The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [155]
Mahjoub explained that they had just sacrificed a sheep in the courtyard to ensure that the harvest and the pressing would be a success. The sacrifice is made to God, he told us, but the meat goes to everyone. In the girl’s hand was the gallbladder or bile duct of the sheep; the more bile it contains, the more money your future holds. I rushed into the courtyard, but all that remained of the sheep was its skin, which looked like a bloodstained shearling jacket on the concrete.
Everybody seemed happy with the message of the entrails. As I watched the old engine turning a long pulley attached to the millstone, I noticed that a lucky horseshoe had been tied to the engine, just in case. The new extra-virgin olive oil was raw and bitter, as it would remain for some days after the pressing, but a sample of last year’s oil was excellent.
Years ago Paula had read about bkaila, a Tunisian specialty in which huge volumes of Swiss chard are cooked in oil until they are reduced to nearly nothing and become amazingly concentrated in flavor. So early one morning Lynn’s driver took Paula and me to Carthage to meet Lola and Georges Cohen, retired teachers who live in a white corner house across from the ruins of the Roman baths. Georges’s forebears arrived in Tunisia in the late fifteenth century, when the Jews and Arabs were expelled from Spain; Lola believes that her family has lived here many centuries longer, perhaps since before the Arabs conquered North Africa in the late seventh century. The Cohens are disappointed that their three children have left Tunisia for France. They told us that in 1956, when Tunisia won its independence, the Jewish community numbered sixty thousand. Now there are fewer than two thousand.
Bkaila takes nearly all day to make, which is why, Lola said, it is normally reserved for les grandes fêtes juives and for weddings. We watched her stuff two kinds of sausages, both called osban, with ground beef, beef liver, beef tripe, parsley, coriander, mint, dill, garlic, red onions, harissa, and rice. The sausages were parboiled, then combined with the reduced Swiss chard, white beans, pieces of beef, and a thick and gelatinous piece of cow’s skin; covered with water; and cooked over a low fire for four hours until everything was tender and took on the black-green color of the greens.
That evening, which was the last night of Hanukkah, we returned to Carthage with Lynn and Salah and shared the bkaila and many other courses with five of the Cohens’ friends. We used paper napkins, because the reduced Swiss chard stains cloth indelibly, and drank boukha, a white eau-de-vie made from figs.
I will probably not prepare bkaila on a weekly basis. But I will surely make endless bowls of mechouia, one of the simplest Tunisian dishes and also one of the best. Mechouia (mesh-WEE-uh) is a diced salad of grilled tomatoes, grilled sweet and hot peppers, grilled onions, and grilled garlic. Sometimes it is garnished with tuna and eggs. Sometimes it is pounded into a mush and used as a dip for bread, which is how Paula likes it. There are as many formulas for mechouia as there are people (8.5 million) in Tunisia.
Considering the current fashion in America both for grilled vegetables and for hot peppers, it is a wonder that mechouia is nearly unknown on these shores. But it can safely be predicted that with the publication of this recipe, mechouia will soon find its place on every street corner in America. I have relied on the formula in the French edition of Mohamed Kouki’s well-known cookbook,