Going with the Grain: A Wandering Bread Lover Takes a Bite out of Life

Book by Seligson Susan

The Bread Mystery: Fés, Morocco

Bread is the main thing to understand: the staple of speculation, the food for all theories about what happens next.

-- Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety

In the name of Allah give me bread.

-- Fesi street beggar

My husband and I spent Christmas 1997 in Morocco. I'd been pestering Howie for years about escaping for the holidays to an Islamic country, somewhere we could get through the thick of the season without ever hearing dogs bark "Jingle Bells" or the words "great gift idea." As our base we chose the northern imperial city of Fés. We'd visited this chaotic, ancient metropolis the year before. Both of us were smitten and sad to leave it so soon. Also, I had some unfinished business there. I longed to solve the bread mystery.

A person doesn't blithely stroll into the ninth-century medina of Fés. Stepping through the gates of the old city, Fés-el-Bali, is more like being pulled into a raging river; you catch your breath and surrender to the current. How strange, I thought, that this sensory extravaganza is as familiar to Fesis as a suburban mall back home would be for me. It seems unthinkable that anyone, even over a lifetime, could fail to be startled by the dancing colors, the pungent air, the bone-rattling insistence of this thousand-ring circus. Howie and I step over the cobbled threshold from extremely old to ancient, and we're pelted with the sweet-savory smells of cooking fat, jasmine, orange blossom, musk, and mud-crusted pack mules. Allergic mess that I normally am, I don't even sniffle. It's as if every receptor cell in my body is already on overload.

From the din I make out the ageless entreaties of street commerce. The common denominator is bread, universally required, perpetually produced. A new day yields about one fresh loaf for every inhabitant of the old city. Carted in sacks, perched on the tops of heads, balanced precariously by mischievous toddlers, nearly identical Moroccan round loaves crisscross the narrow streets like Federal Express packages on Seventh Avenue.

The medina bakeries offer no bread for sale. Their business is to immerse the homemade loaves in gaping wood-fired hearths, after which customers retrieve the fresh-baked breads, each a fragrant pillow. By the time a typical Fesi family tears off hunks of semolina loaf to dip into the lemony juices of the supper tagine, or stew pot, the breads have made a round-trip journey at the behest of a system sustained not by lists and figures but by dogged attentiveness, faint nods of the appropriate heads, and sheer faith. Few words are exchanged, nothing is written down. No one with whom I spoke would change a thing about the system. My tagged luggage has been waylaid to cities I've never visited, the photo store has sent me home with snapshots of a stranger's family barbecue, and I once lost an entire outfit at the dry cleaners. But in Fés it's an unspeakable rarity for a baker to misplace or misdirect a single bread. How is it possible?

Morning seems the best time to make sense of what appears to be a bread-centered conspiracy. In the company of a sullen young translator from the Arabic Institute named Karim, I survey the bread traffic from the vantage point of a café, in Place Nejjarine, near the henna souk. The proprietor produces a rickety spool table and laborer's bench, which I drag beside a mosaic fountain framed by elaborately carved cedar. In the carless square a gaggle of children are playing tag. One tiny girl carries a wooden slab with two loaves on it, and as the children sprint and giggle, she just manages to save the shaped dough from slithering off the tray to the rank stones under her feet.

I gulp my second espresso and, to Karim's frustration, bound off in a misguided attempt to shadow these trays of loaves as they come and go. A native of the medina, Karim knows it's a futile enterprise. The loaves and their bearers materialize seemingly out of nowhere. On their one-arm pedestals floating above the crowd, loaves emerge from ominous alleyways or the discreet doorways of aristocratic homes, the wealth of their inhabitants betrayed only by the elaborate frivolity of colored tiles called zellijes. The bearers are just as abruptly swallowed up by dark stairwells or shadowy depressions in windowless stone facades. Foreboding as seawalls, these conceal uncounted labyrinthine worlds of private courtyards and sun-baked rooftops. On the streets in winter, the faces of medina men are in shadows inside the pointy hoods of their woolen over-robes. This prevailing style lends a conspiratorial air to their every move as they dart here and there like figures out of a game of Dungeons and Dragons.

It is a world tauntingly out of bounds to the casual visitor. But I was able to do some serious spying from a strategically placed rooftop café. I saw drying laundry in candy colors, smoke curling skyward from Macbethian cauldrons, women bent over washbasins, and men folded in prayer. Beyond the high walls lining the medina streets and alleys are updated harems from which women venture out only for hurried shopping errands or a trip to the hamam, or community bath. For pubescent girls and restless young wives, a sheet of uncooked round loaves perched on a shoulder is a welcome license to dawdle in public. Young girls' yearnings aside, why not bake bread at home? It's not possible in the old city; there are no proper ovens, Karim tells me, though his own mother bakes bread at their apartment in the nouvelle ville. Other than a few holes in a tiled kitchen stove, most Fesi homes contain only a kanoun, or freestanding charcoal-burning brazier of sun-baked clay. Here sauces, couscous, and tagines simmer on glowing coals. Buying bread is considered almost sacrilege. True, the cafés and food shops of the nouvelle ville serve up their signature croissants and baguettes, but the feisty, transplanted country people who populate Fés-el-Bali consider these French staples second-rate. Morocco has been independent since 1956. To cultural purists, the croissant, the essence of nouvelle ville yuppie fare, is an affront to precolonial authentic Morocco, whether Arabic or Berber. And why, they wonder, would anyone buy bread when they can avail themselves of a nearly flawless communal baking system that does the trick today as well as it served people in the time of Moses?

Medina women prepare bread dough every morning without exception. They knead the dough in a gsaa, a round dish, big as a café table, crafted locally of unglazed baked clay or carved oak, olive or walnut wood. Every day they turn out several loaves of the simple bread called ksra. The typical bourgeois Fesi family feeds thirty or more people. Laborers who won't return from work for a proper lunch set out with a hunk of bread, which they eat at midday along with olives and sour milk.

"Why do you care so much about bread?" the meticulously Euro-clad Karim grouses as we take our third espresso break at a sidewalk café, by the Bab al Jaloud gate. Here is why: Man has been making bread for eight thousands years, and Fés is a rare living museum of the last millennium. Here bread is the glue of community and the currency of human relations; Muslims place bread -- xoobz -- not flowers or stones, on the graves of their loved ones and that bread is the traditional sustenance in the holy month of Ramadan. Toiling before our eyes are descendants of the ancestral chain of bakers and millers born to what truly may be the planet's second-oldest profession. Here a person can see the world in a grain of wheat. I've answered his question, but Karim feels we've hounded enough bakers for one day, and hails a cab.

Karim takes me to the stylish Café Aswan in the nouvelle ville. Arranged like an orchestra pit, its tables face the busy Boulevard Mohammed V and draw its traffic with magnetic regularity. I could certainly linger here, nibbling on almond pastry and watching elegant Arabs murmur into cell phones. But every minute I spend here is a minute apart from the drama of the medina. I can't bear to be away from it. I have stood on snowy alpine summits and ocean bluffs, I've trudged through rain forests and paddled a kayak through schools of dolphin, but nothing holds my senses hostage like the pungent mob scene of the bazaar. And Fés-el-Bali is the mother of them all.

The bakeries are spread generously and reliably throughout the old city, and I suspect my nose could lead me easily to any one of them. But I'd never find my way back. Foreigners do not enter the medina alone; it simply isn't done. There are no proper maps of the maze of streets and alleyways that make up Fés-el-Bali, which dates to its establishment in 809 by Idriss II, a member of Morocco's first Arab dynasty. (The Karaouinyine Mosque, founded in 862, is one of the world's oldest universities and remains the pride of Fés.) The medina has been continuously inhabited ever since. But no one ever got around to naming the streets, or even drawing a proper map. "Our medina streets were narrow, dark and serpentine -- filled with so many twists and turns that cars could not enter, and foreigners could not find their way out if they ever dared to come in," writes Fés-born Fatima Mernissi in Dreams of Trespass, her memoir of a harem childhood. "This was the real reason the French had to build a new city for themselves; they were afraid to live in ours." The medina's centuries-old refusal to bare itself for visitors' convenience is part of what makes the place irresistible. In a time when data collectors are poking into every natural and manmade nook and cranny I'm grateful for the few locales that elude them.

