Madame Couscous

MOROCCO AND NEW YORK 1972 to 1976

“To my mind four things are necessary before a nation can develop a great cuisine. The first is an abundance of ingredients—a rich land. The second is a variety of cultural influences; the history of a nation, including its domination by foreign invaders, and the culinary secrets it has brought back from its own imperialist adventures. Third, a great civilization—if a country has not had its day in the sun, its cuisine will probably not be great; great food and a great civilization go together. Last, the existence of a refined palace life—without royal kitchens, without a Versailles or a Forbidden City in Peking, without, in short, the demands of a cultivated court—the imagination of a nation’s cooks will not be challenged.”

—Paula Wolfert, in Couscous and Other Good Food from Morocco

IT’S HARD TO CALCULATE THE IMPACT OF Paula’s first cookbook because its reach is so vast. The first comprehensive English-language Moroccan cookbook in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Morocco, it introduced the country and culture to many Americans, and it remains an indispensable reference on the cuisine, even for Moroccans. In San Francisco, Mourad Lahlou, one of the best Moroccan chefs in or out of Morocco, admits that he’s used the work as a cheat sheet. He grew up in a traditional Moroccan household where men weren’t allowed in the kitchen. So as an adult, he had to teach himself the cuisine, working largely from memory.

Recreating the food of your birthplace is challenging when you’re oceans away from it. After Mourad met Paula at his pioneering Moroccan restaurant, Aziza, he dove into Couscous.

“If I wanted to know how to make aged butter or preserved beef or a tagine, instead of calling someone in Morocco or trying to remember what I saw my family do in my childhood, I could just go to her cookbook,” he told me. “Because she did the research, she got the recipes from people who really knew what they were doing.”

Given the work’s scope, it’s astonishing how quickly Paula wrote it. Unlike her next eight books, which each took on average five years to complete, Paula wrote Couscous in about eighteen months. To gather materials for the book, she made three trips from New York to Morocco between 1971 and 1972, each of which lasted one to three weeks and all of which were arranged by the consul general, Abdeslam Jaidi, through the Moroccan government. With a head start from having lived in Morocco for a total of three years, she was able to research most of the recipes at breakneck speed, inside of six weeks. Retrieving her memories from that compressed period felt akin to reverse engineering the spice combinations in a Moroccan couscous. Even when we established the chronology, she kept convincing herself (and me) that key events had happened in a different order.

The first trip was fast and furious, lasting ten days. They came to call it The Golf Trip; in late December 1971, shortly after Paula signed her book contract, Jaidi and his wife, Janet, finagled a deal to fly Bill and Paula on a chartered jet with a group of US professional golfers who were attending the Moroccan king’s inaugural golf tournament (now called the Trophy Hassan II). Incredibly, it was Paula’s first flight across the Atlantic. She had not been willing to risk airplane travel after the Balkan fortune-teller had cautioned her that her twenty-fourth transatlantic flight would crash.

Relieved when they landed safely, she and Bill abandoned the golfers for a road trip to Marrakech, Essaouira, Tangier, Tétouan, Fez, and then into the Berber countryside and up into the Atlas Mountains that form Morocco’s spine. The road trip gave Paula a better grasp of the country’s geography, allowed Bill to take his first photographs, and inspired Paula to dream of returning to Tangier with her family for good. In Tangier, Paula introduced Bill to her old friend Paul Bowles, in an effort to sell him on the idea of moving back there, at least for one year. She appealed to Bill’s parsimonious side, pointing out how affordable it would be to rent a villa and hire servants. She also urged him to research a novel about Isabelle Eberhardt, a Swiss adventurer who, beginning in the late nineteenth century, spent nearly a decade in North Africa.

“I identified with her because she was another Jewish girl in love with the Arab world,” Paula explained of her idol. “Except she converted to Islam and had to disguise herself as a man to get around Algeria and Tunisia in the early 1900s, which was very hard to do.”

But it was the next trip, in the spring of 1972, that proved pivotal. Traveling solo to the outskirts of the coastal city of Rabat, Paula finally got to meet the consul general’s mother, Madame Khadija Jaidi, to study with her. In three short weeks, Paula received the equivalent of a Grande Diplôme in Moroccan cooking.

Madame Jaidi lived in the Souissi suburb of Rabat, in a rambling two-story home set in a small, bucolic compound complete with an orange grove. At this charming homestead, affectionately called The Farm by her family, several servants helped her cook sumptuous midday feasts for a rotating cast of visitors.

