The Man Who Ate Everything (43 page)

You can’t name a cooking style that is not represented here. There are classical French and Italian restaurants, though most
Seattle chefs seem to have come no nearer to Europe than a year or two in Santa Monica. Some menus speak in the dominant idiom of today’s regional American cooking—New Southwest with a few Cajun phrases mixed in. California cuisine has oozed up the coast, which usually means underflavored, undersalted modern French cooking hidden under edible flowers and Mexican fruits. Eclectic is in. An odd combination known variously as Pacific Rim, Pan-Pacific, or Pan-Asian is spreading fast; it typically combines every known Oriental cooking method and ingredient, minus India and Japan. One restaurant dishes up, simultaneously, the food of Mexico, the Caribbean, Brazil, Santa Fe, and someone’s fantasy of Native America. The
Weekly
characterizes this as “post-ethnic melange,” “post-pre-Columbian,” and “neo-Mayan Span-Tex.” One local food writer recently put her foot down: “I insist on one nationality, indivisible, per plate at a time.” The profusion of tastes and techniques from every corner of the globe gives Northwest chefs no incentive to explore their own natural niche as intensely as the Philips do at Sooke Harbour House. The desperate pace of culinary borrowing and experimentation often overwhelms the exquisite quality of the region’s produce and seafood. Many of the ethnic culinary models here were developed in places without impeccable raw ingredients and employ methods of cooking and spicing that do nothing to enhance fresh, natural tastes. In reaction, some Northwest chefs follow principles like these guidelines from the Herbfarm (whose acclaimed restaurant was closed during my visit):

· To be true to our local roots, stay away from food that could only be grown or raised in another climate—oranges, tropical fruits, coconut, etc… .

· Here are a few examples of items that should not be used: swordfish, mangoes, tiger prawns, blue crabs, grapefruit, and lobster… .

· These items could be grown in Washington but should be avoided as inappropriate and trendy: blue corn, sweet red pepper sauce (maybe), black beans, chilies, avocado, polenta, and the
other overt manifestations of California, Cajun, and Southwest cuisines.

When I first read them, these admonitions sounded austere,
xenophobic, almost Stalinist. But I became a convert one evening when I spent ten minutes extracting the carambola and sapote from a perfectly nice piece of fish to a waiting ashtray, and then
I
tried to taste the chunks of fresh crab in my wife’s Thai-Caju
n
chowder.

As I drove from Canada to Oregon, the restaurants that interested me most were those that follow, more or less, and ofter inadvertently, the Herbfarm principles. The Raintree in Vancouver is one, though my afternoon snack there was only a glimpse of how Rebecca Dawson uses what her corner of the regior offers. Salishan Lodge in Gleneden Beach, Oregon, is on everyone’s list, but my drive down the coast from Seattle was cut short by a savage storm that everybody told me was unprecedented but that, I suspect, occurs on a weekly basis.

I did get as far as the Long Beach Peninsula at the extreme southwest corner of Washington for dinner at Ann and Tony Kischner’s Shoalwater Restaurant at the Shelburne Inn. Chef Walker’s restrictions are not as severe as at Sooke or Raintree or the Herbfarm. But products from twenty miles around rule the menu. Local gardeners bring Ann their seed catalogs every February to find out what she would like them to plant in the spring. A fisherman who lives a half hour away supplies salmon and sturgeon caviar, which he prepares by a method taught to his father by a Russian emigre. In summer, an elderly neighbor lady collects blackberries from a vine that bore fruit for her mother.

I ate scrumptious Willapa Bay oysters poached in whiskey and served with Columbia River sturgeon caviar in a beurre blanc; an Italian vegetable-lentil soup (Washington lentils, of course); sturgeon baked with a creamy sauce of sake and wil
d
mushrooms; and a deeply flavored pear sorbet made with a Washington Riesling. The next morning, the owners of the Shelburne Inn, Laurie Anderson an
d David Campiche (who has lived
here all his life), fixed one of their famous breakfasts: David’s handmade caviar, smoked salmon, and potato-clam cakes; Laurie’s pastries and sourdough rolls—the starter may be a hundred years old—and gallons of hot coffee from Seattle’s Torrefazione.

Then we walked to the lighthouse at the mouth of the Columbia River. The storm had lifted for the first time in a week, and the morning sun on the Pacific was dazzling. But there was a culinary tragedy in the making.

The salmon fishing season on the Columbia had opened at midnight, fully ten hours earlier. As salmon do not feed as they swim upstream to their spawning grounds, they are at their fattest and most luscious at the mouth of the river, just as they begin to run. This is the only perfect place to catch them and the only perfect time to eat them. Grown men swoon as they describe the taste of spring-run Chinook. And I had come here, at no small risk to my safety and that of my rent-a-car, to taste of this perfection.

But there was not a boat in sight. Either fearful that the storm would resume or wary of the crosscurrents it had left behind, every fisherman for a hundred miles around had simply decided to stay at home. A day later I would leave the Pacific Northwest without even a bite of fresh salmon. If the Columbia River were in New York City, I thought bitterly as I boarded the plane for home, it would have been choked with boats by 12:01 a.m., all vying with each other to catch the first and fattest salmon of the season and rush it to my table. Pacific fishermen are fair-weather sailors, I decided. It is no accident that Captain Ahab set sail from Nantucket, not Santa Barbara, in his quest for Moby-Dick.

