A Cook's Tour_ In Search of the Perfect Meal - Anthony Bourdain [51]
We were approaching the town of Moulay Idriss, an important spot in Morocco’s introduction to Islam, a town named after a relative of the Prophet. It’s a crowded but picturesque hill town, studded with box-shaped houses built at kitty-cornered angles, with narrow streets, high walls, and hidden markets. Until recently, nonbelievers like me were forbidden entrance. These days, as long as you’re out by dark, it’s okay to visit.
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