Tasting Berber History

The dusty clay village of Leksbah, a slow and somewhat treacherous 30-minute walk (the casualty in my case was a black sandal ill-equipped for such rugged terrain) from the town of Taznakht in Southern Morocco, is a Berber village spartan in modern-day luxuries, but rich in tradition. Here in this village, which sprouted up around an old, abandoned casbah, women bear the burden of what I call the Four Cs: cooking, cleaning, care-giving—and yes, carpet making. Nearly every home has a carpet loom, and as long as daylight exists and lamps illuminate the night, women and girls are found sitting upon cushions and bags of flour, expertly weaving candy-colored threads of wool through vertical white strings hung on a hand-made wooden frame. As women juggle the competing tasks of domestic chores and carpet weaving, men, conspicuously absent from the home, are often out tending to the fields and herds of goats, or in town, as is the case of Mohammed, looking for work.

On our last night in the village, we stayed at the modest, but airy home of Fatima and Mohammed, and their sweet-faced, brown-eyed daughter named Safaa. Pregnant with their second child (A boy, said Fatima, Inshallah), Fatima shared the sacred space of her bare-walled kitchen to show us how to make a lamb tagine—which is perhaps most comparable to a Moroccan stew. In the dim light of a single light-bulb, she peeled and cleaned wirey carrot sticks, onions, potatoes and peas, and set them aside. She then took generous cubes of lamb, layered in fat, and placed them in the bottom of the tagine dish. Then, lacing the lamb with olive and argan oils, she powdered the dish with cumin, pepper, paprika, turmeric and rass el hnout (a melange of a range of spices, sometimes up to a 100). She covered the bottom, now placed on a table-top gas stove, with the conical clay lid, occasionally stirring the meat over several long, torturous hours—torturous because the intoxicating smell of the cooking meat was enough to make me, hungry as I was, start climbing the walls. In an anxious moment, while Fatima was away catching up with Mohammed, who had just returned from work, I quietly lifted the lid, and saw the lamb simmering in its spiced juices and now-liquid fat. Not until the lamb had cooked sufficiently were the vegetables added to the tagine.

When it was finally done, the lamb tagine was offered to us in the same clay dish, encircled with green olives. Fatima had also created Moroccan-style salad plates, which often come with beets, steamed squash, carrots and surprisingly, white rice. But the salad, while tasty, was a mere distraction to the headlining tagine. Following tradition, the meat was doled out by the head of the household, who generously gave their guests the lion’s share of the portions. I must have mumbled, between mouthfuls, Shoukran bezef! at least 20 times.

Tagines are eaten with bread—kuhbz in Arabic. In the place of forks and spoons, pieces of khubz soak up the sauce and curry forth pieces of vegetables and meat. The meat of the lamb was tender to the touch, and the caramelized onions provided a lovely sweetness to the meal. The beauty of the tagine may be its simplicity: with a lot of patience and a modicum of effort, a tagine is both delicious, hearty and complex in its flavors. During the meal, we drank glasses of soda and toasted to our hosts, who had ushered us into their homes and fed us like we were royalty. Days after we left their home in Leksbah, my mind often wandered back to that meal. Restaurant tagines in Essaouria and Marrakesh were no match to Fatima’s home cooking. And now, back in New York City, I have to wonder: with all the diversity here in New York, why does the city—especially Manhattan—lag in good, authentic Moroccan cooking? If anyone can refute me on this, please, by all means, do so. I would be delighted to be wrong.