June 1990

Malsouka, masfouf, makfoul. Malsouka, masfouf, makfoul.

Malsouka
is a thin leaf of pastry.
Masfouf is
fine-grained couscous.
Makfoul
is the bottom of a couscous steamer. I can’t imagine why people say that Arabic is impossible to learn.
Zgougou
is a kind of pine nut.
Zgougou
is my favorite word so far.

But sometimes I think that if I had learned the Arabic words for “Where on earth is my tour bus?” I would have been far better off. I was in the medina, the old walled town, of Sousse, Tunisia’s third-largest city. In the heart of the medina are the souks, the medieval maze of market stalls and shops. And I had gotten lost in the souks of Sousse. I was innocently in search of a certain type of flat bread—thin, round, unleavened, stretchy, dense, wheaty, tender, and dotted with dark bumps and blisters from contact with the hot earthenware griddle on which it is baked. I wandered the souks in vain, encountering only a poor version of French bread and airy, biscuitlike flat breads.

And then I came upon the real thing. Unfortunately, someone was already eating it, sitting in front of his hardware stall. I inquired in French; most Tunisians are at least bilingual. He swallowed, gestured up the narrow, crooked street, and told me to walk fifty meters and then turn right. My head down, I paced off fifty meters and turned right, nearly slamming into a huge,
furry cow’s head that hung before a butcher’s stall, an advertisement for the freshness of the meat on offer. After refusing to sell me his gigantic triangular cleaver—I have never seen one like it—the butcher also directed me to walk fifty meters up the street and turn to the right. But this brought me to a shop selling boom boxes; unlike those in this country, Tunisian boom boxes have a circle of flashing colored lights surrounding each loudspeaker. Again I was directed fifty meters up and then to the right. On the way, to tide me over, I bought a freshly gridd
l
ed leavened bread stuffed with
merguez,
the local hot sausage, and green
harissa,
the famous North African paste of hot chili peppers and spices that usually comes in red. Now I was hopelessly lost. Time was running out, and I was prepared to give up on my flat bread.

“Take me to the Casbah,” I implored a passerby. I have always wanted to say that. But this time I was in earnest. If I could find the Casbah, which simply means the fortress or keep of the old city, then I would find the port, where our tour buses were parked. If I didn’t find the Casbah soon, I would become a permanent and involuntary resident of Sousse.

Luck was with me, for the Casbah was right under my nose, and this gave me time to brunch on a prodigious beignet (crisply deep-fried and dipped into sugar syrup) before our bus left for the Islamic holy city of Kairouan and the Roman coliseum in El Jem, and then on to Tunis.

I was four days into a two-week trip to Tunisia. I have always been suspicious of countries (or subcultures) in which a majority of the men wear mustaches, but Tunisia is a delight. It is the most tolerant and progressive country in North Africa and also the smallest.

Here are the vital statistics:

National dish: Couscous.

Population: 8,531,000, predominantly Muslim. (But women are encouraged to take up professions, and Muslim religious dress is discouraged.)

Area: 63,378 square miles—as though you had pasted England and Wales together and sandwiched them uncomfortably between a massive Algeria on the west and an enormous Libya on the southeast.

Capital city: Tunis.

Climate: Mediterranean in the north and east along the 805-mile coastline; semiarid in the interior; pure desert in the Saharan south.

Economic growth rate: 8.1 percent.

Average annual personal income: $1,750, the highest in the region but low by Western standards.

Food: Self-sufficient in fruit, fish, and olive oil. (The fish are red mullet, bonito, bluefish, sea bass, and shrimp. The fruits are citrus, dates, melons, apricots, figs, almonds, and cactus fruit.) Fourth most prolific producer of olive oil in the world, possessing fifty-five million trees.

Favorite spices: Hot pepper, coriander, and caraway in nearly every dish, plus cumin, anise, and cinnamon.

Favorite vegetables: Eggplant, onions, garlic, tomatoes, and peppers.

Favorite color: Blue.

The first week of the trip was organized by the Oldways Preservation & Exchange Trust, an extraordinary foundation that brings together—often in romantic foreign climes—nutritionists, environmentalists, historians, anthropologists, chefs, and food writers from the United States, England, Australia, and Japan, to enjoy and argue about traditional ways of eating that seem much healthier than the way we eat in most of the industrialized world. Then, after the first week, when most of the group had returned to their home countries, I planned to stay behind with my good friend Paula Wolfert. My wife would join us from New York, and we would set off to roam around Tunis and the Tunisian countryside in search of the best traditional home cooking we could find.

This is the sort of work that Paula Wolfert is famous for, and I had wanted to watch her in action ever since reading
The Cooking of South-West France
in 1983, her third cookbook and still my favorite (she has written six in all). There was Paula, tromping through Perigord and the Gers, through the Landes and the Beam, working with a chef in his restaurant kitchen, knocking on a housewife’s door, searching indefatigably for the epiphanous cassoulet, discovering dishes that had never appeared in print. Paula is part anthropologist, part amateur scholar (she rarely attacks a subject before learning the rudiments of the language and collecting and digesting a dozen or two cookbooks written by natives), and part culinary interpreter, often improving on a dish she has eaten—but always telling us exactly how she has changed it. And Paula is a very good cook. If her food were not delicious, I would be much less interested in the rest.

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
sag,
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.