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By Root 1228 0

to walk fifty meters up the street and turn to the right. But this brought me to a shop selling boom boxes; unlike those in this country, Tunisian boom boxes have a circle of flashing colored lights surrounding each loudspeaker. Again I was directed fifty meters up and then to the right. On the way, to tide me over, I bought a freshly griddled leavened bread stuffed with merguez, the local hot sausage, and green harissa, the famous North African paste of hot chili peppers and spices that usually comes in red. Now I was hopelessly lost. Time was running out, and I was prepared to give up on my flat bread.

“Take me to the Casbah,” I implored a passerby. I have always wanted to say that. But this time I was in earnest. If I could find the Casbah, which simply means the fortress or keep of the old city, then I would find the port, where our tour buses were parked. If I didn’t find the Casbah soon, I would become a permanent and involuntary resident of Sousse.

Luck was with me, for the Casbah was right under my nose, and this gave me time to brunch on a prodigious beignet (crisply deep-fried and dipped into sugar syrup) before our bus left for the Islamic holy city of Kairouan and the Roman coliseum in El Jem, and then on to Tunis.

I was four days into a two-week trip to Tunisia. I have always been suspicious of countries (or subcultures) in which a majority of the men wear mustaches, but Tunisia is a delight. It is the most tolerant and progressive country in North Africa and also the smallest.

Here are the vital statistics:

National dish: Couscous.

Population: 8,531,000, predominantly Muslim. (But women are encouraged to take up professions, and Muslim religious dress is discouraged.)

Area: 63,378 square miles—as though you had pasted England and Wales together and sandwiched them uncomfortably between a massive Algeria on the west and an enormous Libya on the southeast.

Capital city: Tunis.

Climate: Mediterranean in the north and east along the 805-mile coastline; semiarid in the interior; pure desert in the Saharan south.

Economic growth rate: 8.1 percent.

Average annual personal income: $1,750, the highest in the region but low by Western standards.

Food: Self-sufficient in fruit, fish, and olive oil. (The fish are red mullet, bonito, bluefish, sea bass, and shrimp. The fruits are citrus, dates, melons, apricots, figs, almonds, and cactus fruit.) Fourth most prolific producer of olive oil in the world, possessing fifty-five million trees.

Favorite spices: Hot pepper, coriander, and caraway in nearly every dish, plus cumin, anise, and cinnamon.

Favorite vegetables: Eggplant, onions, garlic, tomatoes, and peppers.

Favorite color: Blue.

The first week of the trip was organized by the Oldways Preservation & Exchange Trust, an extraordinary foundation that brings together—often in romantic foreign climes—nutritionists, environmentalists, historians, anthropologists, chefs, and food writers from the United States, England, Australia, and Japan, to enjoy and argue about traditional ways of eating that seem much healthier than the way we eat in most of the industrialized world. Then, after the first week, when most of the group had returned to their home countries, I planned to stay behind with my good friend Paula Wolfert. My wife would join us from New York, and we would set off to roam around Tunis and the Tunisian countryside in search of the best traditional home cooking we could find.

This is the sort of work that Paula Wolfert is famous for, and I had wanted to watch her in action ever since reading The Cooking of South-West France in 1983, her third cookbook and still my favorite (she has written six in all). There was Paula, tromping through Périgord and the Gers, through the Landes and the Béarn, working with a chef in his restaurant kitchen, knocking on a housewife’s door, searching indefatigably for the epiphanous cassoulet, discovering dishes that had never appeared in print. Paula is part anthropologist, part amateur scholar (she rarely attacks a subject before learning the rudiments of the language