What Did You Have for Lunch Today?

10/10/14

Today for lunch I ate sheep’s head.  With my hands.

Hanane invited me to her aunt’s home in Sale for the famous Friday couscous lunch.  I’ve had my first Friday couscous experience already last week at the CCCL with other Moroccan teachers, but this week is something totally different.  Her aunts and cousins welcome me with open arms (literally) and despite speaking only Arabic we still manage to laugh, joke, and tell stories—with many gestures and a good deal of translation help from Hanane.

They bring in the massive steaming bowl of couscous, and Hanane shows me how to pick up some couscous with my (right) hand and add bits of the vegetables and meat to it, mashing it into a ball in my palm.  She asks if it’s different than other couscous I’ve had and I say it is, and mean it: it is perfectly moist and vaguely salty and fatty tasting.  I can tell some kind of broth is involved and the mischevious look on Hanane’s face suggests that I’m right.  I ask her to tell me the secret and she says she’ll tell me when I’m done eating; she doesn’t want to scare me away.  But when I assure her I’m not a squeamish eater, she finally grins and explains that it’s been cooked with the head of the sheep that was sacrificed on last week’s festival.

The secret out, the aunts delightedly fish out one of the sheep’s cheeks for me, picking out the face meat and plopping it onto my section of the bowl.  Hanane delicately extracts some dark meat from behind the cartilage flap that was once the ear.

It is, I have to say, delicious.

After eating (more than anyone wants, at the insistence of the aunts… “I eat for the whole week here,” Hanane says) and a desert of pomegranates, we sit back and chat for a while.  As we leave, Hanane’s aunt insists that I must come back and learn to make couscous next time.  And I don’t have to come with Hanane or just on Friday, either, she says.  You know where we live now, come any time!

I’ve met (and tasted) the famous Moroccan hospitality.  And the amazing thing is, I know she means every word.