A Cook's Tour (17 page)

     The old city dates back to a.d. 800 and many of its standing structures were built as far back as the fourteenth century. It has been the center of power and intrigue for many of Morocco’s ruling dynasties. The fortress architecture is not just a style statement. The buildings, the layout, the walls, the location, as well as the city’s agricultural and culinary traditions, all reflect an ancient siege mentality. As the Portuguese and Spanish have adopted
bacalao
– a method of preserving fish for long periods – as a way to ensure naval power, the citizens of Fez have a culinary repertoire developed around survival, food hoarding, preservation, and self-sufficiency. Back in the old days, marauding armies from other regions were common, and the standard medieval strategy for taking down a walled city was simply to surround it with superior force, choke off its supply routes, and starve the opponents out. Fez’s mazelike walls within walls structure, surrounded by exterior fortifying walls, were constructed as defense against that tactic. Neither infantry nor cavalry would have had an easy time of it even once inside the outer walls, for troops would have had to divert constantly into narrow columns, vulnerable to attack from ahead, behind, and above.

     A building’s exterior reveals nothing of what’s inside. A simple outer door might open onto a palatial residence or a simple private home. Furthermore, between the floors of a building, many homes have hollowed-out areas suitable for stashing food and hiding fugitives. An early hub for the spice routes from south and east, Fez made use of the spices and ingredients from other cultures, particularly when it came to the practical necessities of repelling potential invaders. Air-dried meat, pickled vegetables, preserved fruit, cured food, a protein diet consisting largely of animals easily raised and contained behind high walls – all remain features of Fez’s cuisine. The preponderance of inaccessible wells and walled gardens are design features one might well find quaint and even luxurious now. Back then, they were shrewd and even vital additions to the neighborhood. Wealthier citizens of the old city still pride themselves on growing their own dates, figs, lemons, oranges, olives, and almonds, and pulling their own water out of the ground. Situated in the middle of a wide valley, surrounded by unforgiving hills and plains, invaders almost always began to go hungry before the residents and were forced to withdraw long before the food ran out inside the walls.

     We followed our porter up and down nameless dark alleys, past sleeping beggars, donkeys, soccer-playing kids, merchants selling gum and cigarettes, until we arrived at a dimly lighted doorway in a featureless outer wall. A few sharp knocks echoed through an inner chamber, and an eager young man appeared to welcome us into a deceptively plain passageway large enough to accommodate riders on horseback. Around a corner, I stepped into another world. A spacious antechamber opened up onto a quiet enclosed patio, with a round breakfast table situated beneath a lemon tree. The air smelled of oleander and fresh flowers. Looming up in the center of a vast open space of terraced patios with tiled floors rose what can only be described as a palace, a gargantuan high-ceilinged structure surrounded by outbuildings, a large garden with fruit trees, a small pond, and a well – the residence, it appeared, of a medieval merchant prince, all within the impenetrable walls of the crowded medina.

     My host was Abdelfettah, a native of the old city of Fez. Educated in Britain, he spoke with the unmistakable accent of the British upper classes – but is, as they say there, quite the other thing. A few years ago, with his English wife, Naomi, and two children, he’d returned to his beloved hometown and begun work restoring this magnificent estate tile by tile, brick by brick, doing much of the work himself. He now wore only traditional garb, djellaba and
babouches
(pointed yellow slippers), having turned his back on the world outside his walls. Abdelfettah and Naomi have dedicated themselves to preserving the ancient culture and traditions of Fez – and their own luxurious piece of that tradition. No television and no radio were on the premises. Outside the main house and kitchen annex, Abdelfettah maintained a studio, where he spent hours each day creating indescribably intricate reliefs in white plaster, hand-carving endlessly repetitious non-representational designs and patterns into its surface. At the far end of the garden, construction was under way for a center for Moroccan music, where local musicians and aficionados will assemble and work.

