Abdul broke off sections and placed them around the table. One does not simply reach for bread here; one waits to be served.

     ‘
Bismillah
,’ said Abdul.

     ‘
Bismillah
,’ said Sherif.

     ‘
Bismallah
,’ I said, quickly corrected by my hosts.

     A large selection of salads was placed in a circle: potato salad, marinated carrots, beets, olives of many kinds, mashed okra, tomato and onion. One eats without knife or fork, or any other utensils, using one’s right hand, always. There are no southpaws in Islam. You don’t use your left at the table. You never extend it in greeting. You don’t reach with it. You never, ever use it to grab food off the family-style platters of food. You don’t eat with it. I was really worried about this. It’s enough, one would think, learning to eat hot, often liquidy food with one’s fingers – but only one hand?

     Practice was clearly required. I had to learn to use bits of bread, pinching the food between two – and only two – fingers and the thumb of the right hand, the digits protected by a layer of folded bread. Fortunately, I soon noticed that a lot of cheating goes on. Both Abdul and Sherif used quick moves with the bent fingers or knuckles of the left hand to push or position recalcitrant bits into the right.

     Individual styles varied. I caught Abdul tearing the white centers from each little triangle of bread, creating an ersatz pita pocket of the crust, making it easier to scoop food. I called him on it, accused him playfully of cheating while I struggled with thick, not easily folded hunks. ‘No, no,’ protested Abdul. ‘I do like this so I do not get fat. I am on . . . diet.’ A little pile of white bread centers formed beside him.

     After a peek at Sherif’s technique, I decided to stick with the more traditional approach, forcing my fingers to learn. It was messy at first, and one does not lick one’s fingers here – as you are constantly revisiting the same communal platters as the others at the table. Napkins are rare. The bread, issued periodically throughout the meal, serves double duty as both utensil and napkin. It took me a while, but I got better over time.

     The waiter brought a big tagine of bubbling-hot
kefta
, set it down on the table and removed the top. A tagine – I should explain to avoid confusion – refers to the cooking vessel of the same name. Nowadays, since the introduction of the pressure cooker, it is used largely as a serving platter. The tagine is a large, shallow, glazed bowl, with a sloping, conical top like a minaret’s peak. Nomadic peoples used to carry them from camp to camp, preparing slow-cooked meal-in-one fare over open fires, using the tagine as an all-purpose stewpot. It was a low-maintenance way for women to cook: Simply put the food on the fire, then move on to other pressing chores, like tending to livestock, gathering wood, nursing kids, making bread – all this while the stew (also referred to as tagine) cooked. In Morocco, if you didn’t know already, like the James Brown classic, it’s a man’s, man’s world. The women cook. The men often eat their meals separately. Should you be invited to the home of a Moroccan for dinner, the lady of the house will cook, hidden from view in the kitchen, with maybe a sister or mother to assist her, while you and any other male guests are entertained in the dining area. The women of the host’s family will eat in the kitchen. The tagine was both boon and curse to women, in that the basic foods of the region – lamb, mutton, fowl, couscous – take a long time to cook. The pressure cooker cut serious cooking time out of the average workday, freeing the cook at least to dream of other activities.

     I was getting pretty good at the pinch with my fingers. And just in time, as the next course was a searingly hot tagine of mutton and onion with green pea sauce. It tasted terrific – dark, spicy, hearty, with big hunks of now-tender mutton shoulder nearly falling off the bone into screaming hot sauce. I managed to avoid scalding my fingertips, careful to eat a lot. Portions are large, as a good Muslim always prepares more than is required for immediate use, anticipating that most important figure of lore – the hungry traveler in need – who might unexpectedly appear. It is considered an ennobling act, a sacred duty, to provide hospitality to the needy. To waste even bread is a sin. A dropped piece of bread found on the street is often retrieved by a devout Muslim and left by the entryway to a mosque, as to leave food lying about like trash would be an offense to God. So I made sure to eat as much as I possibly could.

     The three plainclothesmen sat impassively against the wall while the platters were cleared and a few plates of dates and figs were served with more of the sweet mint tea. At the end of the meal, the hand-washing procedure was repeated, followed by a presentation of burning incense. Sherif held his fez over the smoke from the burning sticks. Abdul wafted the fumes around his neck. A silver container was brought around and the three of us shook rosewater on our hands and clothes. The cops smiled, showing off their gold-capped teeth.

Abdul pulled the van to a halt just outside the walls of Fez el-Bali, the old city of Fez, an enclosed medina of ten thousand or so narrow, indecipherably arranged, completely unmappable streets, alleys, cul-de-sacs, pass-throughs, corridors, homes, businesses, markets, mosques, souks, and
hamams
. Over thirty thousand residents live densely packed together in a labyrinth that a lifetime of exploration would never fully explain or reveal – even to a native. Cars, motorbikes, and any other kind of vehicle are not permitted inside the city’s walls, as they would be useless. It’s too crowded, the streets too narrow, a busy rabbit warren of crumbling walls, sudden drops, steeply inclined steps, switchbacks, turn-offs and dead ends. A thin old man in a djellaba was waiting for us by the outer wall and promptly loaded our luggage into a primitive wooden cart, then headed to a slim break in the wall of what remains – in form, if not in function – a fortress city.