A Moveable Feast (5 page)

I took Hebrew classes at the YMCA, and noticed the cognates with Arabic. The two languages share
mish-mish
for apricot.
Tamar
and
tamara,
for date.
Shuk
and
souk,
for market.
Shalom
and
salaam,
for peace.

Reem, a photographer in my bureau, offered me her mother as an Arabic tutor and I started going to Mrs Kayyali’s house one or two evenings a week. It was in a part of the city I hadn’t visited before, a modern part of Arab East Jerusalem. West Jerusalem taxis wouldn’t go there, so I walked down to the taxi depot outside Damascus Gate. The house was on a steep road, and built of the same white Jerusalem stone as the rest of the city. Reem, who was in her late twenties and always wore jeans and a T-shirt, still lived there with her parents. Her sister and nieces lived next door. On the wall in Reem’s bedroom there was an enormous reproduction of a travel poster from the time of the British Mandate. It had a picture of a ship, with the words in big letters ‘Visit Palestine’.

I brought my Arabic textbooks and Mrs Kayyali sat with me on the couch, reading and talking, gently correcting me whenever I made a mistake. Every now and then she excused herself to pray. She often offered to feed me, and one night she served a dish called
maqluba.
The word meant upside-down. After cooking all the ingredients in a pot, you turned it over onto a plate. The dish was made of lamb, eggplant and rice, and she served it with yoghurt. The lamb was so soft it fell off the bone, the rice was velvety, the spices both familiar and strange. I took another helping, and Mrs Kayyali looked pleased.

‘How do you make it?’ I asked. She said she would show me, so I would be able to make it at home. We made a date.

Reem, who had no interest in cooking, brought me a note from her mother with all the ingredients. I needed eggplants,
onions, lamb, butter and a list of spices: cinnamon, cardamom, turmeric and something called
baharat.
I looked forward to shopping, a comprehensible task with a comprehensible goal. Reem wrote down the names in English as well as Arabic, except for
baharat,
which was untranslatable.

‘What is it?’ I asked.

‘It’s
baharat,
’ she said.

‘Where should I go?’

She raised an eyebrow at me.

‘Go to the spice market.’

I thought immediately of Damascus Gate. I took a bus from the office along Jaffa road, got out when the Old City was in sight, and walked down the hill, paralleling the city wall, to the familiar portal. It was crowded. I wove my way across the plaza and into the souk Khan al-Zeit, the market on the street of the oil merchants. For all the times I had walked by the spices, I had never bought any. I picked the store with the biggest rainbow, deep red and orange and green, and approached the vendor. He was skinny, smooth-skinned, and moustachioed. I began to go through my list.

‘What are you making?’ he asked, as though I were not a tourist, as though it were the most natural thing in the world that I should be cooking in my home. ‘
Maqluba,
’ I said. He gave an approving nod, and I felt like I had a reason to be there. He tied up each spice in a clear plastic bag. I sniffed the
baharat;
it was a mongrel mix. I thought I smelled nutmeg and black pepper.

I took my ingredients over to Mrs Kayyali’s on a Saturday afternoon and we began to cook. She spoke to me in Arabic seasoned with English, and I tried to take notes. We sliced the eggplant and sprinkled it with salt. We cut the lamb into cubes and sautéed it with onions. Her tidy, tiled kitchen filled with the rich carnivore smell of sizzling meat. We added the spices, and I watched the colours melt into liquid.

Now we heated olive oil in a pot and began to build our layers. First tomatoes, then a sprinkling of rice. Then the meat, the eggplant and more rice. We pressed down on every layer with a spatula, and each one mingled with its neighbours without giving up its essence. We added the lid to trap the heat, then retreated to the couch for an Arabic lesson. Family members drifted in and out, and we passed the late afternoon. When the dish was ready, and it had cooled, Mrs Kayyali took a platter and heaved the pot upside down. The layers were intact, with bright tomato on top.

I took my spices home with me to Rechavia and at the end of a long week, I invited Ben and my roommate Sarah to eat with me. I began cooking in the afternoon in my tiled kitchen, windows open to the rustling trees. I’d always enjoyed the chemical logic of cooking, and thought of cookbooks as sorcerer’s manuals. I followed their instructions, and every time the trick more or less worked.

