The Food Maven Diary
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Italy, Spain, Paris, Morocco
I know it has been a long time since I last wrote. I have some really boring excuses that I won’t bother to explain. But I also have had some interesting
as well as frustrating situations that have kept me away from writing. To start from the end, working backwards, I am in Battipaglia right now, at Baronessa Cecilia’s house. With Bob Harned, I just returned today from
visiting Iris Carulli in Rome, then the week before that we were Spain, where we traveled by car to Toledo, Granada, Seville and Cordoba to see the
Muslim-Jewish-Catholic sights. 
You read that correctly. Before Queen Isabella – La Catolica, as the Italians and Spanish call her (yes, the same Isabella who financed Columbus) -- banished the Muslims and Jews, or burned them at the stake, among other atrocities, everyone lived happily together in Andalusia, southern Spain. (Interesting aside: We encountered two museums of “instruments of torture.”) On the road in Spain, it was difficult to write much, and, actually, my computer was dead for several days. Fortunately, it was only the battery.
The week before Spain, I was in Marrakech, visiting European friends who winter there. They live in the lap of luxury, but without the internet. They know nothing about computers. To give you a hint, one night, my friend Klaus (from Switzerland) couldn’t understand why I couldn’t get internet reception from his satellite TV.
You know, it was very nice to be totally out of communication with the world. My only English language resource was CNN International, on the aforementioned TV, which is truly a very poor excuse for a news station. For the three days in a row that I turned on CNN, they had the same features – repeats, repeats, repeats – old news.
To take you back to Christmas with excuses, I was in Paris from Dec. 22 to 26. The city of lights was dark. Friends told me how beautiful Paris is at Christmas, but there were hardly any decorations, hardly any lights. The “crèche” or nativity scene, as we would so prosaically call it, on Blvd. St. Germain was pitifully spare compared to the “presepi” of Naples and Salerno. And it rained every day in Paris. It was very cold, and it was empty. Parisians, sensibly, stay home for the holiday.
Of course, we had to eat in restaurants, which you wouldn’t think would be a hardship, but, even when it is not a holiday, French restaurants are very expensive for Americans. Our dollar is worth a third less than a euro. For Christmas, as in New York, the high prices are jacked up even higher. That means that the 43-euro filet that Bob Harned ate on Christmas Eve at the famous Deux Magots, which isn’t even a restaurant but a café (the only place we could get into) cost $65, with just a little mound of mashed potatoes. I had a small piece of venison for a mere 39 euro and the total bill for those two plates, one dessert, a dry and greasy (and tiny) example of boûche de Noel, a glass of Beaujolais and a small bottle of water, cost $160.
We had a very jolly Christmas Eve nevertheless. We were sitting between a young and delightful Korean-American couple and a family of three from San Marino, which is an independent republic within Italy (in Romagna, near Rimini). The beautiful and chic mother of this family was actually a New Yorker, from the Upper West Side. Her teenage daughter was interested in New York. Her husband, the San Marino native, was so charming it was easy to understand why she abandoned The Big Apple for his tiny country.
Then, between Christmas, and including New Year, Bob, Cecilia and I hosted our first winter session of Cook at Seliano. That keeps me busy from 8 o’clock breakfast until buona notte at 11-ish. There’s absolutely no time to write when I am with my groups.
So are we a little caught-up?
SOME OF WHAT I ATE IN MOROCCO AND SPAIN
My visit to Marrakech was fascinating, but I didn’t get to eat much Moroccan food. My European friends, who I have to say are very rich, don’t eat much Moroccan food. They say it is too heavy, which is a joke. The French boudin noir (blood sausage) and foie gras that they serve are not what anyone would call light. One of my hosts did, however, have a couscous luncheon, which he likes to do on Fridays. I didn’t get to the bottom of this, but several people said they eat Moroccan food only on Fridays. After Champagne being poured like water, tastes of some French tidbits, we gathered at a round table – we were 10 – and a huge ceramic serving platter was placed in the middle. On top of the fluffy yellow couscous were beautifully arranged pale green zucchini and deep orange pumpkin, chickpeas, and both meat and chicken. Bowls of the broth in which everything was cooked, and on top of which the couscous was steamed, were available to douse the couscous. Instead of harissa, the hot pepper paste, some of the broth was cooked with whole hot peppers, which were still floating in it. Pretty! A relish or condiment of deeply caramelized onions with raisins was also passed around. For dessert we had a lemon meringue tart (French not Moroccan), an apple tart (ditto), and what the French call fondant, a rich chocolate cake.
