The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [151]
The amazing thing about Paula’s explorations is that she cannot drive a car. She failed her driver’s test twice in the United States and four times in Paris. Only in Morocco were they willing to give her a license, which made me very nervous about the drivers of North Africa.
We had planned our tour of Tunisia in as much detail as we could, considering that Tunisia is half a world away. Paula had just returned from Turkey, where she spent two weeks in and around Gaziantep, a remote provincial city near the Euphrates River and the Syrian border. Paula brought me back a saç, which is pronounced “saj” and looks like a very large wok without handles. You invert it over a gas burner and, when it is hot, bake Turkish flat breads on its convex surface. Whenever I telephoned Paula at her house in Connecticut for a planning session (she lives there with her husband, William Bayer, a well-known crime-fiction writer), she was practicing one dish or other that she had discovered in some tiny Turkish town with a name like Nizip. Paula is the only food writer I know who spends much of her time in towns with names like Nizip.
Never having been to Africa, I had made an appointment with an infectious-disease specialist before leaving New York. Thanks to a nurse who thought I had said “Tanzania” over the telephone, the doctor was about to administer a series of agonizing inoculations against meningitis and yellow fever and force me to swallow a bottle of malaria pills. When I told him that it was only Tunisia, he backed off. As long as I did not eat the food or drink the water, he said, I had nothing to fear.
Our trip began on the island of Jerba, off the southeast coast of Tunisia, the island of Homer’s lotus-eaters and the home of one of the oldest extant Jewish communities anywhere, probably dating from the years after King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon captured Jerusalem and sacked the temple of Solomon in 586 B.C. Oldways had arranged a lavish banquet for our arrival, and despite Paula’s initial belief that the best Tunisian food is to be found in private homes, this was one of the best meals of our two-week trip.
Spread before us were specialities from the southern regions of the country, from the Mediterranean coast to the edges of the Sahara: a variety of salads and Tunisian breads; stuffed calamari; red pumpkin stewed with chickpeas and onions; a steamed square pasta from the town of Gafsa; a gelatinous meat stew with dried mallow leaves from the city of Gabès; a flat, stuffed semolina pie from the oasis of Tozeur; a vegetable soup from ancient Tataouine; a dish of tomatoes, eggs, and local sausage from somewhere else; and the ubiquitous seafood brik, wonderfully thin malsouka pastry folded into a triangle around a piece of cooked tuna and a raw egg and deep-fried until it is perfectly crisp. Dessert was fresh dates, still attatched to their branches; pomegranates; a variety of citrus; and thé à la menthe, a strong, sweet mint tea with pine nuts floating on its surface. Tunisia grows the best and most varied citrus fruits I have tasted—clementines and mandarins, sweet lemons, also called bergamots, and a succession through the seasons of twelve varieties of oranges.
The following days were filled with sight-seeing, sumptuous dinners, and seminars (all with simultaneous translation into Arabic, English, French, and Japanese). On Jerba, Paula and I searched the souks for an unusual triple-decker couscoussier, a steamer made specially for the famous fish couscous of Jerba; the steamer holds a spicy fish broth on the bottom, fish in the middle, and the grains of couscous on top. Paula thrives on the profusion of the marketplace, but she was afraid we had arrived too late in the morning. Throughout the Mediterranean, the first customer