Newsletter Marrakech August 2010
Posted by peta on Friday August 06, 2010 2:31 am
Salaam alikum. It was while I was sitting at the Café de la Poste in the Guéliz in Marrakech, sipping citron pressé and brooding on existential and personal terrors that I realized how meaningless and cruel life is. I spent a long time choosing a snack - practically memorized the menu, then ordered it, then was told the kitchen was closed. My epiglottis actually trembled. How can you tell me life is not cruel and meaningless?
Things improved when Le Tresor hotel in the medina, where I am usually lodged, was full for the first four days of my stay so I lived in the Italian designer owner's house - part of a palace, huge and very beautiful with ornate ceilings and white chandeliers everywhere. Ho hum. Beautiful hot weather, mint tea, big welcome from the staff at the hotel, slow roasted lamb shoulder with onion marmalade, prayers singing over the rooftops, perfect flat bread - so happy to be here with the warm, fun-loving Moroccans.
In Marrakech, when you dream of someone bringing you tea, someone actually does. In this case it is a beautiful boy called Adil. My business partner David and I are here to host our yearly culinary adventure. We arrive a week early, wander around meeting people, browbeating our professional contacts into obedience (you are quite likely to turn up to some fabulous site in the middle of nowhere with ten punters, only to find they thought it was the day before), buying tassels and pompoms (David designed aprons with a Fez hat on them so we had to busily hand sew tassels onto each hat!), murdering pigeons to make pastilla (pigeon pie), trying out different hammams (massage houses) in the interests of research and avoiding being decapitated by flying motor bikes in the medina.
We are eating beautiful food - lamb mechoui, tagines of veal with a weird shaped sort of courgette, tagines of lamb and cardoons, nutty tasty Moroccan potato salads, sushi (yes lots of sushi in Marrakech believe it or not), turkey brochettes with fried carrot and cinnamon salad, baby eggplant salad, bread cooked in a rammed earth oven fired by twigs, gallons of Berber whiskey (mint tea), gallons of rosé. Still waiting for the king to invite me over for lunch but he's playing hard to get.
There’s another kind of pastilla from the pigeon version and that’s the sweet one called Milk Pastilla. A little like the French mille-feuille, this flamboyant pastilla is designed to disintegrate when you plunge a fork into it, mess up your lipstick and decorate the table with dozens of shards of golden pastry. It is constructed of layers of deep-fried warka sheets in triangles with almond pastry cream tinted with orange blossom water and grilled chopped almonds. This is built up high, layer after layer, just like Moroccan life. I devised a manner of eating it perfectly - I lifted off a triangle of pastry covered in cream and nuts and ate it with my hands then moved on to the next layer.
As you know, a lot of Moroccan men are handsome so it's hard for a girl to keep her eye on the couscous, as it were. There is one guy who, every time I walk past him in the medina, says 'I will wait for you flower'. At first I ignored him then I started bursting into laughter. One day he didn't say it so I complained. I was giving you a break, he said, I'll start again tomorrow.
In forty-five minutes you can be in the dessert outside Marrakech. I spent the day there dressed in Marni, Robert Clergerie, Italian silk fan and fake Lanvin handbag to the confusion of the natives and camels. Ate beef tagine with pears and lucerne couscous (odd I know, but it was delicious). This was to recover from performing with Al-Andalusian musicians the night before. There’s something about a classical lute that just doesn’t go with a Piaf song. The May culinary adventure was wonderful and you can get a good look at what happens by reading my book ‘Culinary Adventures in Marrakech’ and by clicking on this link
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8A6J8h_IRk&feature=channel
The next culinary adventure is in May 2011 and is already booked out so I will probably do another one earlier in May Insh’allah.