On this night, however, my layers collapsed – like the way, in Jerusalem, the Ottoman years had fallen in on the Crusader years, which had caved onto the Roman ruins below. Sarah and Ben assured me that the
maqluba
was delicious nonetheless, and I began to feel at home.

Anita Breland has lived and worked in several countries in Europe and Asia. A Mississippi native, she grew up in Texas and began her culinary adventures in Mexico. She has been a Fulbright lecturer in Romania, restored a 400-year-old house in Morocco and travelled solo in India, where she explored the cooking traditions of Kerala. She currently writes from Basel, Switzerland. An ardent believer in cultural immersion through food, Anita joins local cooks in their kitchens at every opportunity. Her writing was recognised by the 2009 Solas Awards, and she blogs about food and culture at
http://anitasfeast.blogspot.com
.

Seated cross-legged on a worn kilim pillow, Tante Tamou licked her right hand, first wrist to palm, then knuckle to fingertips. Afternoon sun slanted through the doorway behind her. She swept the platter with a practised move, and in self-absorbed satisfaction tongued her forearm almost to the elbow. Only when virtually every grain of couscous was gone did she allow Fouziya to pour water from a battered copper kettle to wash her hands.

‘It was a good couscous, eh!’ Tamou exclaimed to us through great-nephew Rachid. Accepting a towel, I nodded happily. Couscous steamed and tossed by hand before receiving a blessing of sauce was the centrepiece of the meal. For me, though, Tamou’s company was the feast.

Couscous is traditional Friday fare in Morocco, shared with family and friends after prayers at the mosque. The meal is one part couscous, with its meat and vegetables, and the rest, love – of family, food and companionship. Seeing Tamou exuberant in her pleasure with the meal she had orchestrated out of a gift basket from strangers was as heart-warming as it was unexpected.

It was week two of my home-kitchen travels in Morocco with Canadian caterer and cookbook author, Chef Deb. We’d seen women in Fez put in long hours to produce the many dishes with complex flavours that feature in Fassi cooking. Today’s visit to a home kitchen in the foothills of the Atlas Mountains contrasted sharply with our previous experiences.

We were introduced to Rachid in Agadir, and three days later he brought us to his ancestral home, a farm between Essaouira and Marrakesh. Fortified with café lattes and sugary pastries, we left Essaouira just after breakfast, a little worried about intruding upon Rachid’s relatives. We implored him to let his aunt know we were coming to see her. ‘I take care,’ he assured us.

We stopped in a dusty village to pick up supplies: two chickens killed and cleaned as we waited; and couscous, chosen by Rachid from the several types arrayed in sacks fronting a street-side stall. We bought November vegetables: potatoes, carrots, parsnips and onions; pallid tomatoes; and for dessert, clementines from a truck parked beside the highway. Vibrantly orange, they were just coming into season.

In Fez, we’d been treated to prized family recipes and lavish spreads. We’d accompanied housewives and chefs into bustling souqs to select fish, lamb and seasonal vegetables. Rachid’s request that we bring all the food for the meal had been a hint that this cooking encounter might be something more elemental. The landscape we’d driven through provided another: arid plateaus, pocked with gullies, dotted with gnarled argan trees and little else. We saw no power poles, no other traffic along the rock-strewn track that ended at a squat mosque.

We parked beside the mosque and three women emerged from a walled compound on the far side of a field and ran towards us, dogs yapping about their heels. Rachid hurried to embrace his stick-wielding great-aunt and her teenaged granddaughters, and to calm the dogs. The women smiled and grasped our hands.
‘ A salaam alaikum
. Peace be upon you.’
‘Wa ‘alaikum as-salaam,’
we answered. ‘And to you, peace.’

They had no idea we were coming. Every Moroccan man proclaims his wife or mother as the maker of the best couscous in the country, and brings visitors home on short notice to prove the point. Women in the household readily accommodate unexpected guests. In any case, Rachid could not have contacted his great-aunt, as neither the farm nor the hamlet half an hour’s walk below the mosque had a telephone service.

