Tales of Benshasha
Created | Updated Aug 7, 2011
Continuing from Part I
The Daily Fare - Part II
For protein, one of the main sources that can be gathered from the highways and byways, are 'snails'. These are not the enormous Helix pomatia 'escargots' that the French eat by the half-dozen as a hors d'ouvre - these are Galba truncatula , the small grey snails, and it takes ages to collect anything like enough for a half decent meal.
But having harvested enough of them, the fun's only just begun. 'Cleaning' snails takes forever - they have to be washed about twenty times and if you happen to be the one collecting water that day, you might well have second thoughts as to whether it is worth the effort.
On a good day, it took Fatima two days to prepare enough for one meal, and, apart from anything else, it's an incredibly noisy process. In addition, snails have a strong survival instinct and if Fatima wasn't careful, we had snails everywhere, all trying to go home. Our evenings were often spent trying to retrieve hundreds of them so as to avoid the bed feeling as though you were sleeping on one of those beaded things that lorry drivers sit on in the hope that it will cure their back ache.
Another problem is that if they get out of the pot, they have to be washed again and thus the process can go on indefinitely.
Once you have washed and dried them sufficiently, you then have to boil them for a few hours. The smell of snails cooking falls a long way short of 'appetising' and I have to confess that if I didn't manage to stay upwind, I couldn't face eating them later.
But when all that's done you have the job of getting them out of their shells. This is done with an enormous great thorn, and, fortunately, acacia trees grow along the road towards Plage David, providing a plentiful supply of murderous thorns - far better than tooth-picks, as they are curved.
But all this effort, for what? You'd get more to eat, with less effort, if you picked your nose.
Fatima - bless her - noticed my frustration (and inability) and devised recipes that involved par-boiling the snails, shelling them and then cooking them in a tagine in butter with garlic, onions, tomato, green pepper, ginger, herbs and a glass of white wine (if there is any left) and served with rice. Delicious!
Throughout most of the summer, Tara would come back of an evening with about 20 kgs. Most were sent to Mohamedia the following day to sell, but we always ended up with more than enough for our needs.
But, far better than snails, is what can still be gleaned from the beach. Squid is still plentiful and if you go down there at low tide you can guarantee to come back with enough for lunch. As catching a squid in a rock pool requires little more than a bent piece of wire, it is not totally beyond the technological capabilities of the family.
There are mussels, but they have been over-cropped and they have been pretty well obliterated. Now, it is only when there is an exceptionally low tide that you can find any worth eating, but when you do, they are excellent.
Fatima's Moule Mariniere is the best I have ever had. She was taught the recipe by Françoise, for whom she worked as a teenager, and managed to adapt it to whatever we had available.
But there's plenty else available on the beach and there is not much living amongst the rocks that doesn't get eaten. Sea urchins are eaten raw - as and when you find them - but at the other extreme, limpets have to be beaten with a mallet and boiled for hours to render them anything like edible. There is just about everything in between, and a makeshift 'paella' provides most of the protein required to live.
Abdullah, Fatna's second son and a couple of the local lads have fishing rods but their 'catch' is sporadic at best. The reality of their 'fishing' is an excuse for hanging around the beach and their main source of income is not the fruits of the sea. Nevertheless, fish is available and what finds its way to Benshasha is cheap.
Sardines are always available and a man with a cool-box on the back of his moped visits the village at least twice a week, when €1 will buy you 3 kgs, even on a bad day. I could quite happily live on sardines and we have them in any possible form from soused to grilled, to tagines.
As for meat - it does not feature high on the list of priorities, other than the religious or family high days and holidays. For the rest, it is the occasional local chicken - often added to the Friday couscous, or a lump of beef or mutton (depending on what was cheap and available on Sunday), that will be chucked as a lump into the tagine and pulled apart when the meal is eaten.
It should be perfectly possible to live in Benshasha and have a steady supply of fresh eggs. However, the concept of 'domestication' of animals, like 'growing things to eat' is non-existent. There are hundreds of chickens, people do keep chickens but they keep them without any organisation or finesse. The chickens just wander wherever they like and - being chickens - lay their eggs in the most inaccessible places possible, the favourite of which is underneath the barbary figs.
Thus for every ten eggs laid only about one gets 'harvested' and the remainder get eaten by the dogs and cats which abound; other than when a chicken goes broody and 'sits' - probably under the barbary figs - until such time as she emerges with a clutch of chicks, which are promptly eaten by the cats.
Nobody has the wit to make any form of a chicken run, nobody has the wit to feed the chickens on the household scraps and very few of the chickens last long enough to be eaten by their owners.