     I was taken through a well-equipped kitchen and breakfast area to the main building. It was a towering square structure, built around a large interior courtyard. The inner walls rose over a hundred feet in a wide, wide shaft to the roof and sky, every inch decorated with precise hand-painted and -assembled mosaics of small white and blue tile. The cedar doors to my room on the ground floor, which opened onto the courtyard and a gurgling fountain, were at least six times my height, and carved with the same kind of skillfully executed patterns as Abdelfettah’s plaster reliefs, many of which occupied spaces over entryways and interior windows. I could easily imagine two big bald guys, shirtless and wearing silk pantaloons and fezzes, flanking each side of the almost ridiculously tall doors, opening them to the accompaniment of a hammered gong.

     My residence contained a sitting room and a bedroom, with elaborately handcrafted bookshelves, couches covered in embroidered cushions, and Berber rugs on the floors. Upstairs, beyond the top of the estate’s walls, no windows opened onto the outer world. Those peeking in from a vantage point on the hills outside the city would see only a bare white surface. As I unpacked my belongings, the muezzin’s call from the mosque next door resonated through the hard-tiled courtyard. It was easily the most fantastic residence I had ever seen, much less stayed in, a building many times older than my whole country.

     My host was a serious man, although he possessed a well-hidden whimsical streak. His former life revealed itself only in flashes – a spark of interest in the mention of a Western film, a sudden yen for an American cigarette. Other than that, he was concerned only with his home, his lifestyle, and the preservation of Fez’s traditions. He was resolute in his determination to restore the property fully to its former glory, and, if possible, to influence others to do the same. Fez is now under siege of a different sort, as hundreds of thousands of Moroccans, dispossessed from their rural homes by drought or poverty, have flooded the old city in recent decades. The buildings are filled with squatters; the infrastructure is crumbling. The tendrils of the Great Satan – Internet cafés, housing developments, fast-food joints – lick at the outer walls. The once-proud elite of political thinkers, philosophers, and merchants has largely fled elsewhere.

     It was my host’s work with plaster that spoke most articulately of his seriousness and dedication. There are no faces in Islamic art, nor any images of animals, plants, historical tableaux, or landscapes. Anything God created is a taboo subject for an artist. The artist must speak in severely constrained fashion, within the framework of centuries-old traditions and practice. Yet despite those constraints, I saw in Abdelfettah’s work – and, later, in the works of other Islamic artists – a universe of possibilities for beauty and expression. I was reminded of Moroccan food, where there may be only a few standard dishes but infinite room for subtle variations exists. Abdelfettah showed me how he did the work, allowed me to feel as the metal tools pushed through one section of softly yielding plaster, routing delicately into the pristine white surface. Again and again, I saw those tiny repeating patterns, never varying from God’s plan, always within the controlled borders of the design, kept firmly in control yet emanating outward, layer upon layer, ring around ring. It takes a long time to do a single piece – how long, I have no idea. And there were scores of them all over the house. (On occasion, Abdelfettah worked for others. He did, he confided, Mick Jagger’s bathroom recently.) The challenge of all that work, all that elaborate detail, and his unwavering faith in what he was doing, his discipline, his certainty that he’d chosen the right path, provoked and disturbed me in new ways. Why couldn’t I be that certain – about anything? Why had I never found anything that so commanded my attention and effort, year after year after year? I looked at Abdelfettah, wondered what he was really seeing in all those tiny grooves and repeating patterns, and I envied him. The professional kitchen has always provided me with my own measure of certainty, a thing to believe in, a cause. Cooking, the system, has been my orthodoxy – but never like this. Mine has been a sloppy, dysfunctional life. I yearned for whatever it was he had that I didn’t, imagining it could only be peace of mind. My efforts, during a lifetime of cooking, have all been eaten – by the next day, a memory at best. Abdelfettah’s work will live on forever. I spent the evening reading the Koran, moved by its seductive, sometimes terrible severity, its unquestioning absolutism, trying to imagine the people within its pages, their very human problems and their extraordinary, often cruel solutions.

     I woke up the next day under three layers of blankets, the toaster-sized electric heater on my nightstand warming my left ear and little else. My host had dragooned his mother, sister, a housekeeper, and a servant into preparing two days of meals, a full overview of the classic dishes of Fez. I was in the perfect place to enjoy Moroccan food. Ask just about anyone in the country where the best food is and they’ll tell you Fez. Ask where you should eat this food in Fez and they’ll invariably tell you to eat in a private home. Certainly, if you want to eat Moroccan food like Moroccans eat it, you’re not going to find it in a restaurant.

