of food

22 June 2008
The taste of plums is in my mouth. Not quite ripe ones, so they are satisfyingly tart, but still delightfully plumy and a little bit sweet. I wasn’t expecting to have good fruit in the mountains, but when it’s the season, the fruit here is nothing short of very, very good. Plums, peaches, figs, grapes, apples, cherries, apricots, and then oranges, bananas, and dates from the plains and Agadir (which is the California of Morocco, that is you can grow anything there all year round). Spoiled as I have been in the past, I still wish for mangoes, passionfruit and fresh avocadoes, but this is not the tropics. It is the Mediterranean.
I thought I would do a little entry about the food. Now that you know about the fruit, you perhaps think that this must be ideal… and it all depends on how much money you have to spend on food. You can eat very, very well indeed here if you want to and have the money to buy the supplies. I get the feeling, though, that there are certain families that do not eat so well at all.
Traditionally the main meals of the day are served in one very large platter: tajine, dwaz and sksu (couscous) are big traditions. And bread. If you run out of bread but have plenty of say, rice on hand, many a Moroccan will say that they NEED bread. One of my teachers was particularly adamant about this. You would have thought he was going to die if he didn’t get his bread! In my region dwaz is the commoner of the first two (which are more or less the same thing just cooked in a different container). I hadn’t had any tajines here at all until my older host siblings came home to visit.
(non sequiter… my 11-year-old host brother just stood up and started wiggling his hips around to the music as loose-jointedly as any of the hottest Carribean/Latin dancers you’ve ever seen… this culture will never cease to surprise me…)
If my host mother doesn’t want to go to the trouble of cooking a dwaz, she is likely to put some couscous in a pot with milk and salt and butter and then heat it to a boil. We eat this every few nights it seems. Sometimes small noodles or rice are substituted for the couscous. Homemade couscous, by the way. Not store bought. They are decidedly different animals, store bought and homemade, by the way. There are bunches of ways to eat couscous…
Also there is the homemade butter (adhan) and the homemade buttermilk (aghi) and cheese (jbnn)… the first two of which I like. The adhan tastes like yogurt a little bit, and the buttermilk is drunk alone or mixed with couscous for a snack. The jbnn tastes like I imagine the color white would taste if it had been left out a little bit too long…
There are five meals a day: ldftar, thduayif, imshli, kaskarot and iminsi. People also drink atay (tea) and kahwa (coffee) whenever someone comes over to visit, and usually at meals too. Some people call atay Moroccan whiskey. J Sort of… they certainly are well caffeinated from a very early age. The food is, in short, good, but I am missing all kinds of food… ice cream, frozen custard, cheddar cheese, Colby cheese, swiss cheese, reubens, spinach salads, Afghani food, mangoes, Mexican food, and good chocolate.