All of her life, Jaidi had access to some of the best food in Morocco. Her background is a bit of a mystery: For years, Paula remained under the impression that Madame Jaidi had served as a dada, or servant cook, to the Moroccan royal family, rising to manage the king’s kitchens in his Rabat palace. But when I checked this with the Jaidi family, I was told that she had never cooked in the palaces but had instead been born into the royal family’s inner circle, and that the king had appointed her father to be the pasha (mayor) of Mogador (now called Essaouira). Growing up in the quarters surrounding the Rabat royal palace, she may have learned to cook from the dadas there.

Like Paula, Madame Jaidi could maneuver in worlds both high and low. She was quirky, too. Although wealthy, she dressed in Berber peasant clothes. In photographs, she looks like a farm woman from Biblical times, with an ample bosom and weathered hands.

When Paula unpacked her belongings, she discovered to her chagrin that she had forgotten an alarm clock. As she wrote in Couscous, “So much of the important kitchen work is done early in the morning and I didn’t want to miss a thing.” But she quickly discovered she didn’t need one: at sunrise the next morning, she awakened to the rhythmic clanking of kitchen workers grinding spices in brass mortars and pestles for the day’s meals.

Each morning at seven o’clock, she joined Madame Jaidi in her traditional Moroccan kitchen to prepare lunch, the main meal of the day. It’s hard to imagine a more picturesque setting: they worked outdoors in the leafy shade of the orange trees, protected from rain by a simple wooden shelter, sitting on wooden orange crates draped with ornate Moroccan rugs, their heads tilted toward each other. Madame Jaidi cooked on charcoal braziers and propane-fueled burners, and a few assistants helped her prepare the ingredients. For five hours they all worked together, talking quietly, surrounded by the enticing scents of charcoal smoke, fresh spices, and breezes off the Atlantic coast. Lunch started at two o’clock, followed by an afternoon nap. At night, Jaidi and Paula retired indoors to watch television, usually the Moroccan news.

A precise and exacting cook, Madame Jaidi had a repertoire of forty to fifty traditional dishes that she had perfected over countless repetitions.

“I would take a pinch out of her hand and measure it, and every time it was always the same. She would slice meat; it was always five ounces on the scale,” said Paula. Jaidi was best known for her bastilla, a sweet-savory pie made with flaky Moroccan warka dough and a rich filling of braised pigeon and almonds. She would peel and crush the almonds by hand, “which takes hours!” Paula said. “Nothing was done the easy way.”

Jaidi informed and inspired many of the salads and spreads in Couscous, including the herb jam (recipe, here) for which Paula is still known. Under Jaidi’s tutelage, Paula learned how to prepare and finesse excellent tagines, the Moroccan stews cooked in cone-shaped pots of the same name. As with a classic French sauce, creating a certain intensity was key. If the meat needed extra browning, Jaidi glazed it under a clay dish stacked with hot coals. Jaidi taught Paula how tagines had an intense, slowly reduced sauce, much more concentrated than the light broth required for couscous, which was often served after the tagine, to conclude the meal. As they steamed the couscous over the single propane burner, Jaidi showed Paula how the grains expanded not while they were steaming but rather while they cooled.

Paula at a Moroccan market, wearing the djellaba commissioned for her by Madame Jaidi

In the kitchen and in the nearby outdoor food markets, Jaidi also introduced Paula to nuances in Moroccan ingredients. “Even though I was aware of Moroccan spices, she was very particular,” Paula recalled. Jaidi introduced her to four kinds of ginger and to two kinds of cinnamon: sweeter Ceylon (Cinnamomum verum), called dar el-cini in Morocco, used in desserts, and the more assertive Vietnamese cinnamon (C. loureiroi), known as karfa, used in savory dishes. Jaidi also familiarized Paula with the subtleties in the flavors of Moroccan honeys. To ensure that they could easily move through marketplaces, Jaidi outfitted Paula with a custom-made Berber djellaba, the hooded robe she wears on the author photo on the back jacket for Couscous.

Paula felt more at ease with kind, patient Madame Jaidi than she ever had with gossipy James Beard or brusque Dione Lucas. In our interviews, Paula spoke of Jaidi with the same tenderness with which she recalled her grandmother.

“She was so good,” Paula said. “She was what a mother should be. Just love. And smothering you with it but in a nice way. She never spoke, she just hugged.”