     When I went for coffee in the kitchen, Abdelfettah’s mother was already hard at work, rubbing and kneading freshly made pellets of semolina between hands decorated with the reddish purple designs you see on elderly women, making couscous from scratch. His sister was making
waqa
, a crepelike substance used for wrapping
pastilla
, a much-loved pigeon pie. Pigeons were marinating, almonds toasting in the controlled chaos of the crowded kitchen. I had a light breakfast of curds and dates, a few pastries, then decided to explore the medina. To have done so alone would have been madness. I never, and I mean never, would have been able to find my way home. Abdul was not a native of Fez and would have been a bad choice as guide. I relied instead on a friend of Abdelfettah’s; let’s call him Mohammed.

     When you’re in Fez’s old city, picking your way carefully down steep steps, hunching to scurry through tunnels, squeezing past overloaded donkeys in dark, narrow shafts, ducking beneath strategically placed logs that had been cemented into opposing walls to discourage mounted riders hundreds of years ago, it looks the way they tried but failed to make it look in a hundred movies. You can’t stand; you have to keep moving, or you’re in somebody’s way. In the medina, just to look around is to feel how far you are from everything you know.

     The smell of the tanneries is intense. Leather is ‘cured,’ according to Mohammed, in pigeon shit. If you want to know why that Jerry Garcia hat your old pal from the ashram brought you when he returned from here back in the seventies still smells like shit, now you know. One encounters a tantalizing mixture of fragrances – spices, food cooking, the dyeing pits, freshly cut cedar, mint, bubbling hookahs – and as one approaches the souk, the smells only get stronger. The souk, or market, is laid out according to an ancient guild system. This means that merchants or tradesmen of a particular kind still tend to flock together, grouping their businesses in one area. We passed a whole street of knife sharpeners, grimacing old men pumping foot-cranked stone grinding wheels with one leg, sparks flying. They looked like mad one-legged bicyclists. Carpet merchants were clearly at the top of the hierarchy these days, maintaining whole buildings covered floor to ceiling with mounds of Berber rugs, carpets, runners, and blankets. I submitted to an invitation to take a look. Seated at a low table, I was ‘pulled’ by the offer of mint tea, ‘hooked’ by the inevitable offer to show me a few particularly beautiful carpets, and ‘closed’ when I ended up blowing eight hundred smackers on stuff I had never intended to buy. After ensuring that every inch of my apartment would soon be filled with livestock-scented floor coverings and itchy blankets, I stepped, blinking, onto the streets. As Mohammed had probably had a profitable morning from the referral, I figured he’d be suitably motivated to find me the cannabis products Morocco had once been famous for. He smiled at my request, disappeared for a few moments, and returned with three thumb-sized hunks of hashish and a piece of kif, the sticky pollen cake made from the marijuana plant.

     Feeling good about things, I continued exploring the market. Butchers occupied a long thatch-covered strip of street, their hunks of bleeding meat slung over counters or hanging from hooks – much of it cut into segments I could identify from no meat or cookery chart I’d ever seen. Piles of sheep’s heads, still woolly and caked with blood, lay in pyramids; carcasses hung in the humid stillness, drawing flies. Meat cutters hacked with cleavers and scimitars. People bullied through the crowds atop their beasts of burden, and pedestrians paused to poke, prod, fondle, haggle, and taste. Baskets of snails and periwinkles gurgled in wicker baskets at the fish vendors. Stalls displayed dried beef and jerky, photogenic piles of spices and herbs, counters of fresh cheese, leaf-wrapped wheels of goat cheese, tubs of curds, olives – every hue and type of olive filling barrel after barrel – dried fruit and produce, preserved lemons, grains, nuts, figs, dates. A woman made
waqa
, peeling the filament-thin crepes off a hot plate with her fingers. Another woman made slightly thicker, larger crepes on a giant cast-iron dome, pouring batter over what looked like an oversized wig stand in a department store window. They blistered and bubbled until solid; then she would peel them off and slather them with a sweet spreadable paste of ground nuts and dates. She folded up one of these great floppy objects and presented it to me. Delicious.