Robert Carrier, O.B.E

MOROCCAN STREET FOOD
An excerpt from Robert Carrier's book
TASTE OF MOROCCO

It is in the old cities of Marrakech, Fez, Meknes and Rabat (and even the old quarter of modern, westernized Casablanca) that you will find your first real introduction to the bustle and clamour, the sights, sounds and smells of the magic world of Morocco. Donkeys bump stolidly into you as you walk through crowded passageways full of colourful open-fronted shops. There are teeming vegetable markets, the stalls of silversmiths and leatherworkers making their wares, and clothes guilds selling beautiful embroidered robes and heavy silks, woollens and damasks by the yard.

Of all the fabled cities of Morocco my favorite is Marrakech, a garden city of tall, curved palms and pointed cypresses, surrounded by orchards of oranges and lemons and acres of silver olive trees, a colourful crossroads between the Sahara and the Mediterranean. Showy and exciting, the city was for many centuries an ancient settlement grown from an Arab caravan halt at an oasis. Originally nothing more than a stone-built casbah or ksar and a collection of tented encampments protected by a stockade, it soon became an important trading settlement on the route across the desert to the north for merchant caravans carrying their silks and spices, ivory, ebony, gems and slaves.

The rich Arab trading post was to grow into an Imperial city of great political significance and dazzling grace, a medieval bazaar of a town set off from the world by a ring of snow-capped mountains.

What we see today - the miles of fabulous pink walls turning to gold in the sunset, the legendary Koutoubia Tower and the Place Djemmaa el Fna, the meeting place of north and south - has excited more first-time visitors than almost any other city on earth.

Here, in one magic bound you will pass the frontier of several centuries. For on this great, sprawling central square you will discover how the common people of Europe used to entertain themselves in the Middle Ages. Walking into the square as evening falls is like a trip into the past. By day, it is animated with crowds of people - merchants and their customers - while later it is alive with the sound of drumbeats and African music, with itinerant jugglers, snake charmers, acrobats, sooth-sayers, sword-swallowers, monkey-trainers and water-vendors, all gathered to tempt and entertain the passers-by. This is no simple show for tourists: this is the true living folklore of another time. If you thrill to the senses of taste, smell, touch, and sight, you will savour every moment of your visit here.

A wandering subculture of itinerant street sellers provides needed services and local colour in the streets of Marrakech. A host of shoe-shine boys and sellers of rugs, djellabahs, and Berber knives roam the streets in search of sales, as does the lemon-wood man with his bicycle strung with dozens of wooden spoons and whisks and stirrers of all kinds, fashioned from the wood of lemon trees, and a selection of outlandish straw hats. Another street specialist sells tall jars of mountain honey. But it is the ambulant hard-boiled egg vendors and the hot chick pea or broad (fava) bean merchants that interest me the most. From the former, a shelled hard-boiled egg with a small paper square with salt and cumin powder to dip your shelled egg in; from the latter, a heaped mound of steaming hot chick peas or broad (fava) beans served with a liberal dusting of coarse salt and powered cumin. Each for only a dirham or less than about 4 cents: wonderful provender - with a drink or a glass of mint tea - for literally pennies.

I shall always be grateful to Marrakech for giving me my first Moroccan street food of any consequence. It was late at night and I was hungry; the restaurants were closed and so I decided to try my luck at a tiny brochette stall in the open square. At the urging of an Arab friend I decided on grilled lamb brochettes, four twisted metal skewers of tiny bits of lamb's liver and fat, grilled over an open fire, the cook turning the skewers and fanning the charcoal with an old piece of tattered cardboard. The brochettes were seasoned with a mix of powered cumin, hot red pepper, and coarse salt. Then, with a flourish, the meats were stripped into a quarter round of flat, crunchy, chewy Arab bread. A pinch or two more of the magical seasoning and I was lost; my senses ablaze with new savours, new mysteries, new sights and new aromas. For around me as I delightedly munched my simple feast were a whole series of wooden tables and benches set up every night in the square where people, tightly gathered, were eating brochettes like mine or choosing from an array of colourful vegetable salads, gleaming piles of savoury chick peas or lentils flavoured with finely chopped onion and garlic, and seasoned with sweet red pepper, hot red pepper, and the (new to me at that time) completely different taste of kasbour (fresh green coriander). Saffron-scented whole chickens were there with preserved lemons or violet coloured olives, and flat earthenware dishes of beef and lamb cooked with raisins and prunes and almonds. At the fish stalls they serve delicious deep-fried chunks of fresh fish brought that morning from the nearby ports of Safi, Agadir, and Oulidia. Dipped first in a salt-and-saffron-flavoured flour and then deep-fried in cauldrons of bubbling oil until crisp and golden, the fish is served - one large piece per customer - with a side helping of crisp-fried potatoes (the French influence), two rounds of fried aubergine (eggplant) and a hot green pepper. Ambrosia. If you are more adventurous - I certainly am - you'll try, too, the rich-flavoured tagines of sheep's or calf's feet simmered with chick peas and cracked wheat, or the savoury stews of lamb or beef with saffron, cumin, prunes, raisins and almonds.