The traditional Moroccan kitchen also felt surprisingly comfortable and familiar. Paula’s apprehension about large knives was rendered moot because Moroccan cooks rarely used them. If a vegetable needed cutting, Madame Jaidi used scissors or a small paring knife; she deployed a heavy cleaver only to chop large cuts of meat. Spices were toasted and pounded daily in a heavy brass mortar, “not wood, since saffron and garlic will soon leave their traces,” Paula wrote. She noticed that certain implements brought unexpected new flavors to familiar foods. When pounded in a mortar with a pestle, parsley and cilantro tasted sweeter and more vibrant. When grated instead of chopped, onions took on a wonderful creaminess and tomatoes an almost velvety texture.

If Jaidi didn’t know how to prepare a dish, she took Paula to meet the best cook who did. In Couscous, Paula tells the wonderful story of meeting Jaidi’s best friend, Rakia, a master at djej mefenned, a savory, richly spiced dish that requires swirling a whole (not cut up) chicken in hot fat while basting it with beaten eggs. Rakia did this while she chain-smoked, “cracked jokes… sang and belly-danced around the kitchen,” Paula wrote. It was perhaps the only dish Paula failed to replicate back home, though she nearly drove herself mad trying.

Paula also persuaded Jaidi to indulge her curiosities. Jaidi never made the paper-thin pastry leaves for her bastilla, always buying them from specialists. Because Paula wanted to include the tricky pastry recipe in the book, they found a bakery to teach Paula how to make it.

When lunch was served, Jaidi would withdraw to rest but had always invited a new authority to dine and share his or her knowledge with Paula. “She’d invite the president of some company and make the ultimate couscous,” Paula gleefully recalled. “I was so lucky, I can’t even tell you.”

The two women formed a bond that endured until Jaidi’s passing years later. In Couscous, Paula gave her prominent mention in her preface and text, and opened the Savory Pastries chapter with a photograph of her seated before a magnificent bastilla. In 2011, Paula published an update to Couscous called The Food of Morocco and dedicated it “to the memory of my mentor and friend Khadija Jaidi.”

After this three-week immersion, in late spring of 1972 Paula returned to New York, buzzing. She had only six months to adapt her recipes for American kitchens before she and Bill returned to Morocco to obtain additional photographs and research materials—and, she hoped, to move to Tangier for good. In New York, through old Tangier connections, she found a private Moroccan chef, a man named Omar Kadir, to help her round out the last of the book’s recipes. He introduced her to a Moroccan woman who taught her rghaif, complex Moroccan pastries, and he shared his own couscous, an early favorite in the book.

Writing up the recipes, Paula had to invent a new vocabulary to capture certain Moroccan cooking methods. For example, after much observation, she settled on rake to describe the action of running one’s fingers through steamed couscous (recipe, here).

But when she began testing her recipes, she faced her first roadblock: American ingredients. She was prepared to sacrifice clay tagines for metal pots but didn’t want to compromise on quality produce. “I wanted the vegetables to taste right!” she said. She avoided New York supermarkets and shopped at The Good Earth, a health food store near her home. She learned its produce delivery schedule and ordered in advance. In Couscous, she urged readers to “turn the markets of your town into souks,” to treat food shopping like an adventure. Madame Jaidi’s four kinds of ginger and two kinds of cinnamon were unavailable or hard to source, but they were listed in the book, just in case they became more widely available in future years (with the same hope, Paula included salad recipes that called for arugula—and we know how that turned out). To parse out the components of the legendary Moroccan spice blend ras el hanout, Paula brought a sample she had purchased in Fez to Herman Bosboom, the importer who had helped her with the Columbia House party boxes. Together they identified twenty-six ingredients, which she listed in the book, from Spanish fly to grains of paradise and nigella seeds. Bosboom in turn introduced her to a scientist at the Bronx Zoo, who helped her list their botanical names.

Paula spent long days at the main branch of the New York Public Library on Forty-Second Street, perusing works of history and literature by James Edward Budgett Meakin, Herodotus, and Edith Wharton to paint a rich portrait of the country and its culture. From her research and conversations with Bill, she devised the four prerequisites for a great national cuisine quoted at the top of this chapter.

To write the book, for inspiration Paula looked to her heroes, authors of other well-researched, narrative-style cookbooks, such as Diana Kennedy, Claudia Roden, and Elizabeth David. That summer, she and Bill holed up at Bill’s father’s house in Duxbury, Massachusetts, while her children went to camp and his father vacationed on Martha’s Vineyard. Sitting at facing desks, they sorted some of Paula’s notes into the book’s massive forty-five-page introduction. They organized the rest into chapter openings and recipe headnotes. The couple also combed the stacks of Harvard’s Widener Library, running into historian Thomas Glick (a childhood friend of Bill’s), who pulled rare books on Moorish and Spanish history to aid their research.