Our other Moroccan meal in an elegant home was luncheon of beet salad, tomato and avocado salad, and briwat (my spelling is likely not correct), small phyllo-like pastries, the triangular ones filled with cheese or meat, the cylindrical ones filled with minced vegetables. For dessert at the table, we had lemon meringue tart again, but back in the living room, with tea or coffee, we were, to my delight, served one of the zillion Moroccan crescent pastries filled with ground almonds.
Can you believe we were even served Swiss fondue while in Marrakech? It was at the impressive home of a Swiss pearl dealer. Unlike writing about food, or teaching cooking, selling pearls is apparently a very, very lucrative business.
I so much wanted to eat in the main square of Marrakech, which has been paved since the last time I was here 30 years ago, but it is just as fabulously chaotic and colorful. There are old story tellers entrancing circles of young men, musicians, monkeys doing tricks, and a large area devoted to food vendors with beautifully arranged vegetables for salads, simmering tagines, and cauldrons of soup, all with benches and tables to enjoy them. There are dried fruit stands and nut stands, and candy sellers, too. But Cecilia and I were only able to have a taste of one tagine on one night. Our European friends thought we were crazy for even wanting to do that, and we had no opportunity to go back on our own.
Then, one day we went to a weekly market in a small town in the Atlas mountains, Asni. There were literal hole-in-the-wall restaurants where skewers of lamb, chicken and livers were grilled over charcoal, tagines simmering on charcoal-fueled brassieres, fish frying, and soups being ladled out of huge pots. All the cooking at these places is done at a window open to the mud street, a little muddier than usual because it had been raining for days, and you had to go down a few steps to find the long wooden tables on mud floors behind the cooking station. No one, not even Cecilia, who is very adventurous, was willing to sit and eat at any of these places, but I certainly would have if I could have. Fortunately, we had with us the young, English-speaking brother of our friends’ Moroccan house man. He managed to steal for me tastes of this and that, and we bought some bread right out of the oven, which was truly divine.
To show you what I was up against, I ate that bread for breakfast the next morning, which my Swiss host couldn’t understand because his freezer was filled with wonderful French baguettes. There are so many French people living in Marrakech that you can easily buy perfect croissants, French bread – you name it, even the aforementioned boudin noir, blood sausage.
While traveling in Spain, I kept reminding myself of what my friend Michelle Scicolone says. She writes about Italian food, too, so she loves to go to France “so I don’t have to take notes.” I decided that I was not going to be searching for restaurants and doing gastronomic explorations in Spain. We had a cultural agenda and I just ate what we found, which wasn’t always good. For one thing, when you want to stay in the touristic center of a place, any place, so you can easily see the things you want to see, all you can find to eat is tourist crap, either the iconic dishes prepared poorly and costing too much, or international type stuff. For instance, in Spain I saw that many restaurants serve spaghetti Bolognese. At some of the tapas bars, a good percentage of the offerings are potatoes cooked in many ways. I grew to love the fried potatoes topped with white garlic sauce, and more than once we had very good fried potatoes with chunks of ham-topped fried eggs.
This is not to say that I didn’t find some wonderful food in Spain, but I have written enough for now, meaning this is getting long. I promise to continue in a day or two. Now that I am “home” in Battipaglia, I will have a little more time.
P.S. – To hear me tell a bit about my travels, go to www.robinhoodradio.com – Robin Hood Radio, the NPR affiliate in Sharon, Connecticut. You can click through to the archive of podcasts from my website. You can listen live on Monday mornings at 7:30. That segment is then podcast from about 11 a.m. on Monday. Last week, I recounted some of this, and today there will be more. And, as I said, it is all archived.
