Red Bean Paste Fishies
[A photograph, and nothing more, for silent contemplation.]
The Cattle are Lowing
July 4, 2009
Photo credit: Neil Smith
Well, the cattle are lowing.**
I am just about moved to my temporary abode, 13 acres on a farm that’s clearly been sold off in pieces. A herd of about 25 Black Angus station themselves on a knoll outside my bedroom window. Wonder if the lowing will keep me awake? And three guinea hens stopped me in my little red car today — I couldn’t tell what they were from a distance, but I knew as I approach them that, unlike vultures, they wouldn’t suddenly flap their wings and take off, miffed. When I slammed on the brakes, they looked up at me, as if to say,”What’s the hurry?”
Looking forward to the really rural life, even if it’s only for 10 months.
**For the next few weeks, I am going to be on a “working vacation,” so my posts will be somewhat more abbreviated. I will still provide you with something substantial to chew on, though!
The Nose Knows
July 4, 2009
Jonathan I. Bloch and Skull (Photo credit: Eric Zamora)
It’s a long, old story. To be somewhat exact, 54-million years old.
To make it short, the nose knows.
And the nose led to the brain that could, well, create music and design spaceships to the moon and cook food à la Ferran Adrià i Acosta (molecular gastronomy):**
“You can think of it as a cousin of the main line lineage that would have given rise ultimately to us.” ~~~ Jonathan I. Bloch
Virtual endocast of Ignacius graybullianus (Paromomyidae, Primates) and brain evolution in early primates, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (June 22, 2009)
Mary T. Silcoxa,1, Claire K. Dalmynb and Jonathan I. Blochc
Abstract
Extant primates are distinctive among mammals in having relatively large brains. As stem primates, Paleogene plesiadapiforms provide direct information relevant to the earliest stages in the evolution of this characteristic. Here we describe a virtual endocast reconstructed from ultra high resolution X-ray computed tomography data for the paromomyid plesiadapiform Ignacius graybullianus (USNM 421608) from the early Eocene of Wyoming. This represents the most complete endocast known for a stem primate, allowing for an unprecedented study of both size and fine details of anatomy. Relative to fossil and extant euprimates, I. graybullianus had large olfactory lobes, but less caudal development of the cerebrum and a poorly demarcated temporal lobe, suggesting more emphasis on olfaction and a less well-developed visual system. Although its brain was small compared to those of extant primates, the encephalization quotient of I. graybullianus is higher than that calculated for Paleocene Plesiadapis cookei and overlaps the lower portion of the range documented for fossil euprimates. Comparison to the basal gliroid Rhombomylus suggests that early primates exhibited some expansion of the cerebrum compared to their ancestors. The relatively small brain size of I. graybullianus, an arboreal frugivore, implies that neither arboreality nor frugivory was primarily responsible for the expanded brains of modern primates. However, the contrasts in features related to the visual system between I. graybullianus and fossil and extant euprimates suggest that improvements to these portions of the brain contributed to increases in brain size within Euprimates.
Now that takes care of the serious part of the day.
For fun, go to Jamie Schler’s delightful blog, Life’s a Feast: Confessions of a Gourmande, and enjoy her unique take on food, memories, 1950s U.S. history, and cooking (with great pictures, too).
aDepartment of Anthropology, University of Winnipeg, 515 Portage Avenue, Winnipeg, MB R3B 2E9, Canada;
bDepartment of Social Anthropology, York University, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto ON, M3J 1P3, Canada;
cFlorida Museum of Natural History, University of Florida, P. O. Box 117800, Gainesville, FL 32611
**For the next few weeks, I am going to be on a “working vacation,” so my posts will be somewhat more abbreviated. I will still provide you with something substantial to chew on, though!
In Morocco, Bread is Life
July 3, 2009
Communal Bread Oven, Fes (Photo credit: C. Bertelsen)
When the only bread you eat comes pre-sliced out of a plastic bag, it’s almost impossible to understand that “staff of life” saying so commonly applied to bread.
George Orwell’s story of feeding bread to a hungry Moroccan worker pointed out the near reverence for bread in much of the world.