In spare moments, they organized their move to Tangier. Bill agreed to live there for at least one year. Paula enrolled the children at the American School of Tangier in the fourth and sixth grades—on scholarship now because the school was running low on American kids. They found an inexpensive villa to rent near Paula’s old neighborhood.

The family packed everything up and flew to Tangier that fall. The kids stayed in their school’s boarding rooms for three weeks while Paula and Bill conducted a final fast-paced research trip, arranged by Abdeslam Jaidi’s contacts at the Ministry of Tourism, to round out the book: Paula to deepen her knowledge of regional specialties and Bill to take more shots of food and the countryside. They came to call it The Caid Trip: at each stop, they met with local officials with romantic titles like his excellency, pasha, or caid (administrator), all of whom she would later acknowledge in the book’s preface.

LEFT TO RIGHT: Leila, Bill, Paula, and Nicholas in their home in Tangier

“In every town, the mayor, or whoever was in charge, had to find me the best cook to teach me the local dish,” Paula said. “I thought that was how you write cookbooks! I had no idea you really had to work.”

Some visits went better than others. In one coastal town, one cook’s pièce de résistance, a fish preparation, turned out to be “gooey and disgusting,” Paula recalled. On the other hand, in Marrakech, though she had only one night there, her hosts not only found her a man to make the city’s iconic lamb dish, tangia, but the same cook then took Paula on a thrilling late-night dash through the souks to buy the ingredients and then to a hammam, where they paid to have the lamb buried overnight in the coals used to heat the baths. The next morning, city authorities closed down the Jardin Majorelle so she and Bill could enjoy tangia as it was meant to be eaten: out of doors. “This would be like the mayor of New York closing down Central Park,” Bill said, still astonished at the gesture decades later.

That winter, though Paula and Bill were full-time Tangier residents, Bill made a quick visit to New York for work. At the Harper & Row offices, he turned in his photographs and looked over the copyedited manuscript with their editor, Fran McCullough. The pages were covered in red ink where the copyeditor had tried to rein in Paula. Paula was so new to writing recipes—and so excited about her finds—that her recipe methods shared too many details about exactly how to cook each dish. Bill knew Paula would be overwhelmed by all of the red ink. But time was running out. To help Paula sift through the many edits, Bill urged McCullough to fly to Tangier to go over the manuscript with Paula in person.

“Bill must have been very persuasive, because I went upstairs and managed to talk my bosses into sending me to Morocco, which is something [editors] could never, ever do,” McCullough said. Then, as now, publishing budgets did not allow for such boondoggles.

It turned out to be the trip of a lifetime. “It was like going down the rabbit hole,” McCullough said of her many exotic Tangier experiences, big and small. “When I walked into the house for the first time, Paula’s maid had made this wonderful small couscous that Paula had never eaten before. There was a bowl of clementines on the table—this was before clementines came to America—and I was just stunned by these amazing little jewel-like fruits.” (The couscous went into the book as Small Family Couscous.) Paula also took McCullough to meet Paul Bowles and other writers, and McCullough went on to edit Millicent Dillon’s A Little Original Sin, a biography of Jane Bowles.

For a week, they worked late into the night, rewriting large sections of the book. “I was very jet-lagged, but Paula would get upset that I wasn’t up early to begin again with laser-like focus,” McCullough remembered, with a mixture of fondness and awe at Paula’s unflagging energy and dedication. With McCullough’s help, Paula accepted the copyedits. To promote the book by giving it some edgy buzz, McCullough, inspired by the recipe for pot brownies in the 1954 Alice B. Toklas Cook Book, convinced Paula to overcome her marijuana aversion and include a recipe for majoun, a kef candy demonstrated to her by Mohammed Mrabet, a friend of Paul Bowles.

Although Couscous would ultimately become one of Paula’s best-selling titles, when it launched in the fall of 1973, as Paula put it, “it died on arrival.”

“It just seemed to make no impression on anyone at all,” McCullough recalled, “except for a few people who immediately saw that there was new serious cookbook publishing going on.”

A few publications like New York magazine and the New York Times were positive. The most prescient review appeared in the Midwest. “It is a book so comprehensive that it makes one long for a series by Ms. Wolfert from each culture area around the globe,” wrote the reviewer in the Minnesota Daily.

The work connected with forward-thinking chefs and home cooks. “Her Moroccan cookbook was really important for me, and for I think a lot of people of my generation,” said food writer Ruth Reichl. “I was in Berkeley with this collective restaurant [The Swallow]. We did a lot of catering. And we made the bastilla endlessly. And made warka by hand.”

