The Man Who Ate Everything (45 page)

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 fetes 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,
La
C
uisine
T
unisienne.
Kouki, you might say, is the James Beard of Tunisia.

Mechouia,
or
Salade Tunisienne Grillee

4 large plum tomatoes (about
1
/2 pound)

2
green bell peppers (about 6 ounces)

1 or 2 fresh poblano chili peppers (about 1/4 pound)

1 yellow or red onion, about 2
1
/2 inches in diameter (
1
/4 pound),
peeled

1 large garlic clove, unpeeled

1
/
4
teaspoon ground caraway seeds (you may need to grind
them up yourself with a mortar and pestle or spice grinder) 1
/4
teaspoon ground coriander seeds

1 teaspoon coarse salt

Juice of 1/2 lemon

3
tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

12 small green and black olives, cured in oil

1/2 tablespoon capers

Grill the tomatoes, the bell and poblano peppers, the onion, and the garlic clove on a charcoal grill (or under the broiler or over a gas flame), keeping the vegetables close to the source of heat and turning them often until they are well charred. Remove them as they are done. Put the peppers into a paper bag, close the bag, and let them steam for 10 minutes. (The paper-bag method loosens the peppers’ skins. A common alternative, peeling under running water, dilutes their flavor.)

Meanwhile, peel the grilled tomatoes, chop them into 1/2-inch pieces, and put them into a 2-quart bowl. Remove the charred outer layer of the onion, chop the rest into 1/4-inch pieces, and add them to the bowl. Then peel the peppers, stem them, and seed them. Cut the bell peppers into 1/2-inch pieces and the poblanos into 1/4-inch pieces, and add them all to the tomatoes.

Peel the garlic clove, and crush it with the back of a wooden spoon in a small bowl along with the ground caraway, coriander, and salt. Mix well with the vegetables. Stir in the lemon juice and the olive oil.

Turn out into a shallow bowl for serving. Garnish with the olives and capers. Makes 4 modest servings as a side dish, but the quantities can easily be doubled.

My photos have just come back from the lab. There is a picture of a blinkered camel turning a mill wheel in a cave dwelling high in the Berber town of Chenini. And there is my favorite, a snapshot of my wife, having her hands painted with henna in the manner of a Tunisian bride. Paula is still systematically plowing her way through forty or fifty dishes we brought home from Tunisia. Yesterday she made
kadid,
preserved mutton thigh, and, for dessert, sweet balls of coarse semolina bread stuffed with nuts and dates. Tonight her family will feast on a lamb’s head with barley grits. I think I’ll make do with
mechouia.

March 1 9
94

The Last Undiscovered Cuisine

What will next year’s food of the moment be?

A. My candidate, admittedly a long shot, is Visigoth cuisine. The Visigoths ruled Europe from Gibraltar to the Rhone for 250 years after the Fall of Rome, until the Arabs forced them out of Spain in 711. History has dealt the Visigoths an unfair hand, picturing them as rude barbarians vaguely connected with the destruction of European civilization. Sure they were, but consider their accomplishments. Their laws, written in Latin, strongly influenced South American jurisprudence. They became Christians as early as the sixth century, setting a fine example for the much later Spanish Inquisition by forcing the Jews to accept baptism in the year 600. And most important, their sweet-and-sour cooking left its mark throughout southwest France and Iberia, especially in Catalonia. Yet you will search in vain for a Visigoth cookbook, restaurant, or food shop. It is the last undiscovered cuisine of Europe, and its day may now have come.
Variations on a Theme

Trader Vic’s was the first theme restaurant I ever visited, thirty years ago, and it would probably have been the last if I had not recently dedicated myself to deciphering the theme-restaurant tidal wave now on the verge of submerging my home city. Why would tourists come to New York to eat meals they can find in suburban malls? Why would anybody buy a T-shirt, baseball cap, denim jacket, or boxer shorts with somebody else’s name on them? Why visit a Planet Hollywood or a Hard Rock Cafe in New York when you can find its identical twin in Atlanta, Aspen, Phoenix, or Tahoe? New York City is hotter and more humid in summer than Aspen, colder in winter than Atlanta, and dirtier than either. The subways are confusing; the taxis require a working knowledge of Urdu and, in summer, a snorkel for drawing some of the air-conditioning through those three little holes in the thick, bulletproof Plexiglas shield meant to protect the driver from you or vice versa. You can’t beat Aspen for sensible roads, clean streets, pleasant people, and mountain air. You’d have to be crazy to come to New York for a visit to the Hard Rock Cafe.