There is one special stall on the square that my friends and I often visit just for a glass or two of chilled fresh yoghurt thickened in the traditional way (with chokes of baby wild artichokes) which gives it a fresh and delicious flavour. Here, too, on the tiny terrace above the square, you can sit at long tables and order brochettes of kefta (seasoned minced lamb), or lamb or beef liver, and bits of lamb or beef. Precede this, as we did one night during Aid el Kebir (the Great Feast), with a nourishing bowl of harira (the traditional 'break fast' of Ramadan) and follow with a glass or two of fresh yoghurt and you'll have a meal to remember. All for a little more than a dollar. So next time you visit Marrakech, let Aladdin open his cave of mystical delights for you right in the heart of the Place Djemmaa el Fna - an array of wonderfully colourful street food ready to be enjoyed in the midst of a Middle Ages scene of story-tellers, monkey-trainers, water-sellers, acrobats, musicians and dancers. You'll love it, for this was the entertainment of our ancestors and this was the food they ate. If the essence of food is its flavour, its texture and its aroma, its spirit is in the people who create it, enjoy it, and rely on it for their own sense of identity. Moroccan street food fulfils all of these ideals.

Taste of Morocco was first published by Century Hutchinson Ltd in 1987

Notes from Ted:

It was Robert (Bob) Carrier who gave me the idea to open my home, The Point, to paying guests. After making my point by developing The Point into the #1 resort hotel in America, I sold it and returned to London; and it was Robert who gave me the idea of writing a monthly travel journal that eventually morphed into Edward Carter’s Travels.

I first went to Marrakech in the ‘70s as the guest of the Duchess de la Rochefoucauld (real French royalty) whose house in the medina of Marrakech once belonged to Jean Paul Getty (fake American royalty, but the richest man in the world in those days). My date was the Baroness de Vendeuve—heady days those! (Here in BKK they call high society “Hi-So.” It’s truncated for a reason: most of it was created this morning, and it probably won’t survive the PM. Quite frankly, I prefer café society to the ‘high’ variety, but here it’s more like Nescafé.)

The Rochefoucauld family seat in France.

I visited Bob twice in his fabulous home, also in the medina of Marrakech. Behind a 6-meter-high door studded with silver was a garden of lemon trees. As at Rory Cameron’s villa in Cap Ferrat—La Fiorentina, the trunks of the trees had been white-washed. Originally a method to discourage tree parasites in the south of France, the practice was unnecessary in Morocco; but Bob loved the look. Bougainvillea hung from the apricot-tinted walls, and the parterres were a jungle of bright blossoms and shiny green leaves. We’d lunch on the many terraces; the great Atlas Mountains shimmered in the distance.

Going down from London on the plane for my last visit, Bob was telling me that his dining room walls were tadillakdt, a rich hand-rubbed finish made of lime, cinnabar colored pigment, black soap, and egg yolk that gives a soft, marble-smooth lustre to Moroccan palaces today just as it did in the eleventh century. Then every centimeter of the walls are covered in Arabic lettering, hand-written so small that one can hardly distinguish the individual letters. Finally, the walls are Shellacked and buffed. The result is astounding.

(Not Bob’s, but you get the idea.)

We walked into the room — magnificent, but Bob was surprised that someone had already started to re-hang his collection of paintings. He adjusted one that was crooked...gasp!! One after another, he flung them to the floor — the workmen hadn’t taken them down before starting the 6-month project and the gaps in the fresco were ridiculous!

…we ate al fresco after that.

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