Berkeley restaurateur Alice Waters, who had opened Chez Panisse only two years earlier, also embraced the book early. “We’ve been steaming our own couscous ever since,” she said.

But in its earliest years, Couscous found few buyers outside the small food world. The title didn’t help, despite Paula’s assurances that everyone would know what couscous was. At a bookseller’s meeting to promote it, McCullough remembered that “every single bookseller who came by said, ‘what’s cowse-cowse?’”

Julia Child’s letter of encouragement

In hopes of stirring up interest, McCullough sent a copy to Julia Child, though Child and Paula had never met. In a letter to McCullough on L’École des Trois Gourmandes stationery, Child typed, “I think it is an excellent book, the first one I’ve seen that really explains how to go about things—I am making couscous right now, and am just letting it dry under a damp towel, waiting for its final steaming.” She suggested bringing Paula to America to merchandise the book. In the margin, she handwrote, “[The couscous] was lovely—light, fluffy, perfect!”

But interest in the book remained so low that Harper & Row couldn’t justify financing a book tour. When it was finally time for a second printing years later, the publisher cut costs by pulling all of Bill’s color photographs. Although Paula was disappointed by the book’s low sales, she was not devastated. For all of her hard work, she surprisingly did not yet identify herself as a cookbook author. When she received her first copy of the book in Tangier and her mailman addressed her as Madame Couscous, she jumped up and down with delight. But she didn’t see Couscous as her own. “I was building on a career. I just didn’t quite know what that career was yet.”

Tangier became home for the next three years, some of the happiest of their lives. They bought a house called Villa Melusine in Tangier’s Nouvelle Montagne (New Mountain), a hillside suburb west of the city, with views of the city and the Rif mountains beyond. Paula reunited with Fatima, her beloved maid from her second Tangier stint in 1968. Fatima moved in above the garage with her new husband, Ahmed, whom Paula and Bill hired to be their gardener and butler. Paula’s children, Nicholas and Leila, were now teenagers; when they repeated the Tanjaoui curse words they picked up from their new friends in the neighborhood and at school, Fatima covered her ears.

With her fertile Tangier garden, horticulture replaced food as Paula’s primary obsession. A neighbor, an eccentric old Englishman, taught her how to crossbreed day lilies, and she cultivated fruit trees in her hillside orchard, teaching herself to make jam from their bounty.

Paula’s Tangier home

Having persuaded Bill to write that novel about Swiss adventurer Isabelle Eberhardt, Paula helped him retrace Eberhardt’s steps across Tunisia and Algeria; in 1976, he published Visions of Isabelle. Paula drifted back to classic French cooking, translating Louisette Bertholle’s Secrets of the Great French Restaurants. Tangier’s population shifted to include more people from Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, and Israel, along with Italy, France, Spain, and Portugal. Through a wider circle of friends, Paula soon collected enough recipes for a second cookbook she called Mediterranean Cooking. Always focused on flavor first, she became fascinated by the ways each country extracted unique tastes cooking the same shared Mediterranean pantry. She organized the recipes not by country but by ingredient, by taste. For example, a chapter on garlic and olive oil included recipes for Spanish gambas al ajillo (shrimp in garlic sauce) and the French fish soup bouillabaisse. Another chapter focused on the nightshades (eggplants, peppers, and tomatoes) and included recipes for Yugoslavian ajvar and Turkish hungar begendi (eggplant cream).

Fatima ben Lahsen Riffi, Paula’s housekeeper and cooking tutor, with her husband, Ahmed, in Paula’s garden in Tangier

McCullough wanted it for Harper & Row, but because of the poor sales of Couscous, she couldn’t afford to match the offer of seven thousand dollars from Quadrangle Books, an imprint of the New York Times. The book was well received in food circles, not least for its innovative organizational structure. But it lacked the depth of Paula’s other books because its recipes were acquired in Tangier living rooms. Its restrained politesse felt almost shallow compared to the adventure and immersion of Couscous. It remains a sentimental favorite, more for reading than for cooking, since she published improved versions of almost all of the recipes in later books (including a reissue of Mediterranean Cooking itself in 1994).

By 1976, Bill had persuaded Paula to return to New York. Tangier had become expensive, and her children needed to attend good high schools. But she resisted until her hand was forced with the publication of Tangier, a mystery novel by Bill populated with characters who were such thinly veiled versions of people they knew that Paula feared they had offended everyone beyond repair. The Western Sahara War had broken out as well, which contributed to her willingness to leave. For the second time in her life, Paula returned to New York from Tangier full of trepidation, for she had no idea what she was going to do.