And, in Morocco, bread indeed is the “staff of life.” Moroccan bread exemplifies the reason for the saying, as I learned, writing the following in a letter to the folks back home:
It is considered sinful to throw away bread. I had read that often an old man would go from affluent house to affluent house, asking for any old stale bits of bread that the household was unable or unwilling to eat that day. This bread was distributed or at least sold at very low prices to the poor who could not afford to buy their bread fresh. I actually saw this in Fes (Fez), in the form of a large flat, slightly shallow basket brimming with odds and ends of bread, being wheeled along in a wheelbarrow by an old man who stopped from doorway to doorway.
For those who did not grow their own grain, or did not have family members living in the bled (countryside) growing wheat, the old grain market in Rabat provided all the grain and other dried food necessary. Of my first visit to this market on the banks of the Bou Regreg river, I said in another letter:
The pink walls of the Grain Market hide more than huge mountains of wheat kernels; it also is an excellent place to buy lentils, chickpeas, white beans, broad beans (both whole and split), split peas, cornmeal, pasta, semolina, couscous, short-grain rice for risottos, and broken rice (sift the rice before cooking to get rid of the weevils).
I bought 20 kilos of wheat, which we picked over sitting there in the market with three Berber ladies, the tattoos on their chins and on their foreheads signifying any number of things. It took an hour and a half. After that we went to the souk (open-air market) and bought a large blue plastic tub to wash the grain in when we got back home. Once the grain appeared clean, we spent three days drying it in the sun on the cement floor of the walled-in courtyard. And then we returned to the Grain Market, where the Berber ladies greeted us like friends and ground the grain into flour for us. The flour makes the nicest-tasting bread, even if it is soft wheat and not the hard wheat we prefer for bread.
Bread is both the plate and the fork in the countryside, where communal eating takes place from a heaped platter of wheat couscous and whatever stew the cook makes on any particular day.
Without wheat, and bread, it’s hard to imagine Moroccan cuisine. The Romans, traces of whom can still be seen in Volubilis near Meknes, encouraged the production of wheat. And that’s another story altogether.
**For the next few weeks, I am going to be on a “working vacation,” so my posts will be somewhat more abbreviated. I will still provide you with something substantial to chew on, though!
© 2009 C. Bertelsen
In Morocco — George Orwell, Bread, and Stirrings of Post-Colonialism
July 2, 2009
George Orwell spent the winter of 1938-1939 in Morocco, for reasons of poor health. Author of stinging commentaries on colonial imperialism [Full-text: Burmese Days (1934) and “Shooting an Elephant” (1936)], as well as 1984, Animal Farm, and Down and Out in Paris and London, Orwell turned his blazing pen on French Morocco that winter. The following short passage comes from his essay, “Marrakech.” (Please remember that Orwell is writing a blistering indictment of colonialism, in spite of the way the paragraph reads below. I can’t encourage you enough to go to the link provided and read the whole piece.)**
When you walk through a town like this [Marrakech] — two hundred thousand inhabitants, of whom at least twenty thousand own literally nothing except the rags they stand up in — when you see how the people live, and still more how easily they die, it is always difficult to believe that you are walking among human beings. All colonial empires are in reality founded upon that fact. The people have brown faces — besides, there are so many of them! Are they really the same flesh as yourself? Do they even have names? Or are they merely a kind of undifferentiated brown stuff, about as individual as bees or coral insects? They rise out of the earth, they sweat and starve for a few years, and then they sink back into the nameless mounds of the graveyard and nobody notices that they are gone.
And even the graves themselves soon fade back into the soil.
Sometimes, out for a walk, as you break your way through the prickly pear, you notice that it is rather bumpy underfoot, and only a certain regularity in the bumps tells you that you are walking over skeletons.
I was feeding one of the gazelles in the public gardens.
Gazelles are almost the only animals that look good to eat when they are still alive, in fact, one can hardly look at their hindquarters without thinking of mint sauce. The gazelle I was feeding seemed to know that this thought was in my mind, for though it took the piece of bread I was holding out it obviously did not like me. It nibbled rapidly at the bread, then lowered its head and tried to butt me, then took another nibble and then butted again. Probably its idea was that if it could drive me away the bread would somehow remain hanging in mid-air.
An Arab navvy working on the path nearby lowered his heavy hoe and sidled towards us. He looked from the gazelle to the bread and from the bread to the gazelle, with a sort of quiet amazement, as though he had never seen anything quite like this before. Finally he said shyly in French:
“I could eat some of that bread.”
I tore off a piece and he stowed it gratefully in some secret place under his rags. This man is an employee of the Municipality.
The Otherization of colonized people made colonialism possible, yes indeed. Yes.
