The Recipe as Colonial Archive: Moroccan Qamama Chicken from a Frenchwoman in Fes

by Anny Gaul

This is the first in a series of posts recreating recipes from North Africa's first modern cookbooks.

"The time has come to fix the tradition of cooking in Fez before it becomes too Europeanised," begins Zette Guinaudeau's classic book Fes Vu Par Sa Cuisine. Her paean to the cuisine of Fes was published in 1958 following decades of research that she conducted, she tells us, "by smell, by touch, and by taste, during more than twenty years among both the rich and the poor families of Fez."* There is so much to say about this book–or rather, the book itself poses so many questions to the would-be food scholar (although they may not seem so foreign to the historian of colonial North Africa). What does it mean to "fix a tradition" and why, in the case of Fassi cuisine, should this task fall to a Frenchwoman? Why is a Moroccan cuisine canonized in French? Who is the book's intended audience? As they were transposed into French, what other translations were these recipes undergoing?

There is no form of close reading quite like cooking your way through a recipe. Below is a record of an initial attempt to understand how these recipes were constructed and the gaps they contain. I present the original recipe with extensive editorializing from the viewpoint of my own kitchen. Aside from the dish itself, which was as fragrant and savory as it was promised to be, the process generated far more questions than answers.

Qamama Tagine with Lemon
Madame Guinaudeau writes: "these tagines made with onions are among the best...You will be praised by all when you put this dish on the table, crisp and golden [and] pungent with lemon." They can be prepared with either chicken or mutton; I opted for chicken. As her original is enough to feed ten people, I also cut the entire recipe in half. I've included the original ingredient list and directions in bold, followed by my own modified list and directions in brackets. The first matter to address, however, is that of cooking implements. Madame Guinaudeau recommends using a taoua and a tagine slaoui (a metal basin and a round glazed pottery dish with a pointed top, respectively, both typical Moroccan culinary items). This recipe also requires an oven, however, an appliance conspicuously absent from her ethnographic-style descriptions of the austere, dark, exotic, authentic Fassi kitchen. This is food for thought. But for the food at hand, a large stock pot and a cast-iron pan work very nicely. Ingredients:
4 1/2 lbs mutton cut into pieces, or 2 chickens, cut into pieces [1 chicken, to halve the recipe]
2 lb 4 oz onions [4 onions, chopped]
1/4 teaspoon powdered red pepper [As pictured, I used dried red pepper flakes instead, and about 4x as much as the recipe recommends]
1/2 teaspoon cumin [Quadrupled that too]
1/4 teaspoon ginger [Quadrupled, again]
A pinch of powdered saffron [A pinch of saffron will always do]
2 chopped cloves of garlic [1 clove of garlic, chopped finely]
A bunch of coriander [I did use an entire bunch, but chopped it finely and reserved half for garnish at the end]
3 lemons [juiced]

Astute readers will notice that while halving the recipe I have blatantly disregarded the book's recommendations regarding spices. This is partly due to personal habit and partly due to what I have witnessed in my own quasi ethnographic forays into "Authentic Moroccan Kitchens." But even if you are more conservative than I with spice, it does seem that a quarter teaspoon of ginger is tragically scant for nearly five pounds of meat and ten people. One explanation may lie in the trend (or series of trends) in French cuisine, starting as early as the seventeenth century, against the heavily spiced, sweet-savory stews of medieval European dishes (which owed much to, and shared much with, Arab cookery) and towards a culinary philosophy more focused on simplicity: selective seasonings and seasonal ingredients. My friend Kate tells me that her mother has always recommended adding extra spice and seasoning to any mid-century recipe, however, no matter its provenance. So perhaps we should just chalk it up to the way recipes were written in the West at the time. Instructions: Cook the meat, half-covered with water in the taoua with the red pepper, cumin, ginger, saffron, garlic, one chopped onion, the bunch of coriander, and the juice of one lemon. [I did this using a stockpot, though I only used half the coriander at this stage. I brought the pot to a boil and then turned it down to a simmer, and to ensure the meat cooked evenly, I turned all the pieces over every 20 minutes and replenished the water as necessary for a total of four times, so that my final cooking time was about an hour and a half.] When the meat is cooked take it out of the taoua and put in the rest of the chopped onion; cover until it is completely cooked. [I made sure to check that the chicken was cooked through before removing it, and kept it covered while the onions stewed. I also, as you may have guessed, added a generous dose of spices to the onions as they simmered. I cooked the onions partially covered for 25 minutes, so the liquid would reduce a bit, and then fully covered for 25 minutes.] Arrange the pieces of meat in the tagine slaoui, add the onions reduced to a puree and pour over the juice of two lemons. Put to brown in a hot oven. [I arranged everything in cast iron. I broiled them on high for 10 minutes, turned the oven off, and let the dish sit in the still-warm oven for an additional 20 minutes.]

 

You can see that even with the detail and instruction provided by Madame Guinaudeau's (a far cry from the aide-mémoire style recipes of medieval Arab cookery books) the cook must supply some measure of judgement and improvisation: how long does it take for chopped onion to become "completely cooked," for example? How would a Fassi woman with no broiler, or a Frenchwoman with no taoua, cook this recipe? The bottom line is perhaps captured in Madame Guinaudeau's own observation: "Happy the town where women still have the time and taste to cook well." Happiness, time, taste, and good cooking: pillars of a virtuous city indeed.

Anny Gaul is a PhD student in Arabic and Islamic Studies at Georgetown University, where she studies gender, the body, and food culture. She has lived in Morocco, Jordan, and Egypt, and blogs at http://imiksimik.wordpress.com.