A Cook's Tour (18 page)

     Turbans, fezzes, kepis, keffiyehs, bangles, chadors, and baseball caps bobbed above the shoulders of the crowd, a sea of headgear moving slowly through the confined spaces. It was work just walking a block. Nudged by the tide to the outer margins of the souk, I saw tailor shops with whole families kneeling inside, sewing. Carpenters lathed and sanded pieces of furniture, metalworkers hammered and tapped, and women filled buckets from community fountains. There were shoes, toys, jewelry, pressed tin, gold, wood, leather, and clay handicrafts – much, if not most, of the same stuff you see in dusty storefronts in the East Village. Believe me, you have, or at least have had, most of this stuff. Those groovy little inlaid boxes you used to keep your stash in? The stash pouch your first girlfriend gave you? They still have them in Fez, if you need new ones. I have come to believe, after traveling all over the world, that there’s a giant factory complex in Macao or Taiwan where all the world’s native handicrafts come from, a vast assembly floor where workers string seashells and beads for sale everywhere from Rio de Janeiro to the Caribbean to Da Nang, thousands of Chinese convicts screwing together Moroccan rifles, carving Mexican chess sets, and slapping paint on novelty ashtrays.

     Returning to the walled idyll of Abdelfettah’s home, I hurried to the rooftop and rolled a fat spliff of hashish-laced tobacco. I smoked deeply while the muezzin’s call echoed through the courtyard. Abdelfettah’s children were playing with ‘Torty,’ their pet turtle, by the fountain. I peered lazily at the rooftops of the medina and gazed at the cemeteries and hills beyond.

Reasons Why You Don’t Want to Be on Television: Number Three in a Series

Goofy with hash, I was worthless as a television host. I sat at the table with Abdelfettah and his wife, Naomi, eating a spectacular meal of wonderful thick
harira
, a lamb and lentil soup traditionally served to break the fast of Ramadan. There were salads, brochettes, and an absolutely ethereal couscous served with Fez-style tagine of chicken with raisins and preserved lemon. While we ate, Matthew and Global Alan stood directly across from the table, both their cameras pointed from the hip straight at us, expectantly. Under the unblinking gaze of their lenses, I felt unable to say a single enlightening or interesting thing. Repartee with my kind hosts was beyond me. I shrank from the artificiality of the whole enterprise, the forced nature of turning to Naomi, for instance, and casually inquiring, ‘So, Naomi, maybe you’d like to tell me about the entire history and culture of Morocco, its cuisine, and, uh, while you’re at it, could you explain Islam for us? Oh, pass the chicken, please. Thanks.’ I was enjoying the food, competently snatching fingerfuls of couscous and tagine between the excellent bread. But I couldn’t talk.

     Next to me, Naomi radiated unease. Abdelfettah looked, understandably, bored. Matthew cleared his throat impatiently, waiting for me to elicit a few recipes, some anecdotes. I liked my hosts, but Naomi, while quick, articulate, and informative off-camera, froze when the cameras turned on. I couldn’t do it to her. In my state of neurotic, hash-heightened sensitivity, I just couldn’t put her on the spot, knowing the cameras would then move in for a closer shot.
I
certainly had nothing to add to the world’s knowledge of Morocco. I was just finding a few – a precious few – things out myself. Who am I, Dan Rather? I’m supposed to face the camera and spit out some facile summary of twelve hundred years of blood, sweat, colonial occupation, faith, custom, and ethnology – as it relates to a chicken stew – all in a nice 120-second sound bite? I’m not even Burt Wolf, I was thinking. And I hate Burt Wolf. Watching him in his flawlessly white chef’s coat, with his little notepad, pretending to take notes for the camera while he leans inquisitively over some toiling chef in a French country kitchen, the voice-over giving the viewing audience the short course on the French Belle Epoque. I used to watch those shows and want to leap through the TV screen, grab a fistful of Burt’s chef’s jacket, and scream, ‘Take that off, you useless fuck! Give the man some room, for God’s sake! Let him work!’ But I was Burt now. Worse than Burt – because I had no idea, no clue, what I was doing. In my madcap lurch around the world, I’d done no preparation. I knew nothing. About anything.

