Nafekh: an earthenware brazier.
Qa tagine: the deep copper dish in which the tagine slaoui is inserted and which serves to protect the table.
Qettara: an alembic used for distilling roses and orange-blossom.
Siniya: a tray made of embossed or plain copper, brass or silver plate. Those on which the utensils for making tea are placed have legs a few inches high.
Tagine slaoui: a round dish of glazed earthenware covered with a pointed lid which fits the dish exactly and can be used for cooking, keeping the dish hot or serving the tagine. Slaoui is used as a diminutive.
Tanjir: a large cooking pot.
Taoua: a basin designed to receive dirty water. These are made of copper or embossed silver plate and covered with a slab of the same metal in the middle of which the ewer is placed. It is over this basin that hands are washed before and after meals.
Tbiqa: a stiff round basket with a pointed lid made of esparto grass or doum decorated with coloured leather. Manufactured in or round about Marrakesh. Bread is placed in the tbiqa to protect it from the dust.
Tbla or mida: a round cedarwood dining-table, just over a foot high; the diameter varies according to the number of guests. Those made in Fez are plain or painted; those from Mogador are of inlaid woods encrusted with mother-of-pearl and much sought after.
Tboq: a sort of midouna made of finer basket-work.
Tila: a sieve made of rush or wire used for separating the bran from the crushed corn.
Tobsil dettiab: a large copper-plated tray with a small straight edge, used for glazing the bistilla.
Tobsil dial Iouarqa: a tray of the same sort, but it is the outside, which is copper-plated, on which sheets of pastry for bistilla are cooked.
With these utensils washing up is quickly done; the guests gone, the serving women will wash the earthenware dishes in the small pond in the middle of the patio, rubbing them with fine sand brought by some poor woman in a sack on her back from the local quarries and sold at the door for a few pence.
It is polishing them with that same sand, a lemon and a half-ripe tomato that will make the copper and brass in the kitchen glow with such power and brilliance.
POTTERY
From the hill of Dar-Mahres to the south of Fez comes the clay which makes the potters’ fortune.
Near Sidi-Frej, the city’s old lunatic asylum, there used to be a little place of which nothing now remains. Smelling of bitumen, it was filled with small shops, all displaying their stocks of unglazed pottery. Disdainful of the tourists’ curiosity, the mallem or craftsman decorated the pottery with tar with the tip of his agile forefinger. For a few francs one could carry away bowls, jars, water-pots and large deep dishes. You can find these shops again today, scattered through the town. The potters are survivors of that corner of Fez which no longer exists.
Between Attarine, Fez’s spice market, and the Moulay Idriss sanctuary there is an entire street, long and narrow, on each side of which the shops display Fez pottery from floor to ceiling: bowls, vases, water-pots, dishes hung on string. Facing us, deep round dishes, deep conical-shaped dishes for couscous, soup tureens with high lids, decorated with geometric or floral designs both naïve and skillful, plain, coloured or with polychrome designs with blue the dominating colour. That blue of Fez, sometimes a deep sea blue, sometimes shining and light, and the plain deep green of the bottles of oil: colours obtained from minerals found around Fez.
Unevenly glazed, but producing designs full of charm … flaws you certainly find in this pottery, but sometimes too the joyous discovery of a rare piece where the spontaneity of design is allied to a fine finish.
The street is still there, the merchants sitting in their shops. One or two remain faithful to the supply of goods from the potters, the others, with an eye to the main chance, have abandoned this primitive ware for more practical European ironmongery.
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Pottery from Kelaa des Sless, buttress of the Rif, is decorated with yellow ochre and brown geometric designs. Shapes of great purity. Etruscan, African or Latin American art? Material hardened and oiled so it looks like polished wood.
Water-pots, jars, pots hanging from a cord, used by the fellah for the melted butter which he will sell in the town. Rancid odours? Yes, but also beauty of form and material, polished, hard and shining.
SPICES
Eyes filled with the harmonious green of the Chrabline minaret, we enter the bustling atmosphere of the Attarine souk.
Berbers smelling of mutton and cloves gaze with envy at the glittering beads, the bright materials, the motley trimmings. I stop there, drunk with the scent, colour and noise, and lean against the narrow edge of a shop between a sack of scarlet pimentos and a basket of rosebuds.
It is here that I have gathered the spices that you will use in the dishes which follow. I will give you, briefly, the names in English and Arabic and what I know of the origin of each. Doubtless there are errors in this work – to give you absolutely accurate information one would have to be both a botanist and an etymologist but I am only … a cook.
Insects, leaves, flowers, petals, seeds, roots and galls. China, India, Java, Egypt, black Africa, the gardens and valleys of Morocco, blending perfumes foreign to our European senses. Spices violent with all the wildness of the countries where they have ripened, sweet from the loving culture of the gardens where they have flowered, here is all the fascination of your dark kitchens, the odour of your streets. Spices are the soul of Fez.
Spices and aromatic plants used in cooking which do not go to make up ras el hanout:
Absinthe: chiba, the cultivated sort can replace mint in tea.
Ambrosia: mkhinza.
Aniseed: nafaa, this can be wild or cultivated in the Tafilalet.
Basil: hbeq zhiri.
Caraway seed: karoniya, found in the region of Meknès.
Citron: laranj, the juice is used to acidify olives.
Cloves: qronfel.
Coriander: qosbour, both the leaves and seeds are used for seasoning.
Cumin: kamoun, cultivated in the region of Marrakesh.
Fennel: bsbas, the wild variety.
Green Spanish aniseed: habbt hlawa, found in the region of Meknès.
Gum mastic: mksa.
Hemp: kif or hashish is used to make majoun.
Hot red pepper: felfla soudania, found in North Africa and Senegal.
Liquorice: arqsous, this is sucked by children and also used in cooking snails.
Mint: nana or iqama, the mentha viridis used in tea, the best is grown around Zerhoun, Sefrou and Meknès.
Parsley: madnousse.
Saffron: