jerome waag, head chef chez panisse: eating the fès medina.
there’s nothing more exciting than discovering a city for the first time: rubbing against its walls, its people, losing your way, feeling it breathing around you, contracting, expanding. sensing its texture: smells that are thick, sounds close and far, murmurs, narrow pathways, dark then bright again. someone calls to you and the next thing you know you are deep in the medina - through a large, arched door you enter a walled city of dense, restless human commerce, pure un-edited street life.
along the way you start collecting colours, shapes, volumes, piles of vegetables, cascades of copper pots, stacks of thick fabrics, small shops crowded with shoes or sugar, pickles, spices and the silver shine of little fish preceded by the smell of slow decay; the sweetness of bread baked in a wood fire, a little further, the stench of leather slowly softening or the anxiety of a rooster tied to its fate. all this is within arm’s reach, crowding the narrow streets. you want to understand its intonations, its gestures, someone’s stride, somebody’s voice, the constant agitation, the back and forth. you want to become intimate with it, learn its language, the vernacular of such drama.
it makes you hungry. hungry for warm bread and the grilled meat whose smoke follows you around, for the fresh green mint; hungry for a taste of this place, the roughness of something you just bought on the street and that you hesitate to put in your mouth, fearing it might change you forever. its flavour intrigues you – a concentration of the hard labour of dried out fields, the high sun and all its olives trees, the tumult of youth, or the inertia of old stones?
you lose yourself in the crowd, buy a quail jumping in its cage, or little pickled plums sold randomly in plastic buckets, you fight the bees for their honey, stop someone pushing a cart full of beet leaves, smell the cinnamon, bury your lamb in the hot ashes of the hammam. in this place you will never fully understand, forever a visitor, what if what can’t be seen can be eaten and tasted? what if food was a secret language? one you can’t translate, but can understand because of its complete proximity, the very intimacy of what you are looking for.
discovering the rich food culture of fes starts in the markets, well stocked with an abundance of fruits and vegetables grown in the fertile valley surrounding the city. one can feel the intense weather and arid land in their deep flavours and certainly in the traditional ways of the medina where we can find beldi produce, fruits and herbs sold by small farmers but also spices, honey or goat cheese. nothing is pre-packed so it is important to learn to buy a live rooster or a squab, you have to look at it, feel its body and gauge its health. you have to learn that in the medina the relationship to food is much more visceral. you have to learn the territory, who sells what, what questions to ask, probe, discuss, argue. you have to get involved. these are the links to the flavours of an indigenous culture and it offers the possibility of getting a real sense of terroir, which for a cook is a dream.
for me, probably the most interesting aspect of all of this is to see the medina as a giant kitchen, to enter the complex web of relationships that create a dish. there are many wood burning ovens where you can bring your bread to be baked, but also to roast a chicken, cook a tart or anything else you might want to bake or roast. the ashes of the hammam can slow cook a tagine or tangia overnight. you can buy ouarka to make b’stilla, get meat or nuts ground in special stores. there are always new discoveries to be made in the way food is bought, prepared and cooked using all these communal resources, and therein is the magic of the medina.