It is easy to understand the attraction of owning a theme restaurant: earn a small profit on the hamburgers and make a fortune on the T-shirts and other souvenirs. The profit margin on a Buffalo chicken wing or a beef fajita is 10 percent, on a baseball cap with a logo more like 50. Here are the typical numbers for a
successful theme restaurant in the heart of a major city: The place costs $5 million to build and open (though some are now creeping toward $10 million). Gross revenues can be $10 million a year, of which about a quarter is profit, $1.75 million from merchandise and $650,000 from food. Your capital is returned in two or three years. Why invest in anything else? Why not turn every last square inch of real estate into theme restaurants? Why not convert entire neighborhoods, entire cities? That’s what happened to Orlando.

If theme knickknacks alone were enough to attract customers, these places would probably drop the food. Even the famously bumbling Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office has opened a gift shop to cash in on the celebrity-trinket craze. Along with the usual T-shirts and boxer shorts, the coroner sells authentic toe-tag key chains, ready to be personalized, and beach towels decorated with a facsimile of the chalk outline that police draw around a corpse on the sidewalk. “Reserve your place on the beach,” the brochure says. At press time, the L.A. coroner had no plans to expand to New York.

But Warner Brothers has evidently decided that food and souvenirs are inseparable. Its three-story store at Fifty-seventh Street and Fifth Avenue—which, by offering clothing and novelties decorated with images of Daffy Duck, Tweety, and Bugs Bunny, has become one of the most successful shops in the world—reportedly grosses $100 million a year. Warner Brothers’ rumored expansion of forty thousand square feet will include
three restaurants.

Fifty-seventh Street is the new epicenter of New York’s theme world. For generations it had been the royal road to Carnegie Hall, once home base of Bergdorf’s, Bendel’s, and Bonwit’s, Rizzoli and Steinway, the Osborne apartments and Hammacher-Schlemmer, the Fuller Building. Then, in 1984, the Hard Rock Cafe arrived, and by 1995 the boulevard had acquired the nickname Theme Street, in honor of the arrival of Planet Hollywood, Le Bar Bat, Brooklyn Diner, U.S.A., and the fabulously
successful Warner Brothers store, all of them right on Fifty-seventh; the Jekyll & Hyde Club and Harley Davidson Cafe a, block away; and Fashion Cafe in the general vicinity.

And more are yet to come. Opening soon will be the Motown Cafe (beating out Steven Spielberg’s Dive! to take over the site of the New York Deli, which had supplanted the great Art Deco Horn & Hardart Automat); Dive! (the decor is bathysphere, the cuisine “reinvented” submarine sandwiches); and Nike (a four-story sneaker theme park behind a copy of the Ebbets Field facade, near Fifth Avenue). Dolly Parton is whispered to be ransacking Fifty-seventh Street for an addition to her country-and-western restaurant chain. And the vultures are waiting for Wolf’s Delicatessen on the corner of Sixth Avenue to stumble. Suddenly this once-obscure patch of earth makes downtown Tokyo look like small change. Soon you will stand on this corner and not know what city or even what country you have landed in.

Nearby, Television City will open its theme restaurant and shop at Rockefeller Center; (Ed) Sullivan’s Restaurant and Broadcast Lounge has parallel plans for a site on Broadway. One subway stop south, in Times Square, look forward to a huge Disney complex (to complement its studio store down Fifth Avenue from Warner Brothers, right next to the Coca-Cola gift shop), entries from MTV and HBO, and from Robert Earl (towering genius of the theme movement, high Hard Rock executive in the eighties, a founder of Planet Hollywood in the nineties), Marvel Mania and the Official All-Star Cafe, which expects backing from Shaquille O’Neal, Andre Agassi, and Wayne Gretzky, all reported to be internationally famous athletes. And I can’t wait for Tito Puente’s 275-seat Puerto Rican theme restaurant on City Island in the Bronx, somehow combining Latin jazz and family fare. Puente (the salsa giant) has chosen the estimable Yvonne Ortiz (author of
A Taste of Puerto Rico)
to direct the kitchen. They expect their Frozen Mango Mambo to be the next pina colada. Las Vegas interests are rumored to be shopping for a property in which to establish their
Saturday Night Live
theme chain. And in a late-breaking development, Madonna is said to be looking for her very own site.