Guissa, the gate leading north from the city, under the sour black heaps. The rancid smells of the souks. The dripping wooden jugs of the sahraoui donkey drivers. Restaurants offer their dishes of olives prepared with lemons. Vendors of fritters with their oily frying-pans. Food with an acid flavour that rasps the throat.
In Fez they have begun to cook with purified olive oil or groundnut oil and seldom use rancid butter. Believe me that nothing is better for preparing a good tagine than real olive oil with its fruity taste, which is indispensable in all Moroccan cooking.
When the moment comes for the inhabitants of Fez to take in their annual provisions it is traditional, in order to analyse the quality of the oil they have bought, to use a sample for a tagine with cardoons or maybe a nicely browned chicken. Tasting and sipping they will discover the degree of acidity and the olive’s subtle perfume.
BLACK OLIVES
The olives, when very ripe black and glistening, are rolled in rock salt in the proportion of two-thirds olives to one-third salt and put into a wicker basket with a heavy flat stone on top; a blackish water will emanate and the salt will penetrate to the fruit. At the end of two months the olives must be washed in clear water and put to dry on the terrace. They keep for a long time packed tightly in jars to avoid all contact with the air, and if dipped in oil may be preserved for many years.
LEMONS PRESERVED IN SALT
Utensils: an absolutely clean jar and a stone.
4 lb ordinary lemons
8 lb small thin or doqq lemons
Put the lemons to soak in water, which must be changed every morning, for five days. At the end of this time divide each lemon in four, taking care that the quarters remain attached. Put a pinch of salt in the middle of each lemon, shut and reshape the fruit. Put the two sorts of lemons into the same jar and place a clean stone on the top. A month later they will be ready. At the end of a few days a juice as thick as honey, but salty, will ooze out and the lemons can be preserved in this indefinitely if kept in a dry place.
You will find that they are used in a number of dishes – meat and vegetable tagines, chickens browned in butter. Pregnant women suck them all day long to give them an appetite.
In salads the salty juice is used to advantage instead of vinegar.
BREAD
Every household in Fez kneads the bread necessary for its daily consumption. Very often, Fassis buy the wheat itself, which, picked over, washed and laid to dry on the terrace on a sunny day, is then carried to the mill. When ground it will be divided into four parts: the best flour, soft and pure; the white lhrama semolina for couscous; the coarse golden semolina from the bran; and finally the bran itself, food for the master’s mule. Nothing is wasted.
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