A Cook's Tour_ In Search of the Perfect Meal - Anthony Bourdain [57]
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