And now? Post-colonial studies (or theory) attempt to deconstruct all the nuances and facets of colonialism. One now-classic (and controversial) interpretation of colonialism comes in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988). As for the food question … good question.
Pre-Colonial Morocco, 1911
**For the next few weeks, I am going to be on a “working vacation,” so my posts will be somewhat more abbreviated. I will still provide you with something substantial to chew on, though!
© 2009 C. Bertelsen
In Morocco, Travelers’ Tales
July 1, 2009
Photo: Todd Hall
In the following passage, from R. B. Cunninghame Graham’s Mogreb-El-Aska (1898), Cunninghame Graham describes (in somewhat superior tones!) the spirit of communal eating in Morocco of the times (late nineteenth century):**
Swani and Mohammed-el-Hosein were radiant, more especially because the Kaid had sent a sheep, which they had already slain and given to a ” master ” (maalem) to roast en barbecue. Although I personally was disappointed that we had not been able either to get an answer from the Kaid as to our return, still less to get permission to go on, yet I was glad to have seen him, placed as I was, and wondered if an English Duke in the Georgian times would have treated an Arab wandering in England, and giving out he was an English clergyman, as well as the wild, semi-independent Berber Sheikh treated the wandering Englishman who assumed to pass, not merely as a clergyman, but as a saint.
Four men appeared bearing the sheep on a huge wooden dish, smoking and peppered so as to start us sneezing; and when the Maalem had torn it into convenient portions with his hands, we all fell to, Lutaif and I with an appetite that civilisation gives for such a meal; the rest like wolves, or men remembering the Hispano-Moorish proverb to the effect that meat and appetite go not always together, though both are sent by God.
Cunninghame Graham is talking about a form of méchoui (from the Arabic, meaning roasted on a fire, though some people called oven-roasted lamb by the same word).
**For the next few weeks, I am going to be on a “working vacation,” so my posts will be somewhat more abbreviated. I will still provide you with something substantial to chew on, though!
© 2009 C. Bertelsen
In Morocco, It’s a Sheep’s Life
June 30, 2009
Even without Islam, Moroccan culture would revere sheep — like the American buffalo, their flesh and their wool provide sustenance and shelter for people. And sheep come into their own around the feast day of Aïd el-Kebir, held seventy days after the end of Ramadan, which — in 2009 — falls on November 27.**
Travelers to Morocco, or to anywhere for that matter, perceive a certain reality based on their cultural underpinnings.
In what we now identify as colonial-toned language, Edith Wharton told the story in her book, In Morocco, of how she and General Lyautey’s wife attended the ceremony of the sacrifice of the sheep:
A sense of the impending solemnity ran through the crowd. The mysterious rumour which is the Voice of the Bazaar rose abut like the wind in a palm-oasis; the Black Guard fired a salute from an adjoining hillock; the clouds of red dust flung up by wheeling horsemen thickened and then parted, and a white-robed rider sprang out from the tent of the Sacrifice with something red and dripping across his saddle-bow, and galloped away to Rabat through the shouting. A little shiver ran over the group of Occidental spectators, who knew that the dripping red thing was a sheep with its throat so skillfully slit that, if the omen were favorable, it would live on through the long race to Rabat and gasp out its agonized life on the tiles of the Mosque.
Since not everyone raises sheep for Aïd el-Kebir, on the day before the feast, the scramble is on to find sheep or to transport previously chosen sheep home from the market or farm. Because the sheep must be obviously alive (the original concept of sacrifice demands that state of being), buyers devise any number of ingenious ways to get the sheep where they need to be for the feast.
Of my first brush with Aïd el-Kebir and the matter of transporting live sheep, I observed:
People were out in great numbers, due in part to the marvelous cool morning and because Aïd el-Kebir took place the next day, one of the biggest festivals of the Muslim year, the day commemorating Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son Issac in order to please God. Every family, regardless of their financial constraints, strives to procure a sheep for the sacrifice (and for the feasting following the sacrifice!). An obligation for all believers, the sacrifice of a sheep places an undue burden on the poor most of the time, unless they can join with family or friends. We saw sheep all over, carried home to be someone’s dinner via every mode of transportation possible. In a country where a private car is beyond most people’s means, conveying a live sheep home demanded a great deal of inventiveness: slung around one’s shoulder’s like a fur stole, pushed in a small flat cart (with or without sides, the sheep tied down), thrown over a donkey and tied to the donkey’s back, tethered on a rope and running pell-mell through a crowd with the purchaser’s feet flying in a vain attempt to halt the fleeing animal, numerous sheep strapped to the roof of a bus and roasting prematurely in the merciless North African sun, wheel-barrowed through the Fes medina with their hind legs serving as the handles of the “wheelbarrow” and held by the purchaser, carted in car trunks with the trunk door propped open just enough to refresh the sheep but at the same time preventing its escape, tied to iron rods on the sides of large camions or trucks, strung over the back “seat” (or front) of a moped, and probably many other ways in places that a foreigner never sees.