But it's frustrating, too. I long to wander on my own, to get lost and found and lost again, the way I have in Venice or Calcutta. No one knows how many people live in the medina, named by UNESCO as a Heritage of Mankind City, sharing the honor with the Old City of Jerusalem. Old Arab Fesis die off and their children and grandchildren migrate to the nouvelle ville while a stream of Berbers, who make up about half of Morocco's population, descend from the surrounding mountains. Once an exclusively rural tribal people, the Berbers are to Morocco what Indians are to North America. Non-Arabs, they dominated all of northwest Africa before the Arab conquest in the seventh century a.d. Though most Berbers speak Moroccan Arabic, their own language dances among three hundred dialects and is rarely, if ever, written. I fell in love with their colored robes and garish headscarves. They look as if they've come bearing frankincense, licorice, and myrrh, and, in fact, many of them do. From the desert and the scrubby highlands the Berbers brought with them a variety of unleavened specialty breads, including the kind of flat bread that can be baked by burying the dough in the hot desert sand. In the medina, Arab-owned bread stalls employ only Berber women to stretch crepe-like dough over a hot globe. "Only Berbers know to work the dough this way," one shopkeeper told me, motioning to a dark woman with leathery hands.

A self-contained hive in perpetual flux, the medina is home to anywhere from a hundred thousand to three hundred thousand people, depending on the whims of les guides, the government-sanctioned guides who lurk outside Fés's hotels clad in white robes and red fezzes. These passive-aggressive entrepreneurs have at least one quality in common: their talent for fabrication. When Howie and I stopped to browse in one of the medina's Judaica shops our guide, Benani, instructed us that each of the menorah's nine candlesticks represents one member of the family. "You have a big family, you light more candles," he explained. Howie and I nodded wearily, not in the mood for launching a lecture. Besides, we're a bit hazy on the details ourselves. It wasn't long ago that I thought a Maccabee was a type of cookie.

Still, d'aller sans guide is a risky proposition. Even if we were equipped with some primal homing device preventing us from being defeated by the medina's dense coil of look-alike streets, having a licensed guide in tow is the only effective way of scaring off swarms of would-be guides, referred to as les faux guides. False guides are as wisely avoided, and ultimately a lot more irritating than false prophets. Official guides are easy to spot, if not for their operatic costume then for the laminated identification cards that swing from their necks. But les faux guides run the gamut from enterprising wannabes (many official guides got their start this way) to money-grubbing predators, to the universally vilified fumeurs de hashish. Most ubiquitous are the ragged prepubescents promising a petit price in keeping with their stature. These are the hardest to shake off. They buzz around you with the tenacity of mosquitoes until you either hire them, which is ultimately the same as adopting them, or beat a breathless retreat back to the sanctum of the hotel. Nothing amuses an official guide more than watching the poor slob who spurned his services being harassed by a faux guide of any age.

Within the apparent insanity of the medina there is a surprising level of order. Its confounding sprawl is really a mosaic of distinct squares, each with its own mosque, Koranic school, fountain, hamam, or bath, and, of course, a bakery. One guide put the number of these squares conservatively at 150, another told me 800, but most sources point to the lower number. Wrapped around the squares are districts specializing in a particular form of commerce or craft. I suppose I could eventually orient myself by the districts -- the tanners, woodworkers and metalsmiths, millers, the gold souk, the henna souk, and the textile districts, where weavers toil as they have for centuries. And there are always the distant mountains, the minaret of the great mosque, and the ramparts of the king's humble pied-à-terre, an eighty-two-acre palace at the edge of Fés-el-Jdid, the Andalusian quarter that once was home to thousands of Jews expelled from Spain. There is still a synagogue and a well-maintained Jewish cemetery there.

The medina's communal bakery system functions in perfect sync with the work at home, performed by an army of prep cooks. In every household in the medina matriarchs, daughters, or servants devote part of their day to kneading the bread they'll enjoy fresh with each supper. This enterprise is not the relaxing ritual familiar to Vermont earth mothers or upwardly mobile owners of Williams Sonoma bread machines. Like everything pertaining to Fesi cuisine it's a labor-intensive proposition. Many families first buy the wheat itself, which they lug home in sacks from crammed narrow stalls in the medina market. Picked over, rinsed, and laid to dry on sunwashed terraces and rooftops, the wheat is then hauled back to the local miller, who grinds it into four flours, each with its special purpose. Howie and I stood mesmerized at the millers' stalls as coarse and fine powders rained from stone grinding mills we'd witnessed only within the precious confines of the ye olden theme parks scattered about our own New England. From the cleaned, groomed whole wheat comes a soft pure flour for the bread, a white semolina for couscous, a coarse golden semolina from the bran, or coating, and the bran itself, destined not for muffins but for the family mule. Aside from what floats into the atmosphere not one speck or kernel is wasted.

In a culture haunted by blood memories of deprivation and famine, bread embodies the blessing of sustenance. As it is to Jews, to Muslims bread is a gift and a blessing. Even the kneading of the dough in t...