     I could have pointed out, I guess, that the raisins and preserved lemon were distinctive of Fez-style tagine. I’m sure I could have described for the viewing audience the difference between couscous made from scratch and couscous made out of the box, talked about the way it’s cooked – in the couscousíre – steaming over the simmering sauce from the tagine. I’m sure, if I’d stitched a smile on my face and gathered my thoughts, and had the heart to do it, I could have gotten Abdelfettah to discuss his hopes for his city, his planned music center, his art, knowing full well that that would have ended up on the cutting room floor. As Matthew squirmed and fumed, the clock ticked, each second dropping like molten lead into the vast pool of unusable footage. What was I going to say? Abdelfettah had found something here, but however beautiful, however righteous and unpolluted by the outside world it was, I knew I could never live this way. Maybe, I mused, if the cameras were gone, maybe then I could give myself over more wholeheartedly to the experience. Maybe I’d be more able to relax. But I knew better. Even with the added conveniences of a high-speed modem, hot tub, bowling alley, regular deliveries of deli food and pizza from New York, and Krispy Kreme doughnuts, I couldn’t live like this. Ever. My hosts seemed so content and at home within the context of their city, their family, and their beliefs that I felt it completely inappropriate to nudge them into the automatic dumb-down that comes with addressing a lens.

     My last meal at Abdelfettah’s was
pastilla
, the delicate, flaky pigeon pie, wrapped and baked in
waqa
with toasted almonds and eggs, then garnished with cinnamon. Like everything I’d eaten, it was wonderful. But I felt pulled in twelve directions at once. I was not happy with being the globe-trotting television shill. I had been cold and away from home for far too long. I yearned for the comfort and security of my own walled city, my kitchen back at Les Halles, a belief system I understood and could endorse without reservation. Sitting next to these two nice people and their kids, I felt like some news anchor with a pompadour, one of the many glassy-eyed media people whom I’d flogged my book with around the United States. ‘So, Anthony, tell us why we should
never
order fish on Monday.’ My spirits were dropping into a deep dark hole.

     I was being ‘difficult.’ I was being ‘uncooperative.’ I really was. An executive producer was flown out from New York to soothe my troubled conscience, to help me feel better about the enterprise. She showed me some rough cuts of earlier shows, pointed out that I wasn’t doing that badly, if I remembered to look at the camera, if I’d only stop cursing and smoking and slagging other Food Network chefs all the time, maybe look at a map before visiting a country. Three minutes into this motivational meeting, the producer mentioned that her boyfriend had been kidnapped by aliens. She said this casually, as if mentioning that she’d seen the Yankees/Red Sox game last week. He’d built an alien landing strip in their apartment, she added, her tone frighteningly devoid of irony or skepticism. I waited for the part where she’d say, ‘Oh yeah, I know. He’s nuts. Barking mad. But I love the big lug.’ That would have been enough for me. I waited, but nothing came. She continued gently pointing out my many deficiencies while urging me on. I think I even jokingly inquired if her boyfriend had mentioned any rectal probing being involved, a suspiciously regular feature of rural alien abductions. She didn’t laugh.

     I was alone.

     I spoke with Naomi before leaving, apologized for myself, thanked her for enduring the crew, and the cameras, expressed regret that I was leaving her beautiful home, and this amazing city, without really having gained any knowledge or real insight. She handed me a small piece of paper on which she’d copied a verse by Longfellow: ‘And the night shall be filled with music,/And the cares, that infest the day,/Shall fold their tents, like the Arabs/And as silently steal away.’

     I hoped so. I truly did. I had very high hopes for the desert. I needed it.

It was a nine-hour drive from Fez to the desert. We passed through snowcapped mountains with Swiss-style vacation homes – a remnant of the French occupation – through forests and valleys, across the Moyen-Atlas, and down onto mile after mile of absolutely flat, hard-packed, pebble-strewn dirt. One long, undulating ribbon of asphalt stretched on and on for hundreds of miles. Occasionally, we glimpsed in the distance wadis, mesas, mountains, cliffs, great mounds of packed dirt. Every fifty miles or so, an oasis appeared. Some oases were simply small clusters of the ubiquitous sand and mud castles, while others were vast wedding cake-like Casbahs, groupings of homes and mosques, schools and markets, small plots of green crowded around tall palms, clinging to where water passed, or had once passed, or was likely to pass again. Coming from New York, one tends to take water for granted. Here in the desert, it’s life or death. One builds where water flows or trickles. One pulls it from the ground. Some of the larger oases stretched for miles in the wide, deep crevices where the earth, thousands or millions of years ago, had split open, cracked like an overcooked brownie.

