A long drive today, enlivened by one of my favourite Moroccan pastimes – a stroll around a village weekly market. If it wasn’t for the parsimonious airline baggage allowance I might well have acquired a handsome example of a goat, with a frightening, or glorious, set of curly horns, depending on your perspective. Even if I’d paid full price for a seat for him, I suspect there would have been some petty regulation to stop me from taking him home. Mind you, at 1800Dhms he isn’t going cheap, and when a burly chap in a deep blue djellaba steps up and begins the bidding at 1400 I realize I’m off the hook. It turns out the ram is being sold for breeding, and as I live in the centre of a city I suspect there’d be few female goats to allow the hearty chap to perform his natural function. I’m told a cow would cost me 10,000Dhms, and a fattened sheep ready for the chop around 1200Dhms, which makes a couple of grilled chops a bit expensive – tasty, but expensive.
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photo credit : PixaBay
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At a different market last year I saw a chap with a few years under his robe stagger by with a fat sheep. It was a couple of months before Eid Al-Adha, the feast that commemorates Prophet Abraham’s willingness to obey God when he was toldt hat he was to sacrifice his son, but the buyer was getting in early to get a good’un because by the time feast day arrived the price would have doubled. He’d given himself a few weeks to get it to full match fitness so that the family and friends who would share it would complement him on the fine quality of the meat and his sharpness at having bought early.
To the side of today’s bleating and butting sheep and goats is a butcher’s stall, but not one you’d go to for prime rib; his stock is all the bits that get ground into pet food elsewhere (or bargain 99cent ‘beef’ burgers), but here make wonderful stews. I feel moderately glad that my request to photograph a wheezing old guy with a week’s stubble and a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth who’s carefully skinning a cow’s head is denied. I suspect the Health and Safety tyrants that terrorise the food industry elsewhere would need to go around in groups if they were to try and enforce a ‘no spilling cigarette ash on a cow’s head’ rule here.
I find it worthwhile to offer to pay for photos of people working. Ten dirhams will not only get you a better photo than trying to sneak one, but you often get the subject joining into the spirit of things. An elderly man has a pile of crushed dried figs laid out on a plastic sheet, and while he doesn’t want to be photographed himself (which is what I am trying to do) he carefully unfolds the plastic sheet and shooshes his lady clients aside so they don’t cast a shadow, allowing me a worthless photo of a pile of figs. He then presents me with a chunk of crushed figs and carefully wraps it in a piece of brown paper.
Alongside the fig man is Mr. Popcorn Seller, with a wonderful hand-cranked popping machine. I ask if I can take a photo and he politely insists that I wait until he makes a new batch.
Meanwhile, in a gesture of camaraderie, Naim hands over half our gift from the fig man. The un-state-of-the-art popcorn machine is an old, blackened pan with a hinged lid mounted on a swivel and set over a small gas ring. The lid is flipped up with a fingernail, a handful of popping corn and a dribble of oil thrown in and the lid flicked down. We three stand like campers waiting for the kettle to boil for their early morning cup of tea. Within a couple of minutes I can hear vigorous popping going on inside the pan and when Mr. Popcorn judges the time is right he flips open the lid and a spitting and sparkling of yellowy-white popcorn leaps out the pan. He spins the machine on its swivel and a cascade scatters on his metal serving tray. A couple of handfuls of salt thrown over, and the cooking process is done. A twist of a piece of paper into a cone, and there’s our 1Dhms-worth, cheap at half the price.
Unfortunately, I really don’t like popcorn, particularly the salted variety. At a respectful distance from the popcorn seller Naim puts the packet of popcorn, the remaining crushed dried figs and a 1Dhm coin into the hands of an elderly lady, who seems very chipper at her impromptu picnic. The highlight of our little jaunt is when I see a pair of joke spectacles with a bulbous nose and moustache attached. I had a set when I was five years old, many decades ago. I tell that to Mustapha, the young salesman, who, quick as a whip, replies, ‘In that case you should buy one to remember that time.’ Nifty sales ploy, so I buy one each for my two grandchildren. They’ll be one up on their granddad, though, because mine didn’t have two paper blowers attached to the sides that shoot out sideways and squeal when you blow into them, as Mustapha’s does.
A village souk is more Arabian mayhem than the exotic atmosphere of Arabian nights, but nothing really gives the true atmosphere of Morocco as a wander around a weekly village market.
