At Night

COOKING LESSON
We’ve finally ventured into Moroccan cooking. While we happily buy our vegetables in the souk (3 kilos of assorted vegetables for just over a dollar), we’ve yet to brave its butchers. We’ve already described the carcasses that hang from hooks in the open-air stalls. Great, bloody mounds of flesh, with flies buzzing about and the sweet, heavy scent of blood hanging in the air. Tonight it’s gotten late, and we don’t feel like taking a taxi out to the grocery store in Gueliz, so we decide to get some lamb in the souk and attempt a traditional tajine dinner, named for the terra cotta pot in which the meal is cooked. We pick a vendor at random from among the half-dozen lining the main street, and tell him we want to make a tajine. He chops off a chunk of meat, and when he generously offers to throw in a couple cubic inches of fat for free, we don’t have the heart to tell him “no, thank you.” Back at the house, we start spreading our ingredients over the counter when Hamoud and his wife Hint show up.

When we tell them what we’re up to, they’re excited to help and, quickly go about instructing us on the basics of preparing a tajine. We learn that the plain terracotta tajine is used by the Berbers, while Arabs use the glazed terracotta. We opt for the glazed since it doesn’t absorb liquids and may be easier for our novice effort. Hint tucks an apron into our trousers, and thrusts a cutting board at us. We start slicing eggplant and zucchini, garlic and onion. Before we know it, though, Hint hi-jacks the project (were we that inept?) and we’re left with little to do but watch and stir the tajine as ingredients are added. Still, the result is quite good, and we’re anxious to practice and experiment a bit on our own.


NIGHT STALKER
He stood stock still in the near dark, and I almost didn’t see him as I rounded a corner of the terrace. Hamoud looked up as I approached and motioned for me to stop, and held his hand to his ear, gesturing for me to listen. I stood still in the hot summer night. It was past the final call to prayer. From the balcony, little noise could be heard from the city outside the walls of the riyad, - perhaps just a faint echo of the carnival drums in the Place. Inside the walls, the soft creek of crickets, synonymous with summer, was all I heard. I shrugged, and Hamoud whispered, “There!” I stepped forward, hearing nothing but the crickets, and then Hamound pounced, jutting his foot forward between two potted ferns and squishing something. The cricket’s chirp ceased, and Hamoud bent down and gleefully pulled out the insect’s mangled carcass.

“The noise!” he explained, and only then did I see the can of Raid in his hand. He led me around the riyad and proudly showed me three other crickets he’d killed that night: two by Raid, and the other by foot. Only then did we learn that the “cricket hunt” is a nightly preoccupation of his, this effort to rid the riyad of one of its most charming qualities. We try talking him out of it, but he clearly sees it as his duty to bring peace to the place by slaughtering the crickets. The more we protest, the more he shakes his head; this is something he has to do, and he often enlists his boys to help track down the chirping crickets behind terracotta pots or lurking in a dark corner. Our small consolation is that this seems an unwinable war; the crickets continue to sing each night.