Tamou looked much older than her probable sixty-some years, but set a brisk pace and brandished her stick as she hustled us through the gate and into a courtyard to a small building of whitewashed stone. We ducked through a low doorway into the single room that was the family’s living and sleeping quarters. Tamou and eldest granddaughter Fouziya went to prepare the food that is always offered to guests entering a Moroccan home.

Nadia pinned the curtain back from the doorway and sunlight streamed into the windowless room. The rough stone floor was
scattered with faded kilims and a few cushions. Thin mattresses lined a stone platform at one end. A brass tray wrapped in plastic sheeting hung from a hook on one wall, a verse from the Koran in calligraphy just opposite. Nadia removed the plastic, positioned the tray on short accordion legs and draped the table with a cloth. A tray brought down from its perch for the sole purpose of sharing food was the only furniture in Tamou’s home.

Fouziya soon appeared with a platter of creamy rice, drizzled with argan oil glistening in amber swirls. We sat on cushions and dipped into the rice with pieces of flatbread. Served at room temperature, this was Moroccan rice pudding, slightly sweet, the nutty argan oil deeply flavoured. We shared a glass of tangy buttermilk. I hate buttermilk, but I downed it with a smile.

‘Rachid, please tell your aunt we’ve brought food,’ we urged. ‘Ask her if we can help prepare it.’ Tamou’s grin of assent revealed she was missing a front tooth. Rachid struggled to help us relay our enthusiasm for Moroccan food, and our quest to learn from home cooks. Moments later, he announced that he was leaving to visit an uncle who lived nearby, but would be back for couscous. I was surprised but not alarmed that cooking with Tamou would be in pantomime. The language of food is transcendent.

We’d arrived tramping through Tamou’s field, fallow in late autumn. Now, Tamou took us on a tour of her property and pointed out her root cellar, the well and the quern, a Flintstone-sized basin and wheel of granite used to grind argan nuts into oil. Tamou opened barnyard doors concealing farm implements and animal fodder. Life here was an unadorned existence: everything in its place, everything with a use, everything well used.

Chickens scratched at the feet of other animals in their enclosure: a donkey, a dairy cow and her calf, two sheep, their lambs. The little barnyard was well kept and the animals looked healthy, especially the little donkey, unlike the pack animals so
often abused by their owners in the alleyways of Fez. Youngest granddaughter Zoubida was out with her herd of eight goats. With a flourish, Tamou presented her camel, secure in its own stall. Farmers here plough fields with camels, but we never learned if this one was ‘tractor’, transportation, or both.

The clean little farm was a study in self-sufficiency. I was impressed by the orderliness here, so different from poorer homes I’d seen in the Fez
medina,
where some families and their animals live in the same rooms. In a few weeks, a sheep and a goat would be killed for Eid al-Adha. Tamou’s family would not have to buy an animal for Islam’s Feast of the Sacrifice, a saving of at least 3600 dirham, an enormous amount for people living just above subsistence.

We returned to the living room, and Nadia opened a sack of argan nuts. Each summer, she and her sisters gathered the almond-shaped fruit that littered the ground under the thorny argan trees nearby. Native to south-western Morocco, the trees are plentiful here. The women husk the wrinkly nuts, roast them over an open flame and extract the oil for home use. When they need cash, they sell nuts from their silo to a women’s cooperative near Essaouira.

Nadia settled onto the floor, a squared-off stone between her feet. She bashed each nut with a smaller stone to break the vise-like grip of the husk. I tried it, clubbing thumb and forefinger with every painful stroke. Nadia giggled and demonstrated again, shells flying. I could see why argan oil is called ‘Moroccan gold’. It is cussedly labour-intensive to produce.

My fingers rejoiced when Fouziya interrupted us, the aroma of mint and absinthe wafting in with her. It was chilly in the unheated room, even in my fleece and boots with woolly socks, and hot mint tea was a welcome prospect. Tamou followed a now familiar ritual, pouring the first glass back into the teapot, then raising the teapot high to stream tea that frothed into each glass.
We sipped our tea with pieces of bread dipped into argan oil and melted butter.