Of course, by far the most sensible animal to keep here, would be a pig. I did suggest this to Fatima but it was met with a rather more than normally virulent, Lah.
Cheap, fresh fruit is to be had when in season, but what is 'free' is very limited. About the only wild fruit are the barbary figs, the fruit of the large and lethally prickly cactus. These are available for most of the summer, and it was Tara's job both to collect them and, more important, to peel them. I had never eaten these figs before and it is a sad loss. They are (to my taste) one of the very best fruits of all. Whether there is a problem with keeping them, or whether it is just that they are so damnably awkward to handle at all I am not sure, but it is strange that I had never come across them prior to living in Benshasha.
There should be dates and figs, but about the only fig trees left standing are in people's gardens, and the few date palms left standing have been left unattended for so long that they produce nothing. There are a few other berries and fruits but nothing substantial.
Towards the end of July Belicose Bill's grapes become ripe and they are not exactly expensive so they give you something of a treat whenever someone has the odd dirham to spare. Watermelons are also plentiful, but not cheap (by Benshasha standards) in the summer. However, someone from Mohammediah sets up a stall, right outside the village, and this means that you can get what's left over at the end of the day at an affordable rate.
However, there is one thing in Benshasha that is really good, and that is the bread. Bread is made every day by just about every woman. Bread is eaten with every single meal and - with the incredibly sweet mint tea - is the most essential part of the Moroccan diet.
The bread-ovens are all outside and are all made of clay. They are all outside because, although they are 'owned' individually, they are also shared, and up to four women will use the same oven. Baking bread is yet another 'all-female' communal occupation, as is building the ovens, and there is more to it than that. Once the oven is hot, it will cook a lot more than one family's bread.
Most ovens are vaguely round, but there is no 'definitive' shape and there are one or two rectangular ones in the village, it entirely depends on which 'lady' built it and what she was feeling like that day. All are approximately the same size and all have a hole in the front, just big enough to get a 5 litre paint tin lid through, and a small hole in the top to let the smoke out.
When I first arrived, I had wondered why all the bread was round and all the same size. Simple, all the baking trays are 5 litre paint tin lids.
Early in the morning, the oven is packed full of kindling and wood and this is set alight. Once it is going, the hole at the front is loosely covered (with a 25 ltr paint tin lid) and left to burn itself out. This size of the oven is (I think) quite critical. Any bigger or smaller and you would have to stoke the fire. As it is, one filling does the trick.
When the fire has died down the bread is placed on top of the embers and the hole in the front is sealed with a paint tin and a piece of dampened material. The smoke-hole in the top is bunged up with a bit of damp rag, and the women all sit down on their haunches and discuss the rights and wrongs of the world while they wait for the bread to cook.
The bread is prepared on a large earthenware plate, a couple of feet in diameter. Like all cooking, this is done sitting cross-legged on the floor. Kneading dough in this position would totally cripple me so I have never even tried (although I have made bread). There is nothing unusual in any of this other than the fact that everything is 'done by eye' and thereby no two ladies' bread is exactly the same. In my ignorance, I thought that the difference between the bread was just this, but it also has something to do with which oven it is baked in. When, one day, Fatna baked her bread in Chaibiah's oven (hers having got washed away when it rained), it tasted totally different.
After you have been there but a short while, it is possible to tell exactly who made the bread, and you notice that some women's bread is considerably better than others.
Here, bread really is the staple food and I have never eaten so much in my life. In fact, on a rough calculation, I probably ate more bread in seven months than I had done in the previous 30 years. As the bread was, generally, excellent, I had no complaints, especially when it is still hot. Often fresh bread with a little butter or jam (NEVER both) was the main food for the day.
But - through eating so much bread - I was to discover something that I'd hitherto missed in life.
If you drink too much alcohol, there is a possibility that you will wake up in the morning feeling as though at some time during the night, something furry, sick and small had crawled into your mouth, used it as a latrine and then died . The inveterate drinker will tolerate this as a penance for drinking in the first place. I was thus somewhat irked to find that I was waking up in the mornings with my mouth feeling as though I'd spent the previous day blind drunk on the cheapest available plonk. I hadn't. I hadn't drunk any alcohol for months. In the end I realised that this happened only when we had nothing much other than bread and impossibly sweet tea for supper. It therefore must be something to do with the reaction of yeast in the bread and the sugar in the tea.
I didn't know that before; not that it would have made the slightest difference to my life if I had, but I got wry amusement from realising that Ibrahim-the-devout probably went to the mosque every morning with his stomach full of fermenting alcohol!