     I began seeing camels with regularity alongside the road, with blue- or black-clad Berbers holding the reins or riding on top. I saw women with tattooed faces in the same black or blue scarves, the colors and markings denoting tribe. And I saw something else again and again in the middle of the vast, monotonous expanses of hard, waterless desert, where for thirty miles we’d passed nothing – not a house, not a single structure, no stick of wood or blade of grass to distract the eye from horizon to horizon. There, sitting by the side of the road, were lone watchers, people who’d hiked for miles from beyond the curve of the earth to sit and watch the occasional car or truck blow past them at eighty miles an hour, never slowing. These people didn’t beg, or wave, or even raise their heads to smile. They sat impassive, watching in silence in their rags as evidence of the modern world roared past, leaving them in a cloud of dust.

     Abdul owned only one cassette tape: Judy Collins’s
Greatest Hits
. I tried sleeping. I tried shutting it out, but, in the end, the soulless trilling and warbling of ‘Both Sides Now’ slowly ground me down to a state of near-hysterical desperation. The road to Risani seemed to go on forever – especially with Judy exercising her pipes. The scenery changed gradually from the uninterruptedly banal red-pebbled desert to breathtaking Martian landscapes of mountain peaks, flat buttes, deep wadis, and cliff towns. Mostly, however, it was dirt. At times, nothing identified what was out the window as being anywhere on earth. Not a living thing. Occasionally – very occasionally – there would be a mud farm, where deep trenches had been dug for building materials, and a few forlorn-looking goats. Seemingly nonsensical property dividers, irregularly piled baseball-sized stones, indicated boundaries between nothing and nothingness. No water, no trees, no animals, and yet there they were, mile after mile of precariously balanced rocks. Finally, Risani appeared, a sun-bleached, dusty, desultory town of dirty streets and disheveled citizenry. We checked into the ‘best’ hotel, a faux Casbah of mud and cinder block, the familiar combo of inadequate electric heater, mushy bed springs, and lime-encrusted showerhead. Beer, at least, was available in the lobby – along with a very special menu of tagine, couscous, and brochette.

     I had come to Risani to find
meshwi
, the whole roasted lamb so integral to my delusions of desert adventure. It had been arranged in advance over the phone with a group of Tuaregs who guided people around the Merzouga dunes as a business concern. But after a conversation on his battered cell phone, Abdul was telling me that the next night’s dinner in the desert would be ‘something very special.’ I knew what that meant: The bastards were planning a big meal of couscous, brochette, and tagine. I was furious. I had not come all this way to eat couscous again. I could eat that in the lobby with the Japanese and German tourists. I’d come for whole roasted lamb, Berber-style, tearing at fat and testicles with my bare hands around a bonfire with the Blue Dudes, the whole beast, crispy and delicious, laid out in front of me. ‘But, but . . .’ I stammered, ‘I wanted
meshwi
! I was getting
meshwi
!’ Abdul shook his head, whipped out his cell phone, made a call, and spoke for a few minutes in Arabic. ‘They don’t have whole lamb,’ said Abdul. ‘If you want, we must bring ourselfs.’

     ‘Fine,’ I barked, irritated. ‘Call them back. Tell them tomorrow morning we’ll go to the market, buy a whole lamb, dressed and cleaned, and anything else they’ll need. We’ll throw it in the back of the car and take it on out. All they’ve gotta do is the voodoo that they do – cook the damn thing.’ The plan was to get up early, swing by the market, buy lamb and supplies, load it all into the back of a hired Land Rover and rush out to the desert before the food began to rot.

     Abdul looked dubious.

     The next morning, we arrived as planned. The ground meat, vegetables and dry ingredients were no problem. The lamb, however, was proving to be difficult. At a butcher counter down an alleyway to the rear of a flyblown souk, a gold-toothed butcher considered our request and opened his ancient nonfunctioning stand-up fifties-era Frigidaire, revealing one hapless-looking leg of lamb, cut rudely through the hip and leeching blood.