When it was time to prepare the couscous, Fouziya and Nadia bustled to fetch water and kindling. Tamou led us to a free-standing room, a kitchen without running water or electricity. There was no gas bottle, the engine that powers Morocco’s urban kitchens. A lone rack held pots, platters, trays and a few glasses. The cooktop was a low stone shelf in one corner, a small space for building a fire underneath, the wall above streaked sooty black. Tamou’s was the most primitive of the kitchens we’d seen, practically empty. How does she cook with nothing? Where were the big jars of cumin and
ras el hanout,
the piles of coriander and parsley, the little dishes for serving salads?

Fouziya put one of the birds we’d brought into a pot with slices of lemon and covered it with water. Tamou handed Deb and me the ubiquitous paring knives that constitute the full kitchen kit for many Moroccan cooks, and I thought guiltily of the gadgets and conveniences in my home. We were put to veggie duty before a basin of water set on the stone floor. It was cold, and my fingers cramped as I washed and cored carrots. It was impossible to stay crouched and I constantly shifted position. After ten minutes of this, my knees and ankles screamed for relief. I was thrilled when Nadia fetched me a cushion. I wondered how they could prepare every meal squatting on the floor.

Tamou scooped a tea glass through the couscous Fouziya had dumped into a wide crockery bowl, filling it half full of the grains, then to the brim with water, before draining the water out. She did this three times, muttering her disapproval. We could tell Rachid had not chosen the right couscous, but it was frustrating to not understand Tamou’s explanation. When Rachid returned, we insisted he translate for us: ‘Good couscous needs just one washing!’ Ah, now we knew.

Still on their haunches, Tamou massaged oil into the couscous and Nadia seeded tomatoes through a grater into a bowl on the floor. Fouziya broke branches into small pieces for the fire. Deb and I peeled and sliced vegetables over our basin, as Tamou gestured and kept up a running commentary on the proceedings. Her crackling laugh rivalled the snap of kindling as the fire caught. Stinging smoke filled the room until the flue began to draw it outside. Tamou covered her nose with the end of her headscarf. I coughed as I observed the medieval tableau through smoke-induced tears.

Tamou added argan husks to the fire to raise the heat, and swabbed the chicken with synthetic yellow colorant from a packet. I was dismayed that the lamentable chemical, which contributes nothing in the way of taste or aroma, was used by every home cook we met in Morocco, to supplement or replace turmeric. When the chicken came to a boil with onions and tomatoes, Tamou added the root vegetables and simple seasonings: coarse salt, black pepper and a sprinkle of powdered ginger. No cumin, coriander or parsley here, ingredients used in such quantity in city kitchens. I wondered how this meal would taste without these flavourings.

Fouziya trowelled the couscous into an aluminium pot with holes punched in the bottom, and twisted a plastic bag around it. She set it atop the chicken and turbaned the two pots with a towel.
Voilà,
an instant
couscousière
. Ingenious! The stacked ensemble went back on the fire to simmer until Tamou pronounced the chicken done.

Steam roiled above Fouziya’s head as she turned the couscous onto a round platter and shook it vigorously to toss the grains. She mounded the couscous and arranged chicken and vegetables on top. Meanwhile, Tamou had returned the cooking pot to the fire, and reduced its liquid until thickened to her liking. Tamou ladled sauce over the platter and summoned us to the table. The
platter was only slightly smaller than the table top. There were no individual plates.

Nor was there cutlery, just a circle of right hands tearing meat from bone and scooping up couscous. Here, as elsewhere, the Moroccans pulled meat from the hot carcass with asbestos fingers, something I found impossible to do. I was grateful when Tamou placed bits of chicken on my side of the platter. The yellow-tinged chicken was tender, the vegetables and sauce more flavourful than I had expected.

Chuckling, Tamou flipped a small handful of couscous back and forth in her palm to form a ball, and popped it into her mouth. She motioned for me to try it. My attempts to imitate the trick were in vain, but I cadged my share of couscous and vegetables with pieces of bread.