A Cook's Tour_ In Search of the Perfect Meal - Anthony Bourdain [52]
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