**For the next few weeks, I am going to be on a “working vacation,” so my posts will be somewhat more abbreviated. I will still provide you with something substantial to chew on, though!
© 2009 C. Bertelsen
In Timeless Morocco
June 29, 2009
In 1917, American novelist Edith Wharton spent the month of September in Morocco. She wrote of her experiences in In Morocco (Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1920), taking an apologist point of view for General Pierre Lyautey, the French governor of the day.
Of Fes (Fez), she wrote:
There it lies, outspread in golden light, roofs, terraces, and towers sliding over the plain’s edge in a rush dammed here and there by barriers of cypress and ilex. … Fez is, in fact, the oldest city in Morocco without a Phoenician or Roman past, and has preserved more traces than any other of its architectural flowering-time; yet it would be truer to say of it, as of all Moroccan cities, that it has no age, since its seemingly immutable shape is for ever crumbling and being renewed on the old lines.
Unfortunately, she mentioned virtually nothing about the food. And her comments reflected thickly the colonial attitude of the times.
During a two-year period at the end of the last century, over 70 years after Wharton left Morocco, I too experienced the Maghreb, and the length and breadth of a country greatly changed in many ways from the one that she observed.
And yet, tradition still permeated very day life in a way unfamiliar to those of us whose idea of tradition tends to be limited to Thanksgiving and Christmas. Wharton remarked on the hovering of traditions, too.
Permission pending
Of the first of my nine visits to Fes (Fez) the labyrinthine, a sense of the medieval not far from hand, or at least in my mind, everything being so new, I wrote:
You have to remember that we were rushing along through these narrow streets, propelled at times beyond our control by the crowds. Any observations made meant, of course, that other observations were not made because so many things competed for notice. Once, a startling sight caught my attention. Dozens of sheep heads lined up on counter in the food market. And the first thought that popped into my mind when I saw these heads? Heads in an Aztec market described by Spanish chronicler Bernal Díaz del Castillo, one of conquistador Hernán Cortes’s soldiers. Moroccans considered boiled sheep heads a great delicacy and one of the duties of the young boys after Aïd el-Kebir is to take the sacrificed sheep’s head and singe the wool off, this being done usually in the street, in certain special slaughter areas of the city. There the streets run with sheeps’ blood and these blackened sheep heads appear. After cooks boil the heads, the eyes are considered a special delicacy. As with mechoui (a fire-roasted lamb), Moroccans coat the meat off the boiled skulls with a ground cumin and salt mixture before eating. … But what is being seen, in the streets here, is only the superficial part. The only thing the foreigner, the stranger, sees is the outline of the picture. The coloring in, with the clarity that comes from that, takes much time.
Yes, I recoiled, “Mary Had a Little Lamb” playing through my head.
Oh, the rose-colored or, in some cases bile-tinged, glasses we wear when we gaze at the unknown … Later, I saw something similar — roasted and blackened sheep heads — in a tapas bar in Spain and thought little of it.
**For the next few weeks, I am going to be on a “working vacation,” so my posts will be somewhat more abbreviated. I will still provide you with something substantial to chew on, though!
© 2009 C. Bertelsen
Idylls of Cuisine #19
June 28, 2009
Photo credit: Robyn Jay
[A photograph, and nothing more, for silent contemplation.]
Old News: Le Ricette per Cucina Raccolte dal Principe Don Paolo Borghese
June 27, 2009
Le Ricette per Cucina Raccolte dal Principe Don Paolo Borghese (Recipes from the Collection of Prince Don Paolo Borghese), a new cookbook published by the Ferragamo family of Italian shoe fame, sounds scrumptious. The eighteenth-century recipes come from family archives.
According to the Vogue UK Website, the book will be available worldwide in September 2009 for £30.
