The Recipe as Colonial Archive: The Salads of Fes

This is the third in a series of posts about North Africa's first modern print cookbooks. See previous installments here and here. In my previous posts about Zette Guinaudeau's Fes vu par sa cuisine I've noted that her cookbook is working on two levels: on one hand, she's presenting directions for making Moroccan food that make sense in a modern kitchen (featuring standard ingredient measurements, direct instructions, etc). On the other, her text is a project of preservation, aiming to "rescue" a native cuisine and culture from foreign incursion. I suggest that we can read this combination as reflective of the associationist approach that the French colonial administrators of the protectorate pursued. Guinaudeau, as a pied noir living in Fes during the Protectorate, was not a government official. But she would have been steeped in the culture of colonial rule, which emerges through her cookbook.

View of Fes Medina

Gwendolyn Wright provides an excellent description of how these policies worked in urban space, and why they might have been so readily tangible to French civilians as well as Moroccans and colonial officials. She narrates the way that French administrators and urbanists in Morocco simultaneously promoted modern urbanism in constructing villes nouvelles as "laboratories of modernity" while embarking upon preservationist projects intended to maintain the "timeless character" of the local medinas. This approach to urban planning not only accentuates the nature of each style of architecture by way of contrast; it also implies a historical narrative, writ large on the cityscape, which is made to embody and imply a "before" and an "after" – arcing, of course, towards modernity. Borrowing from Bakhtin, Wright refers to this approach as heteroglossic.

I propose reading Guinaudeau's cookbook in the same way: as two modes of writing that emerge by way of two different voices that are distinct but interdependent. One strives to be objective and modern, the other is intimate and ethnographic. For the most part, the recipes are presented by the first "voice," and the vignettes that provide context as interludes between recipes are presented by the second. But there are exceptions that blur these boundaries and drive home how deeply variable and heteroglossic the text is while hinting at the instability of its categories. In rare cases, for example, recipes are presented without discrete lists of ingredients and instructions or indications as to how many people they'll serve or how long they take to prepare. Below, I present seven salads from a section of the cookbook that is written this way: they read almost like ethnographic field notes, much more akin to the aide-mémoire style recipes of a much older generation of cookbooks than the rest of the recipes in the volume. As always my own comments are in brackets. Seven Salads Recipes cited here are from the 1958 edition of Guinaudeau's book, published in Rabat by J.E. Laurent; translations are my own. Mme. Guinaudeau writes by way of introduction: "Served over the course of a meal, these refreshing salads, with their delightful colors and aromas, make you forget the heaviness of the preceding dishes and whet the appetite for the tajines that follow!"

Parsley Salad Very simply, in a bowl, mix a large bunch of chopped parsley, a fresh onion, finely minced, and the pulp of a large lemon cut into small pieces. Squeeze the juice of one lemon over this mixture, and add a pinch of salt. Radish Salad Grate some long radishes with very red skin after washing (but not peeling) them. Add plenty of sugar [I used honey instead]. Mix with an orange, peeled and cut into small pieces, the juice of one lemon, and don't forget a pinch of salt.

  Orange Salad Peel a few oranges and cut them into large pieces, trim them and remove the seeds. Add a few spoonfuls of orange blossoms [I'm not sure whether she means actual blossoms or orange blossom water here. Not having the former, I used the latter] then sprinkle lightly with powdered cinnamon. It is very soothing for the palate. Heart of Lettuce A well chopped heart of lettuce, a pinch of salt, plenty of pepper, oil, vinegar, and a pinch of cinnamon. Do not hesitate to sweeten generously, to taste. Carrots Cook, with a clove of garlic, a pound of large carrots, quartered lengthwise. Once cooked, cover in vinegar and salt, and flavor with hot pepper (soudania) and red pepper; perfume with cumin. Garnish with chopped parsley and coriander. It will keep for several days. [The trickiest part of this recipe, of course, is understanding what she means by "cook." I resorted to La Bonne Cuisine by Madame Saint-Ange, a 1927 French cookbook that would have been the Mrs. Beeton's or the Joy of Cooking for Guinaudeau's generation of French women. My assumption that Madame Guinaudeau might have had a copy of the book with her in Morocco is, of course, mere speculation. The book's simplest carrot recipe is glazed carrots. Carrots are placed in a saucepan and covered with water or bouillon and butter and gently cooked for no more than 20 minutes, during which time the pan is gently shaken once or twice but the carrots are never moved (they become quite delicate by the end). Once cooked, the carrots should be gently glazed with the reduction left in the saucepan. I more or less followed these instructions, but included the garlic that Madame Guinaudeau mentions, and of course the spices and parsley. But obviously I will need to do some fieldwork in Fes next year to ask how carrots are typically prepared for salads there. For the time being, these were quite pleasant, particularly once the spices had been added. My other observation is her use of parfumer with cumin. The word in French doesn't only refer to scent; it can mean season or flavor. But I find it interesting that she uses it in this section only referring to cumin, whereas with other spices or flavors she uses assaisonner or instructs readers to adjusting something to taste, goût. There is no way to know if this usage is based on how her Moroccan interlocutors described the role of cumin – and if it therefore refers to the important role of scent and perfuming to classical feasting traditions in the region – or if it's simply fanciful usage on the part of Guinaudeau. I've left it translated as "perfume" or "scent."]

Black Olives with Lemon Pit two handfuls of olives [handfuls! in other sections of the book Guinaudeau specifies grams and kilos]; chop two lemons. Season to taste with red pepper, both mild and strong, and hot pepper (soudania), and lightly scent with cumin. It is surprising. [This one is surprising. It's my favorite one of all of these recipes, and I must say the one that I'm definitely going to be adding to my own dinners this summer.] Cucumber Salad Grate the cucumbers. Season with vinegar, chopped thyme, caraway seeds, salt and sugar. If you don't like sugar use a little oil.

*****

As I noted, the black olive and lemon salad was far and away my favorite. The rest of them, unsurprisingly perhaps, required a bit of experimentation and finessing before they became something I would serve to guests with confidence. They are the kinds of recipes you would rather learn from a friend in the kitchen than a cookbook and they illustrate perfectly the importance of precise weights, measures, and instructions in the typical modern cookbook – which is by necessity an object separated entirely from its test kitchen and mass reproduced. But setting aside their shortcomings, what is to be gained from cooking through these recipes? Speculating, I'd suggest that they offer us a glimpse of a different culinary palate than what is now predominant in Moroccan cooking, and may even hint at a moment of transition or change. Consider the liberal use of sugar and vinegar in so many of these dishes: these are flavors you'd expect to find in a refined dish of medieval Arab cooking, but less so in contemporary cuisines anywhere in North Africa or the Levant. Nowadays blends of sweet and sour flavors are more likely to come from lemons, pomegranate molasses, or dried fruit than straightforward additions of sugar or vinegar. Guinaudeau even hints at the existence of some form of tension or shift when it comes to these tastes, noting at the end of the section that vinegar can be replaced by lemon juice in any of these salads, and specifying that sugar can be omitted from the cucumber recipe. If these shifts do offer clues into a historical transition in tastes and the ingredients used to produce them, then the next question of course is what was driving these changes. Did the shift in European cooking, starting in the early modern era, towards relegating sweetness to the end of a meal have any influence here? Does the answer lie in the political economies of lemons and vinegar, or the introduction of sweet tea to Moroccan society? Are there regional cuisines or versions of dishes wherein these older combinations – sugar in salads, vinegar instead of lemon – still persist? As usual, Guinaudeau's book produces few answers but a host of new and fascinating questions.

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.